Back In The Saddle

Last week, I was down for the count because of allergies, that may or may not have turned into bronchitis, that may or may not have teetered toward pneumonia.  Honestly, I am not sure what I had.  All I know for certain is that I felt terrible, and there was no way bike rides would be on my agenda.  My last ride was on April 11th, and I would not ride again until Easter Sunday, which was this past Sunday, the 20th. 

Boy, did I miss my rides!  I missed the physical activity, and the mental clarity that comes when I am on my bike.  I missed riding with my friends/family, and I missed riding alone.  I was okay during those days when it was rainy or too windy.  I didn't feel the pull of the trail, but rather the pull of my bed or recliner or OTC medicine, medicinal oils, ibuprofen.  Yes, I took them all.  I walked around with my face glistening from either oil, Vicks Vaporub, or both.  It wasn't glistening with perspiration or tiny black bugs that cling to me on every ride, and honestly, I missed both of those.  Okay, maybe not the bugs so much. 

My ride Easter Sunday was exhausting for me for several reasons.  It was the first time I had ridden in eight days, I rode my cruiser with its messed up gear so my friend would have a bike to ride, and most of all,  I was exhausted from being sick.  Honestly, we only rode 10 miles, and as happy as I was to get back out there, I was equally happy to get back home because I was spent.  I was so tired, in fact, that I did not realize that in my eight day absence, THIS happened:

We went from this:                                      To this:

                   

SPRING SPRANG!!!!!!

Yesterday, I hit the trail again, and felt so close to my old self, that except for having to be back, I would have likely stayed for at least another hour, and I am pretty sure my riding partner would have indulged me.  I was back on my bike which was good for me, because I need its ease of riding while I ease back into the activity.  I felt much better physically, although I still have some nagging congestion trying to hang around, and the weather was perfect.  

I cannot say enough about what a beautiful trail we have.  Many of my friends who ride, walk, or run have remarked that our trail is their therapy, and I have to agree.  I may be dead tired after a long day at work, but as soon as I get on my bike and feel the wind in my face, I am almost instantly rejuvenated.  I may complain about certain areas of the trail I detest (you know who you are), and I may have to slow down and meander every once in awhile, and I may have to shower and take a nap after a longer than usual ride, but it is worth it, because for that hour or two, and sometimes three, I am exactly where I am supposed to be, doing something I adore, not because I have to, but because I want to.

Life is better on the trail, and this time of year, it is certainly greener.

Riding With Friends And Family

Last week, I had the pleasure of riding both with friends and with family, and it was two of the best rides I had that week.  There are many benefits to riding with friends and family, and honestly, it is one of the very best ways to experience the trail, because it provides an opportunity to share the day's events without fear of interruption from the television, phone calls or texts.  If you have ever tried to carry on a phone conversation or send a text while riding a bicycle, you know how difficult it can be, and since I have done both, I can honestly say that neither are recommended activities, especially when you have the balance problems I have. 

When I was gifted my new bike, my old faithful cruiser was in turn gifted to our daughter Kira, and she has decided to ride with me at least once a week.  The cruiser looks like it was made for her, and it behaves itself when she is riding, which makes me wonder if it had just grown weary of me.  She doesn't have the shifting problems I have and the love appears to be mutual.  My husband Anthony, on the other hand, is in dire need of a bike to fit his six foot plus frame, and I know that when we find one, he will begin to love riding the trail as much as we do. 

I have been riding with friends for as long as I have been riding the trail, and have made memories that will forever be special to me.  One of my favorite riding partners, Betsy, has since moved to Missouri, and I miss our times on the trail so much.  I miss the times we misjudged how long it would take before it turned dark, and ended up hauling tail to make it back to my house while we could see where we were going.  I remember one time in particular when we really couldn't see that well, and rode home on a wing and a prayer.  There was also the time we barely dodged the rat snake that had stretched itself across the entire width of the trail, and we learned how well Betsy's brakes worked.  Turns out, she can stop on a dime.  When she, Jan and I rode the length of the trail this past November, they took all the pictures, which is why there is not one of the three of us together.  The pictures only tell a portion of the memories we made that day, and how we hope to turn that into an annual event.

One of my other friends, Lauren (pictured with Jan above), is planning a trip to Maine this summer, where she will experience several days of cycling and kayaking as part of a tour, and I can think of no one better to do this than her.  Lauren and Jan both are so cool, and other than sharing the Ladiga with me, they run/walk many races, kayak, and do all the things really cool women do.  I feel honored when they ask me to ride with them, and last week was no exception.  We rode over 16 miles, but it felt closer to 10, and I was sad when we stopped.  I tend to talk a LOT when I am riding with a friend, and when the subject is one I am passionate about, I tend to ride faster, which I don't really notice until after I get home, shower and try to sit down.  Apparently, riding with friends is a great cardiovascular workout as well.

I have been sick this week, and other than the pain that comes with a head that feels like the air needs to be let out, what I have missed the most has been the trail and my bike.  I have a ride scheduled with Jan and Lauren this week, and I am determined to make it, even if I have to crawl onto my bike seat.

I need the therapy.

What About The Diet?

A few years ago, I challenged myself to ride my bike 28 days on the Ladiga Trail in an effort to get into shape and lose weight.  I published the challenge on Facebook, received a lot of support and encouragement, and although I accomplished the 28 days of riding part, I failed to lose any weight.  Apparently, one also has to combine riding with a good diet in order for that to happen.  Imagine my surprise when I discovered that I could not eat a bunch of processed Little Debbie snack cakes, big bowls of pasta, fried breaded chicken and the like and still lose weight.  (Those last two sentences are laced with sarcasm, just in case we have just met).  While I stated in my most recent blog post that I cannot view my cycling as a means of exercise, or else I will not do it, I still expect results from all that movement, and I cannot obtain those results unless I find an eating plan I can live with and one that is portable, meaning I can adapt to wherever I find myself, whether on a trip, or dining with friends.

I am of the mindset that any diet works to lose weight, as long as it is nutritionally sound and is one that is practical for the long haul.  I have been on them all, and have lost weight on all that I find I can stick with.  The problem is that I don't find myself able to stick with any of them for a long period of time. Low carb used to be THE one I could go on and lost weight quickly, but I am 50 years old now, and when you only lost 11 pounds in over a month where you used to could lose 20, it loses its appeal.  I still believe that I do better when I eliminate processed breads from my diets, and very little bread or grain at all, but to totally eliminate them is a bit radical, and impractical.  I never want to be rude to a host when they serve beautiful sandwiches or a fantastic pasta salad.  I refuse to do that because I know the love and care that goes into the preparation of the food.  The appeal of low carb dieting is also that I get to eat full fat foods, such as cream cheese, mayo, sour cream, and my favorite....butter.  With WW and other low fat, low cal diets, those goodies are looked upon as the worse possible offenders, and I refuse to believe that fat is the culprit.  That leaves me with either refusing to diet and eating less of what I want any time I want it, or going back to what worked for me in the past couple of years and that is Robert Ferguson's Diet Free Life.

I started with this in 2010 (that long ago?) and lost almost 30 pounds before losing interest and allowing my old habits of poor planning to rear their ugly heads, and I gained it all back, plus a few extra.  He calls this "diet free" and really, it can be and pretty much is, in that no food is off limits.  You can actually have a piece of regular chocolate cake.  You know, the kind with real sugar and white flour?  It all boils down to eating the right foods at the right time, and in the right combination.  The program he was first associated with was called Food Lovers Fat Loss and it is still in existence, but his association with them ended for various reasons that I never delved into.  He says on his website that there is no other program like Diet Free Life, so I am interested in seeing how he tweaked his original program, and if there will be anything new to learn.

Unfortunately, I received an email yesterday from the account manager for DFL, and she said it will be up to 10 days before my program is shipped out, so what the heck am I going to do in meantime to keep myself from throwing all caution to the wind and eating everything in sight?  I could continue to do the low carb thing, but I have a few social occasions coming up, and as I stated before, it is just not in my plan to reject food that someone took the time to prepare and lay out before me.  I believe I will just eat like a normal human being, or as close to one as I can get, and continue to ride my bike in hopes that I will not balloon up to elephant size while waiting on the program to arrive.  I know that one of his tenets is eating every 2-3 hours to begin regulating my metabolism, and since I do love to eat, that will not be a problem and I will eat something every 2-3 hours.  I will try to eat the healthier stuff, but I won't stress out about it too much.

I hate that I am once again paying for a diet program, when I have spent so much money in the past on these things and have failed at each one obviously.  If I had every penny I have ever spent on trying to lose weight, I could pay off all my debt and retire from my job.  How is that for depressing?

Maybe this will be the last one.  Maybe.

Why Ride?

Exercise is a four letter word to me.  I do not like it one bit, and would much rather sit on my sofa with food in my hand, watching television until I fall asleep.  Another option is to do the same thing with a book.  I love the sedentary lifestyle, but it does not love me.  I am 100 pounds overweight because of what I love.  I am not fat because of some childhood trauma that caused me to have an unhealthy relationship with food, and I do not have a metabolic disorder nor am I taking meds that make me gain weight.  I am fat because exercise is not something I love or even like, or am all that familiar with.

That is why I ride.

If you were born in the decades earlier than the '90s, chances are very high that one of the very first things you learned to do as a child was to ride a bike.  I can't remember not having one.  I remember the raw fear of learning to ride my first bicycle, when my dad took off the training wheels for the last time, pushed me down the road holding onto the back of the seat and then LET GO!!  I was both horrified and exhilarated.  I was riding a bike and it was fun!!  The kids on our street formed our very own bike club, and we would ride "around the block" which was a bit longer than a block, and tougher than I remembered it being.  We would get together and wash our bikes and it was nothing to ride to the neighborhood store with no fear of being hit by drivers who were more concerned with sending a text from their iPhone than looking out for cyclists or pedestrians.  I rode with my sister and tried to ride with my brother, but he was too cool to hang with us, and he had a TEN speed!  A lot of the time, I rode alone, and that was both fun and a bit dangerous.  I suffered my first and only concussion after my foot slipped on my wet peddle and I hit the asphalt.  This was in the days before helmets, although I am still lax about wearing one of those.  I was also bitten by a white German Shepherd while riding to the store.  He ran out of his yard, bit me on the leg, and ran back.  He never even barked.  The scar on my left knee was the result of a biking accident when my dog Champ ran out in front of me, and I fell onto a jagged rock.

After all of those injuries, one would think I would give up the two wheel machine of disaster.  I could not give up something that brought me so much joy then, and brings me so much today.  Two of my most memorable presents have been bicycles.  One summer, my mom and dad gave me a shiny new blue three speed for no reason at all.  It was not my birthday, nor Christmas.  They just bought it for me, and presented it after one of my softball games.  I loved that bike, even if it was the one I was riding when I suffered the concussion, dog bite, and jagged rock to the knee.  Fast forward about 40 years to my Trek.  I don't plan to suffer concussions, dog bites, or jagged rocks, but I do plan to make many memories.

At least twice a week, I get to pass by the refurbished train depot in Jacksonville that offers a respite for riders, and a glimpse of what makes our little college town so special.  If I go the other way toward Weaver, I get to ride past this most gorgeous bamboo forest.

 

When you get to see this on a daily basis, the word exercise becomes a three letter word----FUN!!

The Lovely Ladiga

This weekend we will celebrate the Noble Street Festival with lots of bike races for kids that will culminate in the Sunny King Criterium for the serious riders.  If you have never stayed for those races, you have missed seeing some very serious athletes compete in a pretty fast and exciting race.  It is a lot of fun, and an event I always look forward to.  On Sunday, the Cheaha Challenge will take place with its beginning and end in our very own Jacksonville, AL. Riders of all ages and fitness levels will ride from Pete Matthew's Coliseum up to the Square, down to White's Gap Road and then onward and upward to Cheaha Mountain.  It is a grueling race and as much as I love riding my bike, I do not foresee ever being at the same fitness level as these cyclists.  I will most likely be on the square cheering them on, and then hop on my bike and ride our beloved Chief Ladiga Trail.  I thank God daily that we live so close to this beauty, and have shared many great times with friends and family. 

What is the Chief Ladiga Trail?  Rather than accidentally giving false information, here is what is on their website:

The Chief Ladiga Trail extends 32.5 miles from the Georgia state line to Weaver, Alabama. It is a paved recreational trail on the bed of the former Seaboard/CSX Railroad and extends into Georgia an additional 63 miles, making it the longest continuous paved rail trail in the United States.   But it was a trail that took 17 years to complete.
In 1990, both the Calhoun County Commission and the City of Piedmont, Alabama received an Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act (ISTEA) enhancement grant to fund the construction of the first 9-mile section through Calhoun County.  Additional ISTEA grant funds were awarded in 1994 to the City of Piedmont, the City of Jacksonville and the Cleburne County Commission.  The National Recreational Trails Fund (NRTF) awarded funds to the City of Jacksonville, the City of Weaver and the City of Anniston in 1997 to construct trail connections or access facilities.  The City of Weaver also received an ISTEA grant in 1997 allowing it to construct 2.5 miles of the trail through Weaver.  The cities of Weaver and Jacksonville opened the trail through their cities in 1998.  The last section to be completed, 9 miles through Cleburne County, was completed in 2007.

What is the Ladiga Trail to me?  It is many many things.  It is a place for me to get much needed exercise without it feeling like exercise.  I first began riding my bike after my good friend Jan Case talked about riding hers.  I started out on my old Walmart bike, and was miserable.  I did not remember this activity being so exhausting when I was younger, but then again, I was younger.  After I invested in a cool men's three speed cruiser, I began riding more and more.  I have put so many miles on that cruiser and have ridden it so hard, that it can no longer be referred to as a cruiser.  Because of the incredible generosity of people I love and who love me, I recently upgraded to a Trek Verve 1 hybrid, and I am in LOVE!  There are days when I ride alone, days when I ride with family, and days when I ride with friends.  I treasure all of those days.  When I ride with friends, we have wonderful conversations that get so animated that we tend to ride harder and faster.  I have begun a ride with full voice, and lost it by the time the ride was over from overuse.  This past November, Betsy Bumpus drove down from Missouri to ride the entire length of the trail with Jan and I, and it was a wonderful experience for all of us.  She had fallen in love with the Ladiga and cycling when she lived here, and it was one of her dreams to ride the entire 33 miles.  I will never forget that fall experience (the pictures above are from that day), and we have all promised that we will do it again soon.  I am thinking an annual event is in the works.

You don't have to love cycling to love the Ladiga.  Each day I ride, I see walkers and runners, skateboarders, and strollers.  I have even seen evidence of horses, if you know what I mean.  People bring their dogs and remarkably all dogs seem to get along with each other as they pass by.  There are other four legged creatures that will occasionally cross my path.  I have seen deer, coyote, a fox, a few goats, and even a couple of beavers.  I was once almost knocked off my bike by a turkey because they fly pretty low, and I will not mention the snakes I have seen, although I will say they were all harmless. 

This time of year is perfect for the Ladiga Trail, and if you suffer from allergies, take a couple of pills and come out anyway.  Any sneezing and runny eyes you may experience will be well worth the memories you will make.

The Unforgiving Shadow

I am 50 years old.  I turned 50 on March 25th and I was actually a bit more excited than I thought I would be.  I had hoped to reach my goal weight of 150 pounds by the time I turned 50, but I missed the mark by a little over 100.  Yikes!!  I have started and stopped blogs for years now, and I am hoping that this time, I will persevere not only with my weight loss goals but with the blog.  I don't intend this to be useful to anyone but me, and it is more of an online diary than anything else, so if I decide to go public, please forgive my poor grammar, disjointed sentences, and rambling thoughts.  I am not a writer, and I am not nearly as witty on paper as I am in person.  I went public with a blog once before when I embarked on a 28 day cycling program, and it was successful, until I wasn't.  I completed the 28 days, but lost no weight, and felt like I let some people down.  Again, this is for me.  I may be successful this time, and I may fail horribly, so keep your expectations low.

What's up with the weird title?  I don't know if you have tried to blog, but all the cool weight loss/fitness titles have been taken.  I chose this one yesterday while I was riding my new Trek on the Ladiga Trail.  The sun was shining, and cast a shadow of me on my bike, and I was horrified by what I saw.  I had read a good article about cycling for weight loss where the author suggested wearing lycra when cycling because is to unforgiving and will keep you accountable more easily than wearing loose fitting clothing you can hide under.  Let me tell you, a shadow of a 250 pound woman in lycra is about as unforgiving as you can get. 

I desire a thinner shadow.  Through healthy eating and regular cycling, my desire is to achieve just that.  I don't know how long it will take.  I have a 90 day goal that I will explain in a later post, but I do have faith that one day I will look at my shadow and like what I see.  Until then, if you see me on the trail, or if you ride with me, I will be wearing cycling clothing which is an unforgiving as it can get.  Be nice please.

Here is me at the beginning of this journey:

Hopefully I will be able to post a picture at least once per month.