Welcome!

Have a look around the forums here, for posts about the live distros (such as DE-ICE, metasploitable, etc - there are MANY threads about them) and begin learning and practicing with those.

Also look into books on building labs, such as:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1597494259

to give you further ideas.

Well, it IS useful, and I recommend it to a lot of folks I know, as a starting point for their labs.    BTW, glad you're doing better, and good to see more of you, on here, again, Thomas!

+1 for Thomas/Grendel's book: Professional Penetration Testing

I believe it is the only book on my self that I have read cover to cover (well, almost). It's an excellent book and I recommend it to.

This book got me started, so create job Thomas. I am considering your hacking dojo course later this year just because I liked your book!

I'm ALWAYS glad to hear feedback on my writings! glad you enjoyed it, and if you have any questions about the course, just ping me. Thanks again!!!!!!!

There are two options, one is that you pay for labs and/or training, e.g. Hacking Dojo, Offensive Security, MDSec (labs only) etc., while the other is that you set up your own lab ( http://www.securityaegis.com/pentest-lab-web-application-edition/ , there are plenty of resources on how to build your own lab, get a VMware ESXi server on an okay machine that hosts your lab, unless you host it with e.g. VMware Player or Workstation.), and use free resources such as security tube, forums, research / whitepapers, etc. (Plenty of papers on exploit-db, plenty of videos on security tube, and so on.)
It's all about asking the right question, when you search for knowledge on Google.