I Just Can't Help It

Gentle Reader,

I'd like to preface my post today by stating clearly that I am painfully aware of my many character flaws, and am constantly reminded of them. These include, but are not limited, to being prone to hyperbole, having strong opinions about things that I don't know enough about, changing my mind frequently, obsessing about a wide variety of interests, refrigerator blindness, and spending other peoples' money. The list doesn't stop there, but I'd like to elaborate a little on that last item. 

A certain dear friend, who shall go by the name of Sunny, is in the market for a road bike. I keep encouraging her to spend just a little more than she wants to spend, and my powers of persuasion are frequently compromised by my aforementioned character flaws. I've tried all the arguments I can muster to encourage her to move up one notch on the component ladder...slightly better derailleur, bottom bracket, crank, etc., but she's not quite buying it. Today I thought I had an ironclad argument about how we don't think twice about paying an unexpected car repair bill than can run into the hundreds if not thousands, yet we don't allow a little more latitude when buying potentially transformational recreational/athletic hardware. Sunny acts as if she's not convinced, but somehow I can't help thinking that she is ever-so-slowly loosening the strings of her meticulously organized wallet. 

Truth be told, I am not an impartial consultant. A brand new road bike beyond a certain price point will just be begging to climb our endless hills, and I might soon have an occasional riding companion! Here's hoping.

Today's ride was stunning. It was my first jacket-free ride of the year, with temps in the mid-60s. Same old Lansing Conlon loop...I can't imagine a better ride with less than an hour to spare. Great tailwinds on the homestretch and feeling really strong. There were lots of other cyclists on the road today—I counted five others. Actually I saw six people, but I don't count riders without helmets. Maybe that's another character flaw, but so be it.

Stats:

Distance: 19.11 miles

Avg. speed: 19.6 mph

Vertical ascent: 949 ft.

Avg. heart rate: 148 bpm

Calories burned: 996 kcal

Max. speed: 36 mph

Time: 58:26

Hunkered Down

Snow is in the air! Now that I'm hunkered down and all set up for spinning in the basement with my trusty trainer, let the snow fly, I say. The big challenge now is to keep up the schedule of indoor biking workouts three times weekly through the winter. This is unchartered territory for me, as I've never maintained an indoor training schedule of any kind before. It's so much harder to get motivated to ride with a trainer than to ride on on the road. How do professional athletes do it?

One of the obvious reasons that I slowly gained weight through my 30s and 40s and had such a hard time losing weight is my strong aversion to exercise. For my whole life I've held stubbornly to my position that exercise for exercise sake is just plain boring and that I'll never do that. If it's not fun, I'm not doing it. I've been able to hold true to this mindset all through this year of substantial weight loss and improved fitness by doing a Wii Fit workout almost daily since February in addition to road biking all summer. For those of you who haven't experienced the magic of Wii Fit, you have so much fun working out that you don't resent it. I've never been into gaming, but I can do Wii Fit for an hour or more without getting bored, and the cumulative effect is incredibly beneficial. The Wii Fit experience is data driven, and I've written in prior posts about my obsession with gathering and analyzing data from my rides. Wii Fit Plus improves tremendously on an already fantastic product, with lots of new fun activities like Island Cycling, Obstacle Course, Birds-Eye Bullseye, Skateboarding, Boxing, and Snowball Fight. In addition, it tracks an estimate of calories burned, and analyzing the graph of your weight loss is very motivating.

So why am I rethinking my anti-exercise stance? Wii Fit alone will not keep me in shape over the winter months, given the limited amount of time I have set aside to work out. That leaves the bike trainer, not the most fun thing in the world, so it means...gulp...exercise for exercise sake. Yikes! Can I succeed? I'm definitely motivated, so hopefully that will make all the difference.

Ask any cyclist who has tried riding on even the best trainer—it's a pale substitute to the euphoria of road biking. It's a good workout but you have to work hard on making the environment comfortable and find distractions that work for you. I get bored quickly with my music mixes, so I have to keep on top of this issue and make a few new playlists in anticipation of my next workouts. It's all about mind games, but there's no doubt that my positive state of mind, thanks to many months of intense aerobic workouts, will contribute greatly to the success of this workout strategy.

Why start this blog in the first place?

Cycling has been a critical part of my identity since I was at least seven, some fourty years ago. Every few years I am reminded of this, particularly when I have a watershed cycling season like this one, 2009, the year I got my first road bike. (Why did I wait so long?) [upcoming posts: watershed cycling experiences]

I've thought so much about what cycling means to me for so long that now I decided that it is finally time to write about some of my most treasured road biking experiences, as well as reflect on my attempt to be a year-round cyclist with the help of my new trainer. Since I'm terrible at keeping journals, I thought that maybe the discipline of maintaining a blog would be somehow more attractive and easier.

This picture is from 1971. We lived in Japan for three years, while my dad took a job with IBM to help to develop a new plant. This was my first serious bike and I was so proud. This photo was taken at our apartment complex in Osaka. It was a 5-speed with some pretty awesome headlights and tail lights, as well as a generator. I was king of all the world.