Left Behind

Several years ago, I weighed almost 100 pounds less than I do today, spent many hours each week on my bike racking up the miles, and would sign up for a half-century (50 mile) bike ride every now and then without giving it a second thought. My dear wife and I would enjoy training rides in the morning after the kids went to school, or on the occasional Saturday morning in which we would ride for ten, fifteen, twenty miles or more – much of that time side by side, talking about a myriad of subjects, or not at all, just listening to the sound of the road and of each others’ breathing and shifting of gears.

As the stronger rider of our duo, and prone to becoming lost in my own random thoughts, I would at times suddenly realize that I had pulled away from Diana and would look back over my shoulder to see her hundreds of yards or even farther behind. I would usually slow down so she could catch up, or – if the distance was too great – turn around and ride back to where she was.

For several reasons which I will write about in upcoming posts, we stopped riding almost entirely — other than the occasional hop back on the bikes every few months to see if we remembered how to do it on particularly gorgeous, mild days.

As a result of this lack of riding, and the return of my many extra pounds, lots of things have changed on our rides. Not only are our rides being considerably shorter than they used to be, but my wife is now the one out in front on any given ride. If it’s a downhill stretch of road, yowza – I’m out in front like John Candy on a greased bobsled. But let the road turn into even the slightest incline and I start to drop back like I’m riding with flat tires through wet concrete.

Short of shoving a rocket pack up my hiney, there’s just no way I’ll ever even ride alongside my pedal-pushing honey, much less pass her up. Those days – for all intents and purposes – are gone. At least for now. Sometimes it really gets me down – like our ride last night. Between our son’s Lance-like speed and endurance, my wife’s strength and stamina, and my lack of endurance and inability to take deep enough breaths due to a certain rather roundish mid-section between my lungs and madly pumping knees – I may as well have been all by myself the entire ride. Whoopee.

My hope (and one of several goals) is to realize at some point in the not too distant future that I’m riding up the west side of the Rose Bowl loop right alongside my wife, maybe even chatting her up, and I know I’ve got some juice still left in the tank if I wanted to blow past her in a manly, dominant Alpha male sorta way. Not that I would, of course.

Then again, as soon as that happens, I know without a doubt that Diana will catch me at the next water break and say, “Hey … it’s no fun riding by myself, y’know!?!” I live for that day.

Oh, and for anyone keeping score – as of last night, I have been on my bike ten times for a grand total of 100 miles since my “restart” during the last week of February. It ain’t much, I know. Hopefully before too long, I’ll be able to look at numbers like those and laugh what’s left of my butt off like most of you are probably doing right now. Until then, it’s a start.

Flat out frustrating

So, no sooner am I all pumped up, committed to success and ready to chew up the miles, but I get sidetracked by as stupid and inconsequential a thing as air. Simple old air. You might think that any “air” problems with a guy of my stature (think of an ‘Oompa-Loompa’ in tight, stretchy bike pants) would involve simply catching my breath. As true as that might be all too often, yesterday’s trouble strictly involved keeping a tire inflated.

And it wasn’t even my own! Nope. Here’s what happened: my youngest son, wife and I were getting our bikes and gear (shoes, helmets, gloves, etc.) ready to ride at our usual weekday riding spot, the Rose Bowl in nearby Pasadena. One part of the pre-ride routine is making sure the air in our tires is at 110 psi. Now, if you’ve ever paid attention to the air pressure in your car’s tires, you know that 30 – 35 psi is pretty normal. But for all of you out there not into the sport of shoving a rock-hard, wafer-thin bike seat between your butt cheeks and hunching over hard metal handlebars shaped like ram’s horns for miles on end – road bikes have skinny little tires, with even skinnier little inner tubes inside them. In order for these tiny tires to hold the weight of a rider, the air pressure inside has to be fierce.

When a road bike tire goes flat, it usually happens all at once. One second you’re rolling along at speeds up to 35 or 40 miles an hour, and the next, you’re riding on a metal rim. Not a nice thing to have happen to you. Trust me.

All that is to say that we always check our tire pressure before a ride. So, my son notices that his rear tire feels soft. He attaches the head of our super-high-tech (and expensive – all accessories for cycles are expensive) bicycle pump to the valve on the tire, and – PSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS --- all the air left in the tire immediately begins to vent out. Turns out the rubber tube where the valve is attached was cracked from fatigue. I know the feeling.

So, before we can load our bikes into my truck and head over to the Rose Bowl for an early evening ride, young son must have lesson in tire repair. Good son. Watch closely son as Dad shows you how to remove the wheel from its greasy home on the back of your bike, take out the inner tube, take a new inner tube from that funny little cordura bag that is strapped under your bike’s seat, reinstall the new tube, put the tire back on the rim – being extremely careful not to pinch the new tube as you do it, reinflate the tire and put the wheel assembly back into place, ready to ride.

See how easy that was? Huh? What noise? Hang on … let me listen. PSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS. Are you kidding me? Where the **#!!**$#^!!! is it leaking? It’s a brand new tube!

Turns out, “new” is a relative term in the world of cycling. The spare tube that was new at one time, had been languishing in the bag under my son’s seat for over a year and a half at least. Apparently, tubes go bad. Who knew?

And so, the entire process was repeated with great enthusiasm (or at least significant commentary on my part) and off we went. Upon arriving at our usual starting point in one of the many parking lots at the world-famous Rose Bowl, we unloaded our bikes, slipped into our biking shoes with the clippy-cloppy cleats on the bottom, strapped on our helmets, adjusted our sunglasses, picked appropriate playlists on our iPods, zeroed out our bike odometers, and …
PSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS.

Seriously? Again? Ah c’mon!! Well, I won’t repeat the sequence of events that followed since by now, even my son could do it in his sleep. My wife went ahead and began her circuit of 3.2 mile laps around the stadium complex and nearby golf course, while my son and I stayed at the truck, replaced yet another bad tube all the while painfully aware that the sun was rapidly disappearing behind the many McMansions on the surrounding hills.

By the time my son’s bike was fully operational enough to set him free to go and catch up with his mother (the boy is an incredibly strong and fast rider), I have to admit that I was less than motivated to ride. My former enthusiasm and adrenalin had dissipated as fast as the air in my son’s inner tubes.

Being at the Bowl, however, dressed in my silly bike cloths, my wife and son already pedaling away, I figured any ride at all would be better than no exercise and who knows, maybe I could even ride away from some of my stress and frustration.

And you know what? I did. I only logged another 6 miles before the darkness and hordes of just-off-work walkers, joggers, cyclists, dog-walkers and inline skaters convinced the three of us to call it a day.

Ready to ride

So, here we go.

Introductions are in order. I’m a suddenly middle-aged west-coast suburbanite, with a wonderful wife, four exceptional kids and three absolutely perfect grandkids, so far. But that’s not the important stuff – at least as far as this new blog is concerned.

I’m also a big guy. At 5-foot, 9-inches of verticalness, some would say I’m average height (just ask me). My wife and kids say I’m short. Eye of the beholder, people, eye of the beholder. At my height and weight, the actuary tables would likely say I should already be dead. I’ll put it this way, when I open the front door, life insurance salesmen run away. Screaming.

Simply put, I weigh too much. Scratch that. I’m fat. As in obese. A real porker. A corpulent fellow. A heavy hitter. Jumbo-sized, that’s me.

How heavy am I? Too. In all honesty, I’m not ready to post my current weight for all the world and my mother to see. Let’s just say I weigh way too much. Dangerously much. They don’t call it “morbid” for nothing, folks.

I will eventually – soon, I’m sure -- post a picture or two of me in glorious spandex garb (you have been warned) and you’ll be able to see how far I have to travel down my weight loss road.

I’m not just a big guy, all too often I’m a “Big Guy” – a term I absolutely HATE when friends, clients or random strangers use it to address me. I’m sure they think it’s cute and cuddly. I think it’s only slightly less painful than listening to an angry cat trapped in a box made of chalkboard walls. Because I know what they don’t dare say instead – “Hey FATSO!” or “Whas’up lard butt?” Or worse.

I used to work in the creative department of a big honkin’ ad agency on Wilshire Blvd. in Los Angeles. The head honcho of the agency would always greet me in the elevator with a hearty, “Jim! How ‘ya doin’ BIG GUY?!?” Of course, it didn’t help that he was a tall, scrawny, bean pole of a man who I’m sure had to draw a permanent marker line on his belly so he wouldn’t pull his pants up too high every morning. And yet, I’d always see him pound down twice the lunch I ever ate when with him. No one said life was fair.

Anyway, Mr. Insensitive would give me that stupid greeting every day, I’d grit my teeth, put on the best phony-sincere smile I could manage, and somehow avoid pushing him down an open elevator shaft. Some days I came close.

Where was I? Oh, yeah -- I hope to use this blog to chronicle my efforts to – for the umpteenth time – lose a ton (or slightly less) of weight, regain my health and energy (and youthful good looks, of course) and relieve some of the constant and unbelievable stress that is a daily result of being a self-employed freelance writer in an economy that – for all intents and purposes – bites wind.

Rather than go on another crazy, mind-numbing, super-costly and dangerously restrictive diet (more about those in a later post), I have committed to doing something wildly simple – ride a bike. A lot.

I’ll be paying close attention to what I eat, when I eat and how much I eat as well. I’d be an idiot not to. But, in the wisdom of so many who’ve gone before me, I know that it’s the old “calories in, calories out” battle that I have to wage.

I actually re-started my biking last month and am already beyond the initial saddle sore, I’ll-never-be-able-to-sit-down-on-anything-ever-again stage. Thank you, Lord. Starting out, I rode a whopping 31 miles in three rides towards the end of last month. So far in March, I’ve already ridden five times for a total of 52 miles.

I’ll wait for the “oohs” and “aahs” to die down. Hopefully, those numbers will be laughable before too long. (Yeah, yeah. I hear some of you laughing already.)

In coming posts, I hope to have lots to say (sorry) about where I ride, what kind of bike I torture with each and every mile, the trials and troubles of being a Rubenesque rider in a world of anorexic-ly thin riders, the agony of road bike saddles, and much, much more.

As I ride the streets of L.A. County, I often pass other plus-size cyclists (“Look honey … there’s one like me!!”) and am tempted to flag them down to ask where they found a jersey that fits, how they keep their featherweight wheelsets from taco-ing every other week, and other issues that “normal” weight riders never have to think about. Maybe this blog can become an online meeting place where porky peddlers like us can swap favorite routes, equipment sources, and fashion tips (!!) Or at least a place to encourage each other.

I think you’ll find that my writing alternates frequently between tears-of-a-clown humor, self-deprecation, painful transparency and a wide (pun) range of other emotions.
Hang on. It should be quite a ride.