The look I'm aiming for is freakishly huge

I'm sure you had an image in your mind of what I must look like in real life. Probably something along the lines of this guy to the left. Sorry to disillusion you, but my physique is more like a flabby stick person than berzerker. My body is put together like your average twiggy nerd-boy with a sweater-vest made out of cottage cheese. My body stores fat around my torso like the bready part of a pig-in-a-blanket.  I've got these skinny arms and skinny legs and then all this blubber up top.  So, obviously, I need to do some upper body work. 

The problem is that I never stick with a weight/core training plan. I just run, and even then, I sometimes fail to do that consistently. There was several-week period when I did the 100-push-up challenge.  I made it to the fifth week or so, faithfully building up to 100 push-ups, and then I missed a couple days and lost the momentum. For a while, I made a commitment to myself to do crunches on my balance ball every time I went into the basement [where spiders build webs on my workout gear.]  I did that faithfully for about a week  until I ran down to get a load of jeans out of the dryer or something and forgot. Then I kept on forgetting.

Kettle-bells drew me in for a few reasons. First off, they are manly as hell. "Imagine a cannonball with a handle." After a few weeks of chucking this bastard around, I expect to be eating bottles of beer -- caps and all -- and communicating only through punching and grunting.  Second, I don't feel like a dork doing it. Nearly every other kind of exercise you can mention, including running, makes me feel self-conscious. I don't know who I think would walk in and make fun of me for doing push-ups or whatever, but I know they'd think twice if they saw me swinging around a 20-pound steel ball. But the most important reason is that all the exercises are complex, functional movements that work a combination of muscles rather than isolating targeted muscles. That makes more sense to me. Bicep curls are no good to me if I can't move a couch when I need to.

How do I expect to succeed with the 'bells when all my other strength training plans have failed? What will I do different to make sure I do it? I'm fishing for ideas, people. Help! Meanwhile, I'll tape this dude to my monitor as a visual cue.

Crazy

On the way home from my in-law's today, I thought about writing and my relationship to this filthy habit. Then, it dawned upon me: I hadn't written anything here in a long time. My excuse is that I have had nothing to write. I've barely been running. Seriously. Go to my Daily Mile page and check it out. It's shameful.

In fact, I had a dream the other night about running. It was after the 2010 Chicago Marathon. I was feeling blue about not running in it this year I guess. Here's the dream, though. I was running with my daughter. She's seven, I know, but she was running like a demon. The course was all wack, wending in and out of people homes, down alleys, and all over the place. I was running barefoot. And here's the strange thing -- I was banditing!  Why the hell would someone bandit a marathon? I mean, really? No t-shirt, no medal, no post-race beer? Just a 26.2 training run with 40,000 people who'd hate you if they knew what you were up to?  Madness.

What's my point? I guess I'm missing racing, but not missing it enough to actually sign up for anything. My schedule is hectic enough, being a dad and a husband, with a baby on the way, and work being even more of a nuisance than usual. Training is something I hunger for, but I'm struggling to find the time. When I have the time, I find that sleep is an irresistible luxury. I should have run this morning, for instance. I could have done six easily this morning. Instead, it was all I could do to squeeze out three after a heavy lunch.

I need running now more than ever. Why can't I get myself together enough to actually do it?