I debated whether or not to do this, but decided that of course I have to. If I’m actually going to blog about my fitness journey starting as a 39 year-old dad, I need to get real. And putting a couple less-than-flattering pictures of myself on the internet is actually less scary than the idea of committing to regularly writing and sharing about this process over the next decade or so. So here they are!

There you have it! I tried to at least smile to make it less sombre/weird (did it work?). These are the “before pictures” I need to give me credibility when I become a famous fitness influencer (mostly kidding). And, although appearance is not a perfect proxy for fitness (you can look great and feel terrible or vice versa, and looking “good” is far from a strictly objective thing), it can be a significant window into reality, and at any rate, it’s what we have to work with.

I think my pictures convey the reality of my “average 39 year-old guy) starting point more clearly than any words. You can’t see my ankle injury, and you can’t “see” how stiff I feel when I get out of bed in the morning or how beat I often feel at 4pm, but you can see that I didn’t step out of the pages of a fitness magazine. Maybe you cringe when you look at these photos (I kind of do), or maybe you think “this guy is in way better shape than I am.” Whatever you think, it’s a snapshot of me, as I am this morning.