Just because it comes in your size …

I’ll just come right out with it: Is there a jersey on the planet that doesn’t make a fat guy look like an elephant in a wet suit? It’s bad enough that the standard dress code for cyclists calls for neon-bright, retina-burning colors and wild, psychedelic designs that look like they were dreamed up during a bad LSD trip in the 60s.

But to wrap that sort of fabric around a person of size is not healthy for either the wearer or the sighted public. But try to find cycling clothes in bigger sizes is nearly impossible.

I have yet to find a reliable online (or bricks & mortar, for that matter) source for bike clothes made to fit “real” size people. I’m not really sure who most of the manufacturers use as size models, but it’s nobody I’ve ever ridden with. I mean, my closet has hanger after hanger with jerseys that are the biggest size available online from Pearl Izumi, Performance Cycle, Nashbar, Canari, Descente and Primal Wear and every single one is listed as either a size XXL or even XXXL on the tag. But whoever sizes these things has a really, really sick sense of humor.

Just trying to get one of those puppies over my head and past my shoulders is like stuffing 20 pounds of knockwurst into a 10 pound casing. You can count the hairs on my back through the fabric – it’s stretched so tightly across my torso if I’m even able to wriggle into the things. I mean, most store mannequins wouldn’t fit into these sizes.

And shorts? Puh-lease. You know that popular rubber stress-reliever toy that’s shaped like a reddish pink, squishy alien and you squeeze the thing in your fist and his head expands and eyes pop w-a-a-a-y out of their sockets?

Yeah. That’s pretty much an accurate description of me trying to cram my ass into most pairs of bike shorts available in any given store. Come on, people. We’re not all like the rail thin, teeny tiny, man-boy riders on Team Saxo Bank, for crying out loud. Yeah, yeah, I know – if I put more miles under my wheels and less food in my face I’d find it easier to wear the biking clothes. And I’m truly working on that particular problem. But even having lost nearly 80 pounds in the last four months doesn’t make a shred of difference in finding shorts or jerseys that I can wear without restricting necessary bodily functions like, oh say … breathing. And the flow of blood through my arteries. That sort of thing.

So, while I do have a couple of pairs of shorts that I can manage to stuff myself into and take advantage of the padded chamois imbedded in the fabric (thank the good Lord for THAT invention! – see my post of 4/7/11 http://fatguybiking.blogspot.com/2011/04/agony-of-da-seat.html), most of the time I wind up wearing a large, loose t-shirt instead of a jersey. But I know that no cyclist can ever be given an iota of respect by other riders if he’s seen riding in a spaghetti-sauce-stained Hanes Beefy-T instead of an officially sanctioned jersey and six-panel bib shorts. I might as well be riding a rusted-out Huffy with training wheels and smiley face stickers plastered all over it.

And yet, I can’t be responsible for the consequences if I venture forth in some of the jerseys I’ve tried to squeeze into. Trust me, the last thing I want is to be the unwitting cause of other cyclists careening off the road or straight into the back of parked cars just because I’m riding in public with a way too-tight, jiggling riot of color-saturated stretchiness. I have more consideration for my fellow man than that.

Seriously, I’m pleading with you. If anyone out there knows where I can buy well-made shorts and jerseys made to fit body sizes larger than an anorexic jockey, I’m all ears … and butt, gut, chest like an oil drum and thighs the size of Douglas pines.

Ride on.

The Agony of da Seat

Okay, so my wife and I managed to sneak in another ride – our second after more than a year off the bikes. The ride was “only” nine miles this time, but I’m actually surprised that we rode even that many. Why?

Two words: baboon butt.

I’ll give you a moment to conjure up an image of the last baboon’s rosy posterior that you’ve seen. Got it? And now you know what almost had me leaping off my bike’s seat the first time I sat on it after my 13 mile, first-time-back-on-the-bike-in-over-a-year ride two days before.

Much like the excruciating pain of child birth (so I’m told, at least), the mind mercifully forgets how much agony those rock hard, razor thin, completely inflexible bike seats can inflict on the oh-so-sensitive skin on one’s nether regions. What masochistic sadist designed these things, anyway? I mean, besides having less padding than a wedge of granite, these satanic “seats” want to disappear up inside places where the sun don’t shine within the first half mile of any given ride.

Bumps in the road? Puh-lease! Talk about "the agony of da seat." Dear goodness.

Thankfully, of all the adventures I've had in life, I’ve never been caught unawares in a prison shower. But (butt) after my recent battle-with-the-saddle, I think I might have some idea of what that intrusive experience would be like. Yowza!

Now, one would think that a heavier person like me would have an advantage – all that extra padding and all. Having cheeks like fluffy twin pillows should make the ride a whole lot more comfortable than someone who is more of a boney Ichabod Crane type. Sadly, no. The extra weight I lug around combined with the forces of gravity over many miles of riding produce some of the worst chafing and irritation a person can experience short of an infant’s case of terminal diaper rash.

If you’ve never ridden a road bike with a traditional saddle, try it for a few miles and you’ll understand why cyclists wear those stretchy skin-tight short pants with the padded crotch (the technical name for this heaven-sent invention is the chamois).

The subject of bike shorts is rich enough for another post entirely. So I’ll save any more comments for a later day. But check back often, because there’s a secret to wearing bike shorts that is extremely well-kept and embarrassingly obvious once you find out. But, that’s all I’ll say for now.

 I have to go find a barrel of Desitin.

Back in the saddle (again)

It had to happen. Well, actually it didn’t have to happen, but I hoped it would. Eventually. Some day.
 That day was yesterday. A fine, cool, overcast Southern California Sunday. My lovely wife and I dusted off our bikes, Put air (and a couple of new tubes) in the tires, lubed the chains and cables and headed out to the San Gabriel River bike trail.
 It’s been such a long time since we’d ridden our bikes, neither of us could remember how long, in fact. But through process of elimination, calendar landmarks and such, we figure it has been almost two years. That’s just ridiculous. But, the journey (or bike ride) of a thousand miles begins with one step. Or one pedal stroke. So I pulled on the stretchy bike shorts, stuffed myself into a jersey, dug out my helmet, gloves and shoes and mounted up.
 How was it? In a word: wonderful. Not only had the civic powers-that-be greatly improved the bike path from the last time I had ridden on it (newly repaved and striped, smooth, crack-free and relatively debris free), but because of the mild grade of the path as it heads from Arrow Highway south, past Interstate 10 and on towards its ultimate destination near Long Beach, I was able to ride six miles (even into a strong headwind) before realizing that – I was now six miles away from our truck and ride home. And that as nice and relaxing as the six miles just ridden had been, in spite of the wind – the six miles back would all be uphill.
 Doh!
 But, the bicycle spirits were kind and the headwinds became tail winds, helping to make the return ride – dare I say it? A breeze. Yes, my thighs were beginning to protest as eight miles turned to nine, then ten and the grade increased the closer we got to our starting point.
 But we did it. We even added another mile in the other direction once we made it back to our pickup truck – just because we felt like a cool down mile.
 It’s great to be back. So much so that – we’re talking about entering the Pasadena Marathon Bike Tour that’s coming up at the end of next month. I mean, if we were able to crank out thirteen miles the first time back on a bike in almost two years, how hard could 26 miles be to work up to in almost two months? Right?
 Stay tuned.

Hittin’ It hard

Are you kidding me? I just start to feel vaguely like I might be working myself up to some level of fitness and endurance and riding at least three times a week and that a minimum of 100 miles a month is a good goal for now and … and … then my dear wife and I go away for a long (much needed) weekend. The normally mild (boring) April weather turns blast-furnace hot and nasty for days on end, and I’m supposed to leave town again this weekend and won’t be able to ride for another three days of the week and pretty much all of my forward momentum – pun intended – to cycle on a consistent basis has hit a big ol’ brick wall.

So now the battle will be to not let one week with only one ride (last week) turn into this week with no rides, and another week, and another week, and then I’m right back at square one.

I remember reading once how long an athlete (now, that’s funny!) can go without training/working out before his/her muscles and stamina are back to the way they were before training began. I think it was something like 3 weeks max away from training before you’re starting all over again. I’m sure it’s quicker the older you get. With me, it feels like it must be about 3 days. But as I said in the last post, that problem is mostly in my noggin’.

And so, today is supposed to be yet another 100 degree scorcher (I love L.A.—not) and I somehow seriously doubt my wife and son will feel too much like suiting up in black spandex and sweating our collective brains out, gasping for lungs-full of superheated L.A. basin air with its inversion layer soup of toxins and pollutants, rolling our skinny bike tires over taffy-soft blacktop that radiates the sun’s heat back up at you in shimmering thermal waves. Care to join me?

And so another day will pass unridden. I guess it’s days and weeks like these for which they invented indoor trainers. I just can’t help but think that – after investing hundreds of $$s in a trainer, it would only sit unused and collecting dust and clothes hangers just like the majority of treadmills and rowing machines sitting unused in bedrooms and basements around the world.

Thankfully, tomorrow is another day and the crack weather forecasters on TV (weather forecasters on crack?) are predicting that our daytime highs will drop nearly 20 degrees. I sure hope so. I’ve got a lot of time in the saddle to make up in order to ride around the brick wall that’s in front of me.

Ride on.

The 3 most dangerous pounds

I’ll be the first to acknowledge that I’m in lousy shape (and yes, ladies and germs, round is a shape ... rimshot! ) Granted, I don’t know many guys my age and weight who can ride a bike 10 or 15 miles or more and not end up writhing in agony on the pavement, clutching my chest with both hands and doing my best Redd Foxx/Fred Sanford impersonation.

So, I’ve got THAT going for me at least. But on my ride late yesterday afternoon, somewhere around mile 6 or 7, I realized that my biggest obstacle was my own head. That old saw about “mind over matter” is really true when the matter is feeling like your legs just can’t push the pedals down and around one more time, and your lungs want to explode in your chest and then some skinny-minny-clown with lead weights in his back jersey pocket so he won’t get blown around by the breeze whizzes past like you’re standing still and disappears around the corner as your vision begins to gray-out and an annoyingly shrill whistle starts sounding in your ears and you can’t feel your fingers on the handlebars and your mph numbers on your cycle-computer steadily drop from 16 to 13 to 10.3 (I’m going uphill, okay?) and all you really want to do is stop, get off your bike, do a two-handed heave of the thing into the scum-lined cement trough of the nearby Arroyo Seco waterway, sit on the ground and cry until some good Samaritan comes along driving a mobile-masseuse-on-wheels-van and helps you inside to make all the pain and heartache go away.

Where was I? Oh yeah … I was not having a good ride. Especially when a couple of former riding friends (from a few years and a hundred pounds ago) found me huffing and puffing and just barely surviving and decided to ride alongside and grill me for miles about how often I was riding and how many miles was I going to do and why don’t I do more than that and is this how slow I normally ride and … you get the idea. The next accessory going into my tool pouch is a 9mm Beretta.

All that is to say, I’ve learned that you can ride the same route, the same number of miles and one day it will be uplifting and energizing and fill your soul with great hope for a physically fit and mentally enlightened future. And the next day (like yesterday) the very same distance and route can just kick your existential butt and make you want to post your bike on Craigslist as soon as you drag your sorry self home. It’s all a matter of what’s going on up there in that attitude manipulating brain. Call it the “inner game of cycling” if you will. Sure, I have no doubt that, if and when I shed a whole bunch of this extra weight I’m carrying around, I’ll always have those three-some-odd lbs. inside my skull that will play a huge role in how much I do or don’t enjoy any given ride.

In other words, like many other sports, cycling isn’t only about endurance and strength or aching feet or near lethal saddle sores – there’s also a whole lot of it that’s simply all in your head. Ride on.

At least my tires are skinny

I need to fess up. I’m a roadie snob. Can’t help it. Having ridden both mountain bikes and road bikes over the past many years, I’m a certified, carbon-fibered, speed-loving, asphalt-riding roadie, through and through.

Maybe it’s because mountain bikes are typically ridden over – duh – mountainous, hilly, rough, steep, rocky terrain. You know, the kind of ground that can wreak serious havoc on over-the-hill bodies like mine. Oh sure, hitting the hard pavement doing 30 to 35 mph is no walk in the park, either. In fact, a good road-riding friend of mine (several years older than moi, I might add) had a close encounter with the highway a few years back. He doesn’t remember what made him fall, but he woke up in an ambulance on the way to the hospital with a badly broken collar bone that required many months of recuperation and physical therapy to heal. To this day, he can’t raise his arms above shoulder height without pain.

But at least most asphalt or pavement is relatively flat – as opposed to dirt trails with sharp, jagged rocks, sharp pokey branches and life-threatening drop offs – to name just a few of the hazards. On the road, you only have to worry about tires blowing out at high speed, cars, broken glass, cars, pedestrians crossing in front of you, dogs, cars, squirrels (don’t ask), wheels that taco on sharp corners and (did I mention?), cars.

Okay, so maybe road bikes aren’t that much safer (and maybe even worse) than mountain bikes. But there’s just something cool about being able to cover so much distance on two wheels under your own power. And as futile as trying to ride a skinny tired, rigid-framed road bike on a dirt trail would be, it’s also kinda goofy to see guys on their mountain bikes huffing and puffing along an asphalt road – much of their energy being used up and wasted bouncing up and down on their bike’s spongy suspension, along with the rolling resistance of fat, knobby tires against hard pavement.

I must say, it’s a small victory when I’m able to ride right past some younger, in shape guy and leave him in my substantial turbulence (think Boeing 747 passing a hang glider at 30,000 feet), even though I know perfectly well that my speed is only due to the type of bike I’m riding. For a fleeting moment, I can pretend to know what Lance feels like blowing past Carlos Sastre on the Alpe d’Huez.

Of course, any serious road biker could clean my corpulent clock even if they rode a Huffy tricycle. But I can dream.

Here’s another plus to riding road bikes over mountain bikes: when you break down on a road bike, there’s a good chance you can call a friend to come pick you up in their car and be back home nursing a cold one in the time it takes a mountain biker to stumble the first mile back down the trail carrying his bike on his shoulder.

Mountain bikes? Only about 30 pounds psi in the tires. Like a kiddy bike. Road bikes roll on an impressive 110 pounds psi. Pump that! I’m talkin’ serious air pressure, dude.
Oh, and one last reason to look down my sweat-dripping nose at people of the mountain bike persuasion is that these poor souls don’t get the pleasure of wearing clown-colored, tight fitting jerseys that zip up the front like an ultra-cool dentist’s smock along with body-hugging lycra pants that … well, that are ridiculously tight. You’d ride away real fast, too, if you were wearing a getup like that. Ride on.

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.