The Long Road Back

If there is one thing you probably never want to do, it is to have to start over (more or less) in cycling.

I can remember pretty vividly when I first started to get serious about riding. It was about a month after my 40th birthday, and I was watching the 2005 Tour de France on OLN. I had bought a used mountain bike earlier in the year, thinking I might ride to work and maybe lose some weight (I was round 240lbs at the time), but I didn't. Not until I started really watching the Tour and seeing Lance race. So I started riding. My first ride was ~2.25 miles and it took me 15 minutes to do it and I was totally wiped out afterwards.

Doesn't sound like much, does it? I kept at it though. Every couple of days I'd go a bit further and maybe a bit faster. By October I was able to ride 62 miles in just over 4 hours. By this time I had picked up a magnetic trainer and a Trek 1200 road bike and had dropped about 30lbs. I loved cycling and, being a somewhat obsessive person, I cycled a lot. In January 2006 I signed up with the lowest level membership with Carmichael Training Systems, and trained hard right through the winter. Putting 10+ hours a week on the trainer wasn't unusual. It was a fairly mild winter so I was able to ride outdoors as well quite a bit, despite not having the right gear for it.

In May I bought a PowerTap, intending to get really serious about this biking thing. I had set my goals for the year. The first was to repeat my longest ride of last year, but to cut about 30 minutes off the time, and my big goal was to ride 132 miles in a single day. Pretty big plans for a guy who was able to last 15 minutes and 2.25 miles just a year before.

For my first goal ride, I did well. 65 miles in 3:35, averaging 18.1 mph and my weight was down to 170.6. This is a very hilly course, so I was quite happy.

By the time my next goal ride came around, I was in great shape, but looking back I can see the signs that I was starting to lose it. Up to the recovery week prior to the goal ride, I worked up to about 250-300 miles per week, doing a century each week for the 3 weeks leading up to it. The goal ride itself, I more than achieved my targets. 132 miles in 7:22 of rolling time (9:10 if you count rest stops and mechanical stops (had 2 flats and a broken water bottle cage during the ride). According to PowerTap, I averaged 17.9 mph, 204W and burned 5300 calories. When you take into account that I was solo and had been riding for under 14 months, I think thats pretty good.

After meeting my goal, though, things really started falling apart. My weight on the day of my goal ride was 178, so up almost 8 lbs in the 3 months since my first goal ride, despite having been increasing my training road right along. So something was going on that wasn't quite right. I know I wasn't eating right in the weeks leading up to my goal, and I continued to not eat right after my goal was past.

I figure now I was pretty much overtrained by the time of my main goal ride, and once I didn't have the goal to keep me going, I slowly stopped. By the end of September my training time and intensity was way down and by the end of the year it had stopped. I had just lost the drive to get on the bike and, being the semi-compulsive person I am (where it usually is all or nothing), since it wasn't all it was nothing.

A couple times this winter I did try to get back into it, but it didn't seem to last. I should mention that in spite of not riding any more, I was taking in calories as if I was, with the predictable results.

Now though, I think I've gotten back into the groove. Books were the key to this. The first was Chris Carmichael's new book, "5 Essentials for a Winning Life: The Nutrition, Fitness, and Life Plan for Discovering the Champion Within"

While there wasn't a terribly lot of "new" information in this for me, having read his other books, it did give a bit of perspective for me. The perspective of someone who had been fit, but lost focus on it and all of a sudden found themselves out of shape. Its focus on shorter workouts and watching what you fuel yourself with were what got me the most, so I decided I'd try his program, with a bit of variation. I still love cycling, so instead of just walking as the gook describes, I decided I'd do 3 days of cycling and 2 days of walking a week. This would let me cycle and get some variety in the mix which would also help maintain bone strength.

The second book, which I just got this past weekend is by Mike Magnuson, "Heft on Wheels: A Field Guide to Doing a 180". This book is about a guy, Mike actually, who finds himself at middle age, fat (255lbs), drinking too much (more than a couple nights a week til the wee small hours) and smoking 2 packs or more a day. In a very humorous way he tells how getting back on his bike (which he always loved) was the first step in his plan to recreate himself. Even the fact that he went overboard with his training and diet (was riding 2+ hours 6 days a week while consuming less than 1800 calories) and pushed himself til he was overtrained was inspiring to me as I could see myself in what he was doing. He succeeded though, and got down to less than 180lbs and completed, and finished well, in a number of challenging cycling events.

Its funny how things work sometimes. With me, I can feel when a real change of direction happens, and I feel that way now. I feel like I've got that drive to be on the bike again, even to the point of going out in less than ideal conditions and when the conditions get worse (thunderstorm moves in) I just head home and set the bike up on the trainer to finish my ride. The fact that I'm carrying 36% more weight than at the time of my main goal last year (~41% more than my lowest last year) and that my threshold power is only about 70% of what it was last year (220W vs 310W) is a little embarassing, but compared to where I started 2 years ago, I'm doing well. My ride today was 9.5 miles in 45 minutes, so 4 times as far and about 30% faster than my first ride way back then.

It will be a long road back to get where I was at my peak, but I'm confident that I'll make it, now that I've made that corner.

Take care.