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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Real stories versus "real" stories

I'm about to go on vacation and I've been picking up a bunch of cycling books, each about an epic journey somewhere. Last night I cheated a bit and started reading one impressive sounding book before the vacation even started and I quickly realized they're hard to read. Depending on the rider-slash-writer, the recounting of a day's ride can include several pages of wandering thoughts about the protagonist's role in the world before ever divulging details of actual honest-to-goodness ride information.

Maybe I'm a literalist, but the most interesting stories from the road are light on flowery details of personal psychology explorations in a riders head and instead tell you about the road conditions, how bad the wind was, how many miles you covered in how many hours, and who you met along the ride.

I realized I might just be leaving a stack of cycling journey books behind when I always end up riveted to my seat while reading tour diaries at a place like the Crazy Guy On A Bike community. If you don't know anyone using that system, try looking for your hometown or current trip in progress from the front page. I found a random guy that rode from the Oregon coast, through my town, and then all the way to New Hampshire over the course of several months with daily updates, photos, and stories.

I had no idea who the person was before I started reading but after a few entries I wished I could have bought him dinner when he passed through my town or rode along with him for a day. Oh, and I started reading his tour story right before bed and it wasn't until he was halfway across Ohio in the stories that I noticed it was 2am and I should really get to sleep.

Posted on January 8, 2009 in stories

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