(Long Post)
It’s January 2009. I’ve just turned 50 a couple of months ago. I weigh over 200 pounds and I’m 5’6″ tall on a good day. My mother is terminally ill and on the other side of the country. The US has recently suffered a serious financial meltdown, but elected its first black president, Barak Obama. My family business has suffered a significant financial setback from the worst flood in the history of its home town, Cedar Rapids. Where do I go from here?

Sitting idly by, watching playoff football and eating another pint of ice cream sounds really soothing. But I am not feeling well. My business will suffer a significant sales shortfall in the coming year ( in real terms it does work out to a 25% decline ). My personal health is not good. I’m stressed and I’ve got some uncomfortable gastro-intestinal issues, high blood pressure, and a couch potato mentality. Time to do something different.

Crises have a way of focusing your thinking. January 2009 was that period of crisis that focused mine. For some peculiar reason I latched onto the idea that if my business could suffer through a significant sales decline I could personally reduce my weight by a similar amount. I resolved, that January, at a mid-life turning point, to take control of my physical well-being first and let the chips fall where they may with other parts of my life.

I had been riding my bike to work for several years now. But riding to work was a direct substitution for taking public transit and I found I could only really do the 3.5 mile ride two or three times per week and by the most direct routes. Doing more than that made my knees hurt and I found it difficult to take the 88 steps each evening up to the front door coming home.

So what changed? First, I enrolled in a calorie counting program called Lose It! and started counting calories. Second, I committed to riding my bike to work, no matter how slow, five days a week. Bike riding became a spiritual as well as a physical outlet for me. Finally, coping with my mother’s eventual death in February 2009, I resolved to slow my life down and put my personal well-being at the center of my priorities.

Over the next 12 months the calorie counting fixation got me to make tangible changes in my eating habits and marginal changes in my exercise routines. I joined a health club at my office to augment my three day per week rides to and from the office. In April of 2009 I made a mini-discovery. If I covered my knees during ALL of my bike rides the sore knees issue went away. Sounds weird, but it worked. I bought of couple of calf length bike riding pants and found that riding to and from work daily was no longer painful. Over the next two years my daily commute changed from 3.5 miles one way into or from work to 5, 6 or eventually 10 to 15 miles each way.

Mentally, the changes were a godsend. The added half hour to hour on my bike gave me more time for reflection; it became a meditative experience as much as a physical exercise. And the pounds fell off. From February 2009 to January 2010 I lost a little over 40 pounds and settled into a 160-165 pound weight range. All of my gastro-intestinal ailments faded away. While I occasionally felt some physical muscle pains I felt better overall and didn’t have anymore joint pains.

In 2011 I traveled over 4,000 miles by bike. I invested in a Garmin 500 Edge cycling GPS device and began having fun not only logging all my cycling miles, but seeing the actual routes on my laptop. I stuck with ‘Lose It’ and found that daily logging of my food and exercise allowed me to at least maintain my weight loss while still striving for that elusive final weight goal of 155 pounds. With two active daughters at home I was still doing a fair amount of daily driving to pick up or drop them off at their activities or friend engagements and any free time I could find with them was precious. Like most of us I am a terrible dieter and, while maintaining better eating habits than four years earlier, I was eating more in proportion to my increased exercise routine. I was maintaining my new weight, but not really putting effort getting the last five to ten pounds off.

At the end of 2011 I joined a social website called Strava. Several sites like this had been cropping up and offered a link between my GPS device, iPhone, web and social media sites. I got hooked. For 2012 I resolved to record ALL of my bike rides, including those to the grocery store or other errands. I purchased another bike, a small wheel folding bike for simple errands and occasional commuting. My wife and I started doing all of our evening out activities dining, symphony, ballet et cetera by bike. That turned a few heads. I researched, test rode and then committed to cycling to the airport for business trips. Now my children thought I was going crazy. By the end of 2012 I was recording a little over 4,500 miles. At this point my estimated annual auto miles (personal, business, vacation driving) were about equal to my cycling miles.

My 2013 goal became 5,000 miles of cycling or roughly 100 miles per week. I joined challenges in Strava and monitored weekly goals. The motivations it provided were awesome. See this earlier post about my first Strava Challenge results. By September it became clear to me I would blow past 5,000 miles as I was enjoying finding longer and longer routes to and from work. I no longer rode through San Francisco so much as I rode around San Francisco.

2013 is over and I topped out at a little over 6,100 miles for the year. Recognizing that there are limits and I am now in an older age demographic I’ve committed to 6,000 miles for 2014. I hope to enjoy these rides as much as I have building up to them over the past five years.