‘I’m here. I’m here to stay.’
Losers are winners
There comes a tipping point, a moment where the status quo morphs into unbearable reality, and taking action to change it comes into clear focus.
Runners Christine Plante, Sam LeHardy and Chris Teachout all experienced theirs over the same issue: Being overweight.
Whether it was Teachout and Plante not being able to keep up with their children when they wanted to play, or LeHardy simply lamenting his physical condition, running became their outlet. Just walking at first, a short jog, but for all three it’s turned into a chance to run this year’s Boston Marathon, the world’s foremost long-distance event.
It is a journey that in some respects seems unbelievable even for them.
“No frickin’ way,” declared the 33-year-old Plante when asked if she envisioned the Boston Marathon when she started running 31⁄ years ago. 2
Yet, here they are. The race a marker between who they were then and who they are now, and a reminder of how they got there.
Baby steps
Teachout was 39 in January of 2011, on vacation in Florida with his family. He can barely look at the pictures of that trip now without wincing.
“It’s just horrifying how huge I got,” the Needham native said. “Just all over, massive human being. I had two little kids at the time and I couldn’t keep up with them. Just wanting to run around and chase my daughter. I couldn’t get up a flight of stairs without having to catch my breath.”
Plante, from Nashua, N.H., had similar difficulties as a single mother with her daughter, Gavin, now 7. Unequivocally, Plante — who at one point weighed 286 pounds — knew her motivation revolved around Gavin.
“When I was at my heaviest weight, I couldn’t play with her at the playground,” Plante said. “I couldn’t sit in the playground equipment. And it was so important for me to play with her and she is such a spunky kid. She has such a zest for life and such energy. And it was so important for me to be able to play with her and give her the best opportunities.”
In a very literal way, Gavin helped Plante work toward that goal every day.
“I would put (Gavin) in a running stroller, and I would take her out,” Plante said. “Sun, rain, snow, whatever, I would bundle her up in a running stroller and take her out and do runs. My dad would help me knock out runs. I remember one night he was actually, he met me out on the course and he was cheering me on and taking pictures, which was totally awesome. But the more it got going, the easier it was. The better I felt. The stronger I felt. It really propelled me to push myself harder.”
LeHardy, who is originally from Hagerstown, Md., has lived in Massachusetts since 2010. The Framingham resident estimates he lives “seven or eight blocks” from mile seven of the marathon. Still, until recently, running it was not even on his radar.
“If you had asked me two or three years ago if I wanted to do one, I would have said, ‘No. You’re crazy.’ ”
LeHardy did reach the point where he needed to lose weight. By incremental amounts, he worked toward doing so through exercise, but it was a slow process at first.
“I just started walking. Just started to get off the couch and get active,” he said. “Once I was walking two weeks and decided to see how far I could run. The answer was about one block, not very far, without having some difficulty. But I noticed that when I got back home I felt really good. I felt a little bit tired, a little bit sore, but I felt physically good.”
It also began modestly for Teachout.
“At work, we had this biggest loser challenge,” he said. “You could pay 20 bucks and my employer was going to match it however much money was raised and we’d give out a couple of prizes at the end and see if you could lose some holiday weight.”
When Teachout stepped on the scale and saw that he weighed 300 pounds, it shook him. He had not been on a scale “in ages.” He was already on high blood pressure medicine with high blood sugar and, as he put it, “wasn’t getting any younger.”
It was time for a change, pure and simple.
“That’s when I started losing weight,” he said.
It was a stroller for Plante, but for Teachout, it was a hand-me-down treadmill from his parents’ basement. He hooked up a television in front of it and got in the habit of walking on the machine for an hour a night while watching the Discovery Channel or National Geographic shows. When he was done, he’d have a glass of water and go to bed.
He lost 50 pounds, won the competition and in a remarkably short amount of time, ran his first marathon in Hampton, N.H.
“I turned 40 on a Friday, and on Sunday I completed my first marathon,” he said. “It was awesome.”
No turning back
Unlike Teachout, this will be the first marathon for both Plante and LeHardy, but all three have already come so far. Plante is down to about 160 pounds. LeHardy has dropped from 240 to between 170175 in less than two years. Teachout is around 210.
Plante knows that completing the race will be an exclamation point of sorts.
“Oh my God, it’s going to be a flood of emotions,” she said.
She will be running for Girls on the Run — crowd rise.com/GOTRBoston2017/fundraiser/christineplante — which gets young women involved in running 5ks at an early age, something she feels could have prevented her from weight issues growing up.
Teachout will be raising money for Hale Reservation’s summer camps, while LeHardy is doing so for Cycle Kids, which both gives bicycles to children who can’t afford them and offers education and information about nutrition.
For all of them, what started as a way to shed weight became a total lifestyle change. And as Teachout said, it’s a permanent one.
“I’m done with the yo-yo diets and the yo-yo weight loss,” he said. “It’s, ‘I’m here. I’m here to stay.’ As you get older, it gets harder. But once you’re there, you don’t ever want to let go of what you’ve got. That’s why I weigh myself. That’s why I work out every day and that’s why I make the time to do it. No matter what.”
He made sure to punctuate the last part and repeated it.
“No matter what.”