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.

2 posts categorized "about"

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 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Some Backstory

I like to think of myself as a lifelong cyclist. I can remember the day the training wheels came off and I can remember the day I got my first decent schwinn. I can also recall the time when I was 13 and I got my first "real" bike (made by GT and not Huffy or Murray) from a real bike shop. I spent thousands of hours on my first real bike, learning bmx tricks galore. By high school, I was riding my freestyle bike from after dinner until a late bedtime, thanks to well lit underground parking garages with lax security being within two miles of my house. The high point of this was competing in contests and winning a few. My biggest accomplishment was winning the overall intermediate flatland title for the 15-16 age class (1988).

In college, I still put in 5-10 hours a week practicing tricks and it wasn't until the last couple years of my undergraduate education that I rode less and less. In graduate school I became a runner again (I had a couple years doing middle school cross country). I also liked to cross train and I used to ride the steepest hills I could find on an old mountain bike. Since finishing grad school, my bike riding went way down, especially when I lived in Los Angeles on streets devoid of bike lanes. I took up commuting to work by bike in 2000, but that went away when I no longer worked downtown.

Getting Back on the Road

Fast forward to 2004, where I've gained about thirty pounds since grad school and I'm telecommuting from home and needing to do something physical in my life. My first bike was a 50lb recumbent and it took me about a year to work up to 20 mile rides with 500 feet of climbing. In the spring of 2006, I was at my local bike shop waiting while some part was being fixed and I decided to try out a low-end road bike on the shop floor.

After riding a 50 pound tank for hundreds of miles, spinning down the street on tiny tires on a sub-20 pound bike was a revelation. It felt like a whole new level of efficiency and I wanted to swtich over to normal bikes as soon as I could (I eventually got it as a father's day present in June of 2006).

Riding a real road bike was nice and I eventually put about 600 miles on it over the summer. The next year I felt an upgrade was in order and I got an aluminum/carbon bike that was a slight step up. I rode this bike about 800 miles or so before I tried out my first all-carbon bike. Riding it was another revelation about efficiency. When I pushed my pedals down, the bike surged in a way my other bikes didn't and I fell in love with the high end hardware.

The Racing Bug

In late 2007 I decided to try my hand at racing. I accidentally stumbled upon the cyclocross championships in late 2004 when I barely knew what it was. I just read it in the paper and stopped by for an hour to shoot some photos. I eventually read more about the sport and became interested in trying it myself because it sounded like it could combine my love of BMX and riding dirt trails with the endurance aspects of riding a road bike like I'd been doing for a couple years.

My first race was pretty bad because I had no idea just how much endurance was required to ride several miles through thick, sticky mud. I came in three spots above dead last but I did have fun and I recognized there was immense room for improvement. I raced again a couple weeks later and came in about a dozen spots from dead last and had even more fun. I was hooked on racing cyclocross.

Another thing happened at that second race. There are often event photographers that sell you prints for a few bucks a pop and this was the first race I got to see lots of photos of me in action. My first reaction to seeing a photo of myself from the race was that I thought I was looking at a shot of my father trying to ride a bike. Honestly, the photos looked like how I remembered my dad when I was a little kid and he was an overweight middle-aged man. Right then and there I vowed to ride through the Oregon winter and ride much more and much harder in 2008.

2008 Shapes Up

Shortly after this revelation, I hit my maximum lifetime weight right around the holidays. I was tipping the scales at 235 pounds. When I ran a marathon in grad school I was around 172. After the new year I started to watch what I ate and I rode a lot more, and after a couple months my weight dropped to 225. By summer I was coming close to 220. As I write this, I'm currently around 225 but I'm hoping to get below 200 by next summer.

After riding about 600-800 miles per year, in 2008 I made it a goal to ride at least a thousand miles and hopefully two thousand by year's end. I also signed up in February for Cycle Oregon (my recap of the event), an annual long distance multi-day tour/ride through Oregon that typically covers 500 miles in seven days. Knowing I had that in September meant I hit my goals pretty quickly. I hit a thousand miles by May, two thousand by August, and three thousand in October. I'll probably finish the year at around 3300 miles ridden.

2008 meant more racing as well. I hoped to race a bunch of mountain bike short track races in June/July but only ended up doing one event (where I got about 25th out of 36 because I rode 35 miles earlier that day). I raced four cyclocross events and did better than 2007, but still not even in the top half of the beginner class. I was a tad disappointed that I didn't post better results given my fitness was much higher.

Fitness

In late October, I decided to hire a personal trainer and hit the gym for only the second time in my life. Back in 1998 or so, I had a co-worker at UCLA that showed me the ropes at the student/staff gym and we made a habit of going there for about 3-4 months. I knew I wasn't ever going to set foot again into a gym unless I had some instruction, direction, and social pressure to do so and a trainer is perfect for that. After two months of 3 weekly hour-long workouts, I have to say I feel much stronger and better overall and I'm looking forward to continuing into 2009.

Recap

That's about it for how I ended up here. I'll detail my goals for 2009 and more about why I started this site in future posts.

Posted on December 21, 2008 in about | Permalink | Comments (0)