Randy Krupa has become a fixture at the Y, either walking the elevated track or working out on every machine in the fitness center. There was a time not too long ago when the only walking Randy did was from his computer to the refrigerator stocked with cans of Mountain Dew and Coca Cola. And even the shortest walk was a real effort, for on his six-foot-four frame rested close to 500 pounds of mostly fat.

“I had hit bottom,” the 23-year old will tell you. “I was chilling at home when it occurred to me, ‘I gotta change.’ I mean, it was a very clear message.”

Part of the problem, Krupa admits, was a group of his friends who weren’t really friends and who bullied him.

“There was this one guy, my friend, but he was always putting me down, like he was kidding but what he said all the time, it broke me down.”

It was the bottom: Obese, unemployed, tired of friends who really weren’t, Krupa made a decision, and one day he walked the track at McCann Field.

“ That first time I couldn’t even walk one lap, a quarter mile, before my legs cramped up and I was breathing heavy,” he recalls. His mother saw what her son was doing and stepped in to help.

“ She said she would quit smoking if I joined the Y and lost weight,” Krupa says. “She hasn’t gone back.”

Krupa says he was “heavy” while a freshman in high school. That’s when he became involved in the video game “ World of Warcraft,” a very popular Internet role-playing game among that generation, similar to Dungeons and Dragons of an older generation.

“ It’s a role playing game,” Krupa says. “I would spend 20 hours a day playing. It’s on the Internet so it’s like you have all these friends all playing this game. And if you’re playing you get hungry. I lived on pizza, I’d order a whole large pizza and six or seven liters of Mountain Dew just for myself.”

By his sophomore year he was obese, which just provided more ammunition for his ( non) friends to make him feel bad. But when his “moment of clarity” came two years ago in led to his showing up for a tour of the Y with Joe MacMahan.

“What I wanted was to lose weight,” Krupa recalls. “ Joe showed me every machine in the fitness room. Helped me work out a schedule.”

To balance his strength training Krupa began to play basketball with a handful of “older” regulars three mornings a week, even though at the beginning he couldn’t move.

“I was so heavy I could only stand and shoot,” he recalls.

Krupa works out six hours a day, five days a week. He has friends who encourage him to strive for his goals. Those goals are simple.

“I want to look good and feel good,” he says.