I have a confession to make.

Now, it’s Week 8; by the Universal Law of Diet Columnists, this is supposed to be the part where I tell you about how I haven’t gone to the gym since Week 3, or I’ve been standing in front of my fridge at 2 in the morning eating fried chicken out of a translucent cardboard bucket. I think the deal is, then I write about how hard dieting is, how mom never loved me, and end by begging your forgiveness. Or wait, maybe that’s just weight loss shows. I don’t know, I skipped the memo.

Although, now that I think about it, I did interview the cook at a criminally delicious restaurant called Al Dente’s in Lake Ariel, where I just HAD to try a piece of her special stromboli. However, I have it on good authority from the diet gods that professional bribes are fair game.

No, actually my confession refers to something I noticed going back and editing my old columns. I reread the older ones, and realized I had given the impression that this was my first time around this particular merry-go-round.

It’s not. I’ve never been a dieter, but I have gotten in and out of fitness routines most of my life, with various results. I guess I forgot one of the most profound changes, because it was wrapped up in an unusual time in my life. You see, I spent six months in college studying abroad in a school called Trinity College in Carmarthen, Wales.

Wales, if you don’t know it, is a region in southwestern Britain, and it’s where the Thomas side of my family hails from. It’s a small country, about the size of Massachusetts, and though it’s technically part of England it has its own language, culture, and customs. I wanted to go there initially because I wanted to work on an archaeological dig; unfortunately, by the time I arrived all the digs had been canceled on account of one of the wettest springs in record. I needed some other class to fill the void in my schedule; and, for reasons which are still not clear to me, I picked a class innocuously titled ‘Outdoor Pursuits.’

First off, a little bit about Wales and the program I traveled there with. My college didn’t offer an option to study abroad; in order to do it I basically had to drop out for a semester, enroll in another school which had a Welsh program, then drop out of THAT school at the end of the semester and re-enroll at my original college. The program I chose was through a small college in Iowa, which I didn’t realize was an extremely religious institution, and the majority of students I would be traveling with were corn-fed, teetotaling nonsmokers who went for daily runs and were in bed by 8.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Of course, you don’t go abroad to meet other Americans, or at least I didn’t; I went abroad to experience life in another country. And Wales, to put it bluntly, is awesome. I do realize there’s nothing QUITE so boring as to listen to someone nattering on about a country you’ve never been to, but this is seriously one of my favorite places in the world and I’d go back there in a second. Everyone on the planet has seen Lord of the Rings and knows it was filmed in New Zealand; what fewer people know is that Tolkien, writing the original novels, based many of his geographic descriptions on Wales. It really does look like that.  Merlin was born in the town where I went to school. The biggest event of the year in Wales is the Eisteddfod, which is basically a RenFaire with really complicated poetry thrown in. I unabashedly love that country; it’s insane, it’s rugged, and even their nicest cities  - Carmarthen, Cardiff and Swansea - feel a little primitive and worn in, like Scranton, or a couch with velour upholstery worn shiny from decades of fat aunts.

Of course, the majority of my Outdoor Pursuits class didn’t take place in Carmarthen, or any city. It wasn’t even in the South, where the hills are all soft and manageable and Shire-like. No, for outdoor pursuits. We took busses to more wild terrain, either Rohan, also called the Brecon Beacons, or up to Helm’s Deep, otherwise known as Snowdonia National Park. Now, Snowdonia National Park is where the highest mountains in Wales are located, including Mount Snowdon, about 3,500 feet high. Doesn’t sound too bad, does it? Well, for about the last hundred years, climbers have been using Snowdon and the surrounding mountains to train for the Himalayas, because while not tall, the mountains are difficult. How difficult, you may ask? Well, direct your attention to the picture helpfully included of the Crib Goch approach to Snowdon. What the picture doesn’t show you is that on either side of that lovely, fun-looking jaunt is a straight fall of about two hundred feet.

And I did this with a bunch of corn-fed, teetotaling nonsmokers who went for daily runs and were in bed by 8.

I will probably always remember the way I felt getting back from the first trip to Snowdonia; barring natural childbirth or time spent in a Turkish prison, I hope I remember it as the single most physically miserable episode of my life. Before I left, I was so out of shape that my body simply didn’t remember what being in shape WAS. And, though I’ve fallen pretty far from my Welsh fighting fit, I’ve never quite let it get that bad again.

After coming back from Outdoor Pursuits, I started joining those Iowa kids running. And yes, I was the slowest at the beginning; I was the slowest at the end too. This isn’t Rudy. But all I knew was that I never wanted to feel that vulnerable and incapable again. There were mountains the rest of the class did that my legs gave out on. I didn’t want that shame anymore.

About two months after Snowdonia, I joined a few of the girls from class on a hiking trip to Italy. Owing to an accident reading Italian train tables, we didn’t end up in Pisa like we were trying for, but instead a nearly empty area of the Ligurian coast north of Pisa called the Cinque Terre. If Wales is one of my favorite countries, this would have to be my favorite PLACE. The Cinque Terre is the only area of the Italian Riviera that hasn’t been built up and sporting a half dozen cancerous golf resorts, for one very simple reason. No one can get there to build them. Until the 1960s, the only way to get to the Cinque Terre was by boat, followed by a long hike. Even now, when there is a train line and some roads, they’re so narrow you can’t take anything with a longer wheelbed than a chopped Vespa down them. And to get from the train station to the town, you have to climb a 350-foot ladder carved into a cliff. In the dark.

As a result, most of the buildings are authentically three hundred years old, there are no cars on the streets, and the primary leisure activities are sitting in the doorway of the gelato shop with a few pieces of cheese feeding the cats that pass your way. Well, that and hiking. Which of course my travel companions wanted to do. Not only that, they wanted to do the hardest hike; one end of the Cinque Terre to the other, over ten miles, up and down 1,800 foot cliffs.

I hadn’t said no to a hike since Snowdonia, and I wasn’t about to start now; I just prepared myself to be very very uncomfortable and unhappy, strapped on my hiking boots and set off. I kept waiting for the misery to set in.

Only it didn’t.

It wasn’t easy; I felt every stretch, and really really felt every ascent. It wasn’t painless either. But over every hill was a new view of the water, or a red bird none of us could identify singing two feet away in a tree growing out over a thousand foot precipice, or the smell of olives, or something amazing that we would never have seen if we DIDN’T do this. And that was worth it. It was...fun. If Snowdonia had been a horrible wakeup call about how badly out of shape I was, then the Cinque Terre gave me my first taste of what being in shape could be like.

It is with a little bit of chagrin I admit that, as we summitted the last cliff together, me having kept pace with these healthy prairie folk step for step and not missed a single scramble or ascent, I MAY have punched the air like Rocky. I didn’t know it yet, but that was the beginning of my systematic thinking about health. That was my first day as a superhero.

So there it is, my confession; I actually have a schmaltzy, inspirational fitness anecdote. I could make a commercial! Do I still think I could do that hike in the Cinque Terre? Probably, albeit with Snowdonia levels of pain. And, even though I’m too broke to fly back, I see no reason to not try some local analogues. If I get out of work early enough tonight, maybe I’ll try to climb the hill by the big star. It’s no Mount Snowdon, but who knows? If you look up at just the right moment, you might see a tiny gothy midget punching the air.