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.

3 posts categorized "stories"

A post mortem

I've been meaning to post here more often all summer -- I wanted to say how coaching was going, I wanted to mention how my first races of the summer went, and I wanted to describe my new cross bike and how my very short (1 race) cross season went, but all of that sort of fell by the wayside when I found out I have a large brain tumor last month.

You can read the whole entry if you'd like details, but the long story short is the tumor explains a lot of my frustrations and struggles to be a better cyclist over the last couple years.

Two years ago I rolled off the couch, thought my 20 years of BMX skills would make me a good cyclocrosser and promptly rode myself into exhaustion on a muddy course in Hillsboro, where I placed three up from dead last in the beginner class (the other two DNF'd).

For 2008, I rode all spring and summer and even a bit of the fall, on the order of several thousand miles, and I was mid-pack beginner at best. That's when I decided to get really serious, hire a bike coach, and promptly started doing serious miles beginning in December of 2008.

I rode a lot of hard miles all winter and early spring, going from a measly 225 watt average for 20min of all out sprinting to 300 watts over 20min. I kept riding hard until about April, when real life intervened and by the time I raced in June at PIR's short track mtb series, I knew something had to be up. I came in something like 53rd out of 75 people in June 2009, and a year earlier my results were exactly the same. Internally I thought about this for weeks, why didn't I improve, why was I exhausted soon after the start?

Along with the non-improvement despite training, I was also on a weight loss crusade this year. Ever since I moved to Oregon in 2003, I've steadily gained 5-10lbs a year with no real explanation, and this year, as I lost ten, then twenty more pounds, to say it was a struggle was an understatement. Every night for four months I went to bed starving. I would spend my days eating half of what I normally eat, and then go out and ride 150 miles a week on top of that, and lose about a pound per week.

I couldn't tell if something was wrong with me or if this was just the new reality of being over 35 and getting old.

I've also been going to the gym steadily (2-3 hours per week with a trainer) for over a year and have shown almost no growth in muscle mass despite steadily increasing weights. Ten years ago I went to a gym 1-2 times a week for four months and had noticeably larger arms.

So in a way, the tumor was a blessing in disguise. From my first few rounds of blood testing I saw that my hormone levels were near zero across the board. Typical testosterone levels in men my age range from a low to high of 175-781 ng/dl. My first measurement was 37 ng/dl, or about 20% of the lowest end, and less than 5% of the high end of normal. All my other growth hormones are similarly low, to the point I've been diagnosed with Panhypopituitarism, or a lack of human growth hormones.

Since my diagnosis, I've begun a course of medication and my metabolism and sparked back up again (I lost ten lbs in the hospital as well, but I've gained a few back, still well below 200). I feel like I can control my weight with much less effort than before. I'm still feeling low energy but we haven't started a course of testosterone treatment yet. Another upside is that I'll basically be using every banned performance-enhancing substance in the coming months, though it will be just to take me up to normal, not to make me some superhuman cyclist.

Finally, as I've gotten this diagnosis, I've realized it's not about getting Stronger, Fitter, or Faster anymore, it's really about getting healthy again, spending time with my family, and riding for fun (and hopefully racing next summer). I'm facing more medication and testing over the next few months and possibly some brain surgery, then some recovery.

So with this post, I'm going to shelter this blog for now, as I've moved almost all my cycling-related posts to our bike team site at BuyLocalCycling.com. Thanks for reading.

Posted on December 7, 2009 in stories | Permalink | Comments (0)

The dangers of being a roadie

When I was younger, the biggest danger of riding a bike was mostly about what I felt like attempting to do ("he's gonna jump it!!!") or if something happened while riding (like a crank arm breaking in the middle of a trick), but as I get older and ride mostly on public roads, the biggest danger is quickly becoming cars and trucks I share the road with.

Of course, it's not all cars and all trucks, it's mostly the one in ten thousand assholes that feel bicycles should not be traveling on roads, should not be in the flow of traffic, and should not cause them to slow down while they pass you. It happens every spring when the normally vacant farm roads I ride on become crowded on the first sunny weekend. You'll get someone yelling as they pass, or purposely making their truck backfire just as they go by. Sometimes, you get something even worse.

Sunday was something worse. A friend and I were at the tail end of a 90 minute easy ride, and we were riding side-by-side on an uncrowded road outside of town. A few people had passed that day, but this time it was out of the blue, and very close. Usually that's just a sign of a driver being inconsiderate and considering this was not only a full sized truck, but a dually my first thought was he was making a simple mistake concerning how wide the back end of his truck was relative to us riding.

The horn blast dispelled any notions it was an oversight or mistake. What seemed inconsiderate just turned into something aggressive and unruly. My first reaction to things like this is to throw up a hand to say "Hey! What the hell, dude?!" and my friend's first reaction was to throw his hand up, and motion it backwards. This set the driver off as we saw him slam on his brakes. Jeez, what the hell is this guy doing. Immediately, the reverse lights came on and a three ton dually truck is barreling towards us on a public road, backwards towards us. What. The. Fuck. Not wanting to get run over, I moved off to the side of the road and my friend did the same, riding right up to the side of the truck.

What follows was a flurry of swearing from the driver: "Motherfuckers... get out of my way.... motherfucking... didn't you see me coming... motherfucking faggots!" while my friend is yelling "Do you know what the law is? Do you know what the law is?" and after a few seconds I get my wits and start taking my phone out to shoot a picture of his license plate but after the "faggots!" hangs in the air, he slams the truck into drive and storms off.

When I got home 15 minutes later I threw on some sweats and drove around town to see if I could spot the truck and get the plate number, but after hitting the local hardware, farm, and grocery stores, I came up empty.

It sucks that this is supposed to become normal, and has become somewhat normal, happening once or twice a year both when I ride alone and in groups. Given that I'm riding thousands of miles on bike lane-free farm roads, there's no way to know when the next jerk is going to brush too close next to me, blaring the horn and who knows what this guy will do the next time he encounters some cyclists. It sucks that this happens to everyone, all the way up to Lance Armstrong (who has been hit by drivers at least a couple times).

My wife has always bugged me to get an ID bracelet for these kinds of worst-case scenarios. I find the idea kind of macabre, basically making my own toe tag for when I die, but I'll probably end up getting one soon.

Posted on February 9, 2009 in stories | Permalink | Comments (2)

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 | Permalink | Comments (2)