Biking Update - November 15, 2008

Finally, I can feel good about calling this a "Biking Update" again! Last Sunday, after church, we took a nice long ride with the Bowhunter/Archer family down by the beach in Stratford. It felt SO good to be out on the road again, after so many weeks of pedaling in the attic, staring at exposed walls and getting nowhere. It was not a long ride - a little over an hour from Marnicks to Long Beach to the mouth of the Housatonic River and back - but it was a good one. And I had the amazing experience of actually out-pedalling Bowhunter/Archer. For those who do not know him personally, he is a former track star and rode the 75 mile Ididaride this year. He was weighed down with a trailer containing two active toddlers, so it was not a fair "competition". But it was nice to see how far I have come since we started biking in June... when I was almost always LAST to get up to speed and first to need to stop for a rest. Fitness can be fun.

Weight-wise things have been good this week. I was more or less flat at my goal weight (230) all week until finally at the end, I dipped below it and began to stay below it for several days. It was both depressing to be stuck at one number, and exciting that the number was my original goal weight. I went back and crunched the numbers and it turned out that I was losing about 8 lbs a month (with the exception of the first month, which is always larger than all the rest) but last month I lost almost 15 lbs. That means I lost 2 months worth of weight in a single month, without having been seriously ill. So, it may mean I will need to stay flat for a month to let my metabolism return to normal. I am okay with that. I'd like to be down a bit to have a cushion for Thanksgiving (when I will eat pretty much what I want) but if I am "stuck" here, that is fine. Wii Fit asked me to set a new goal, now that I have reached my goal weight, so my next one is to be down another 10 lbs by February. I think that should be doable, even with Thanksgiving and Christmas in between, and should be a good target to allow me to lose the weight in a healthy manner. Of course, I also failed to mention that I have been suffering from the flu all week, which has probably also been playing havoc with my metabolism and has limited my exercise opportunities.

This upcoming week, I am hoping to get in one more ride. We are flirting closely with the time when it will be impractical to bike most weeks, due to early sunset, dark nights, and frozen temperatures (i.e. black ice). We have already had to abandon biking to Guys Night Out for safety. It may not be long until most of the trails will be closed for the winter and/or there will be enough ice on the roads to make it an issue to bike. At that point, I will need to make a choice to either go for an indoor exercise method (Wii Fit, exercise bike, karate, etc.) or consider taking up snow biking, which I have been reading a lot about. With a bad knee, I am thinking snow biking may not be the wisest course. But I want to research it some more before making a decision. The bike shop behind our house is closing, so I could possibly pick up some really good mountain-biking tires for a very cheap price. We shall see. In the meantime, I need to finally schedule a check-up with my doctor to see what kind of karate I can do safely, and to see if it is worth spending the $100/month on a membership.