Stronger, Fitter, Faster

Stronger

Twelve years behind a desk does things to your body. For the first time in ten years I've started hitting a gym 3x a week but that doesn't mean I can muster too many pushups just yet.

Fitter

Lose a serious amount of weight. This is definitely key to making everything else work, so I'll be focusing on dropping pounds to get not only into a healthy range of BMI, but to also increase my endurance and fitness.

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Hey Didn't You Already Do This Before?

Back in early 2005, I tried to motivate myself to exercise by putting everything in public at what I called a "fitlog". I have no record of it beyond this CSS-free copy of it at the Internet Archive. I tried to do a blog post whenever I weighed myself, took a bike ride, or went on a run. It was the first time I tried out Wordpress and I used a new custom fields feature that let me set my weight and miles ridden/run in the blog's own database engine. Then a friend tweaked out some PHP/SWF graphs so I could see my weight and miles over time in handy graphs on the sidebar.

Like all my late night ideas for internet projects, it starts with the idea, and the motivation to implement carries me through building it and launching it, but soon after my enthusiasm began to wane. Every entry required putting in additional data (and input was a pain requiring a multi-step process), and I'd have to remember my early morning weight when I posted late at night (the worst part was I couldn't record a weight or ride without writing some sort of blog post). Then our baby was born and my exercise schedule went to zero for several months and didn't recover for almost two years.

The obvious question is how will this site be any different and what will keep me coming back to update it?

This time around my exercise schedule is pretty far open and pretty well set. I've got both a trainer in the gym and now a coach on my bike that I both pay to keep me motivated and progressing. I've got the whole 2009 bike racing season to gear up for and enjoy. I'm streamlining as much as I can so that entering my weight or rides is effortless. I've used We Endure for a couple years and it continues to provide the bare-bones features I need to track my cycling progress and has for the past couple years. After a long search, I ended up using Skinnyr to track my weight, though I've tweaked their embeddable graph to fit and it doesn't quite look right (they say custom sizes are coming soon).

I plan to keep track of my rides and weight automatically over on the sidebar, and I'll do at least weekly posts on how training is going. While I've been with my gym trainer since October, I haven't started with the bike coach yet and I'll be walking through devising a training plan for the year and we'll be touching base every month, so I suspect I'll have posts every few days about the process until it gets going. I'm also planning on getting my first custom frame made for racing and I'll be reviewing gear as I pick it up and start using it. I'm also helping a friend launch a new bike racing team that I'll be a member of and we're at square one right now (we have a concept, name, initial sponsors) but we have loads of work ahead planning and putting all the pieces together.

I'm really looking forward to posting on this site for the 2009 racing season and I'm looking forward to tracking my progress in public. I have high hopes for next year -- while 2007 was spent riding a bit and goofing around with a couple races, I was a bit more serious in 2008 but I was still finishing in the bottom third of the beginner racing classes. One of my goals for 2009 is to be competitive in the next bracket up, but it's going to take a lot of work and practice to get there. I hope you enjoy the ride along with me.

Posted on December 24, 2008 in about

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