July 08 odo counts

Date	Long Haul Trucker	errand or mtn. miles	08 Total
6-30	1181.3	1234.5	556.3
7-8	1215.2	1234.5	590.2
7-13	1276.4	1234.5	651.4
7-20	1388.4	1234.5	763.4
7-31	1477.3	1234.5	852.3

Now for a world of bizzare nostalgia…

This blog is awesome. (link) The bicycles section is cool. For an extra treat click on the ‘just wierd’ link on the left side.

Timonium: One Way Dead End Hilly street Suburbia at it's finest

I went on my long Saturday ride this morning. It was fine and I got the exercise and the miles I needed. I did not meet my objective of riding from my doorstep to the NCR trail. There are more dead end and one way streets between here and the trail than bad plot twists in ‘Snakes on a Plane‘. I did get close, but wasn’t interested in bringing my quest to fruition by that point. Also there were a ton of hills. I kept finding myself flying down some side street thinking to myself “I’m going to pay for this later…” The bikely mapping I stole from someone else had me cutting across between 2 properties at one point on a foot path but danged if I found it so that was a good 20 minutes of backtracking. All of the exploring cut into my pace, but I still came out ahead of my target pace for the century, so no problem. All in all I’ll give it a 6. Disinteresting suburban scenery. Too many stop signs. Good hills. Decent workout, and I was up early enough that I wasn’t too bothered by traffic. By the end of the ride, when I reached the ‘hill o’ death™’ I was too tired to do anything other than throw it in the granny gear and spin at 4.5mi/hr. should have taken my panniers. There were a ton of people having yard sales.

Mental Boost

I was feeling a little burnt out when it came time for the ‘briskly paced’ ride which is in my training schedule on Wednesday. Decided to put it off and wake up before work on Thursday, eat an energy bar, ride 12 miles, come home, cool off (usually a 25min process for me), take a shower, and go to work. I won’t bore you with the math, but it was an impossible schedule given that it’s getting light around 5:30am and I need to be at work at 7. I was up at 5 to give it a shot anyway, but failed miserably. After forgetting my helmet, I ended up just cruising around the neighborhood for 2 miles before swinging home and getting ready for work. Good news is that I decided to log all of my training miles above and beyond my commuting miles, so I have a little cushion to fall back on when I screw up my schedule. Thursday was my ‘rest’ day and I put a few miles in there to compensate as well.

The hardest part of upping my schedule has been trying to figure out how to modify my diet to deal with all the extra calories I’m burning now. The easiest thing to do (but not correct) would be to continue eating the way I had on weekdays, and then take the extra calories I exercise and put them towards my weekend ‘deficit’ when we are out on the town living it up. Problem is that it would leave me drained all week long and still not address the transgressions of me eating poorly on the weekend. Alcohol and fried foods are a detriment regardless of how well the calorie equation on my spreadsheet balances out. For the last week I raised my intake slightly during the week, and fairly successfully tried to keep it in check on the weekend.

Now for the sunny part: 2 weeks of non-stop riding coupled with stringent accounting for all my food intake has paid off for the first time in close to 40 weeks. Every Friday morning when I wake up I check my weight. It works better for me than trying to do it every day, which would make me crazy. Today I was greeted by a scale reading 245.2, which is slightly below the range I have been bouncing in for nigh onto a year now. Of course I can’t let myself get too excited because there are anomalies from week to week, both high and low, but I can’t help and wonder if I’ve finally broken out of this demonic range I’ve been in. I’m just going with it and using the momentum to drive my riding schedule for another week. Take what I can get if you will.

There is part of me that wants to eat more protein and try to stave off losing too much muscle. They say you can’t train to get stronger AND lose weight at the same time. If I have to choose between the two, I’ll say I’d rather be a bit weaker and have 10ish less pounds (equivalent to the weight of 1.25 gallons water) of me to push up all those hills this September.

We all gain a little in the winter and take it off a bit in the summer, and if the last 10 years are any indication for me, it only gets harder to take the weight off from here. This is my best chance for the calendar year to break free of this range FOR GOOD. Go team me.

Starting weight when I got back from the Honeymoon — 271
Weight for week 88 (day 613) — 245.2
Gallons of milk you’d have to load into a basket at the supermarket to approximate my progress to this point… — 3.25
Number of pounds I still have to lose before I can really start worrying if my steel framed bicycle is holding me back, and maybe I should get something that has some carbon fiber weaved into it… — 60 (author’s note: a carbon fiber bike is not something I lie awake and dream about – just an illustrative point.)

It's On Like Donkey Kong

After taking a week past camp to mull my options and relax, I started into training for my first Century ride ever. September 6 I’m doing the Civil War Century. The website says 105 miles and 7400 feet of climbing, but the routes others have plotted out on Bikely say 54/5500 ft. No matter. Regardless of what it turns out to be I’m going to get my money’s worth. I found a site online that had a sample weekly training regimen for an 8 week program to work up to the distance gradually. Doing the distance is not really a worry for me because I’ve regularly pulled 70 and 80 mile rides out of thin air after doing little preparation without feeling too awful the next week. Bigger concerns for me are the mountains and the open roads with cars. My habits have had me riding nothing but short distances on local roads in the city and Rail Trails. I ride in the city, so the majority of my routes are on roads with lots of traffic lights and stop signs. Even the most testosterone-crazed drivers can’t get going too much faster than me. For the amount of time I spend on a bike, it is truly amazing how few roads I’ve actually traveled on. The training program I’m doing has lots of 20 to 60 mile rides, so I have to break the crutch of looping around small streets downtown. The first week in July I spent a ton of time on Bikely researching other peoples routes and sketching out routes of my own to get me out on the open road more but still on safe roads. I should be good for the first few weeks of training, then I have some ideas about how to use the NCR trail as a connector between the city and some of the roads around farmland and state parks in North Central MD. Can’t wait to share some of the routes I’m drafting, but since I stole the routes of other people as starting points, the notes are all messed up, and don’t correspond to the areas on the map. Some of them are going the wrong way too which leads to some pretty bad ‘one way street’ errors unless you know better. I’ll get around to it eventually, but right now, I’m too busy getting my mileage up. Saturday morning rides are where I’m testing out many of the routes, and it provides the added benefit of less cars (plus the drawback of having to get up at 5 in the morning…). I’m in week 2 of training and it’s going fine.