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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Winter 2009 Bike book reviews

To get through the long gray winters here in Oregon, I've taken to reading every book I can find about cycling to keep me motivated and wanting to ride when the weather is cold, rainy, and windy. The following are all the books I picked up and read since about October and I included a short review of each.

Of course, it goes without saying the best cycling book ever written is The Rider by Tim Krabbe and none of these books can hold a candle to it, but a few have their moments and aren't half-bad.

In no particular order:

Major by Todd Balf -- a pretty straightforward biography of the fastest man on earth at the turn of the 20th century, Major Taylor. There are half a dozen books on him and I just picked a newer title. Pretty eye-opening look at how hard it was for a man to rise to the ranks of world champion and still struggle with racism in America at every turn.

The Race by Dave Shields -- This is a pretty good fiction book about a rider's rise to the Tour de France and reads like the author really loved The Rider and wanted to capture some of that. There is a lot of racing and cycling and team politics in it and it's great, though I kind of wish in the end it felt more realistic. It'd make a good movie script I bet.

Positively False by Floyd Landis -- I finally got around to reading Landis' book and it's a nice autobiography of how he came up and eventually made it to the big show, but in the end his defense of doping comes off as really nitpicky and reminds me of someone trying to tell you every technical reason why they shouldn't be guilty but none of them are big enough to actually make him innocent. I honestly think most everyone in the pro peleton dopes to a degree, and when people get caught is when they mess up their doses or metabolize it at a different rate. Landis never says why his artificial testosterone levels were more than zero, his defense is that they weren't high enough to be considered suspect by most labs. If he was racing clean, you'd think his numbers would be at or near zero but he never talks about what experimental controls look like in the tests or how the tests work specifically.

We Might As Well Win by Johan Bruyneel -- Fairly silly autobiography that annoyed me by the end. It's basically several hundred pages of Johan Bruyneel telling you how great he is, why he's so great, and even when the discussion turns to failures, it's all about the few times he made a mistake but more about how he turned them around because he's so great. There isn't an ounce of humility in this entire thing. Only recommended to Lance Armstrong fan completists that want to know everything possible about Lance's reign at the top.

Momentum is Your Friend by Joe Kurmaskie -- I wanted to love this because I've seen the author pop up in Northwest cycling circles and I love cross-country cycling diaries, but the writing was just too flowery for me. Instead of hearing what a hard grind of 80 miles the stretch between two Wyoming towns was one day, it's more like all the thoughts in his head while he was spinning the pedals. I guess I'm used to more practical cross-country trip stories that will tell me about adventures on the road but this was more like drinking beers with the author and hearing all the crazy stuff he thought about that day, most of which wasn't at all ride-related.

Dog in a Hat by Joe Parkin -- This was a fantastic autobiography about an American racer in Belgium in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Tons of good stories, though I hope I'm not spoiling anything by saying it doesn't have the "and then I won the Tour de France" happy ending. He strives to win but ends up as a pretty good domestique, but you get the feeling from reading it that he wanted to be a team leader for a long time.

Blazing Saddles by Matt Rendell -- a great albeit brief overview of the last 100+ years of the Tour de France. I've only followed the last 15-20 years or so of the race so most of the classic history was new to me. There are just a couple pages written about each year's tour, so it's a fairly quick read that will bring you up to speed on the history of the biggest race on earth.

Heft on Wheels by Mike Magnuson -- This book was close to my heart because it parallels my story a bit. I've never smoked and I'm not an alcoholic, but I am a hefty guy looking to lose weight and get into bike racing in much the same ways the author did. If you can get through a few hundred pages of "I was so drunk that night, I..." stories the riding and racing stories are worth it and I won't be spoiling anything by saying by the end he's totally turned his life around and is kicking much ass. This was probably the best motivational book of the entire lot.

Posted on April 6, 2009 in product reviews

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