The Project

I've decided to start a blog about my use of cycling for weight loss and fitness.  I currently weigh about 212 pounds and I see myself as something more like 160 pounds, which is what I weighed at one point in 2001, and I think 2000.  I'd like to reach this weight by the end of November, which is less than 2 pounds per week.  I'll be using my road bike and what I consider to be good eating habits to achieve this goal.  I have a lot of good reasons for this that I will explain over the course of this blog.

My History

I moved to Evansville in 1999 at the age of 25 and tipped the scales at up to 230 pounds. As I'm 5' 9" tall, that's pretty heavy, and well inside the obese range according the Body Mass Index (BMI).   I smoked a half pack a day (though I quit permanently in May of that year) and drank 2 to 4 drinks most every evening.  My days were spent on a sugar roller coaster.  For breakfast, I'd have a bowl of cereal.  By 10am, I'd hit the vending machine for a real Coke and maybe a candy bar.  Lunch consisted of a burger and fries from the cafeteria.  I'm sure there was an afternoon vending machine raid, too.  The evening brought some sort of carbohydrate massacre -- dinner always involved large quantities of meat and potatoes.  And how else can you finish the night other than with a quart of ice cream?  I've added it up before and I estimated my daily carb consumption was 400g to 600g per day. 

Part of the problem is that I'm hypoglycemic, so my blood sugar gets low after I eat, and that makes me need to eat again.  Of course, eating carbs and sugar aggravates that, so it is an ever worsening problem.  Eventually, the roller coaster leads to diabetes in many people, and I've seen first hand how terrible that can be.

In September 1999, I picked up a copy of The Atkins Diet at my local bookstore.  I was in there one day and wandered over to the health section.  My intuition serves me well when I allow it to guide me to exactly what I need at the moment.  In this case, I came across Dr. Atkin's book and it called to me to pick it up.  Keep in mind, this was at least a couple months before low-carb diets started their renaissance and became a little too popular at the turn of the millenium.  Also realize that at my age, I'd never heard of him or low-carb diets.

At home, I started reading the book and I was energized.  Atkins describes the people who would most benefit from the diet and he was talking specifically about ME!  A couple weeks later, on Sept. 19, I started low carb in the middle of a family reunion feast by dropping a half a can of Hawaiian Punch into the 55 gallon drum trash barrel and ate just meat the rest of the day.  I remember that morning I weighed 223 pounds.

Unfortunately, my logs of my weightloss have been lost to time, but I was down to 175 within 6 months and was able to easily maintain that within a few pounds.

Cycling Begins:  My Transformation Into a Road Cyclist

In the spring of 2000, I dusted off my Roadmaster mountainbike that I'd bought several years earlier at WalMart for getting around campus at SIUC (Southern Illinois University at Carbondale.)  I lived next to the Evansville State Hospital which has a nice park with a paved roadway around it where I could ride around 1 mile per lap.  Most importantly, it was dead flat and I didn't feel like I was ready for any sort of a hill.  I worked from 2 to 11pm then, so my mornings were free to go ride laps for however long I wanted to.  At first 6 miles was my limit, and I worked myself up to 15 miles, but that gets a little tedious on a small circuit.

It wasn't long before I began to realize that the cyclists with all their spandex shorts and fancy gear might be onto something.  Let's just say that wearing denim shorts on the bike wasn't working out.  I bought my first pair of spandex cycling shorts, but that was as far as I was going to go, or so I told myself.  I rode with those and a regular t-shirt.  My thumbs were going numb on the handlebars, so I bought padded cycling gloves (the standard kind without fingers) and handlebar ends to give me more grip positions.  Summer in Evansville was getting into full swing and my cotton t-shirts were getting soaked, so I bought a polyester jersey with conservative colors.  Realize that each of these was a big step for me, mentally.

I continued to work on my short distances and also my speed.  At a local bike shop, I met a member of the EBC who encouraged me to come out to a club ride.  I wanted to meet like-minded people, but I was reading Cycling magazine and I felt I had a little more work to do to be able to fit in.  I also had a low quality mountain bike.  He offered me a copy of the newsletter and and I took it home and checked it out.  I'd been looking for places to ride and the ride schedule gave me some new ideas.  I found the Dogtown Boat Ramp and started riding my bike down Old Henderson Road until it turns to gravel, then returning to the ramp, which is 23 flat miles along the Ohio River.  I was averaging about 15 mph.

One Monday morning, I was riding at the state hospital and right at the beginning of my ride my bike began shifting gears randomly.  I saw the back wheel was wobbling badly.  Upon inspection, I realized I'd broken one of the frame's chainstays, which is the lower arm that holds the back wheel in place.  The 600 miles I'd put on it that summer were just too much.  Just the day before, I'd done the 23 mile Old Henderson Road route and was grateful that it didn't happen out there.

Now it was time for my last important piece of my transformation...I needed a road bike!  I found a Klein aluminum bike at Gilles Cycling and Fitness with a color labeled, "blastberry."  It is one of those color-changing paints that changes between green, blue, and purple and reflects yellow sunlight.  One small, high-interest loan later and I had my bike and my first clipless pedals and cycling shoes.

I started exploring more of the routes listed in the EBC Ride Schedule, but I really couldn't figure them out at first because I didn't understand the strange hieroglyphics on the roads.  Later I would learn that they are Dan Henries and that the standard is a circle with a line pointing in the direction you should turn.  They appeared to me as a unicycle, as if someone was saving time by painting just one wheel of the bike and I couldn't follow them at all.  Then I brought my roadbike out to what is now the Olmstead route that goes up into the reclaimed stripmine area and rode parts of the marked route (that I couldn't follow) for 20 miles or so. 

About a week later, I arrived at my first club ride on a Sunday afternoon.  Alan Orth introduced himself to me and I told him I was new and was checking out the club.  We discussed my speed and I told him I was getting around 15 mph, so he suggested I ride with his wife, Heather, and Cindy Jones.  They explained the Dan Henry system to me and started teaching me how to draft, which scared the heck out of me at first.  At the end of the ride, I'd beaten my fastest ever speed by 2 mph, averaging over 17 mph.  I was hooked.