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Biking to Live Week 2 Summary

Posted by Bryan on May 4, 2008 in Blog, Uncategorized | 2 comments

And so ends week 2 of Biking to Live. It was a great week. I got four rides in and two of them were with somebody else. I rode distances I haven’t ridden in over 15 years and rode new trails. It was a really good week. Here’s a recap of the rides this week.

The total mileage for this week is 61.38 miles which is an increase of 13.01 miles over last week. Almost half of those miles came from Ride 8 on Saturday. I’m very happy with those numbers at this stage of my riding.

Other great blogging articles I’ve seen this week:

Next weeks goals:

Increase my weekday morning ride up to 11 miles per ride.
Start tracking my food intake. I plan on using a free online tracker at Fit Day.

That concludes this week. Like I said, it was a great week and I feel like I’m making progress.

Biking To Live Week 1 Summary

Posted by Bryan on Apr 27, 2008 in Blog, Uncategorized | 6 comments

With Sunday, Apr 27, upon us the first week of Biking To Live is in the history books. Overall it’s been a great week. I did four rides this week:

Here’s the numbers breakdown for each of these rides:

Ride 1: 10.83 miles, 53 minutes, 12.26 mph average speed
Ride 2: 10.2 miles, 48 minutes, 12.75 mph average speed
Ride 3: 9.86 miles ,47 minutes, 12.4 mph average speed
Ride 4: 17.48 miles, 1 hr 19 minutes, 13.2 mph average speed
Total For Week: 48.37 miles, 3.78 hrs, 12.65 mph average speed

For my first week back into an exercise program and cycling in a very, very long time I’m more than happy with those numbers. I didn’t push myself overly hard to achieve them and they give me targets to shoot for next week. The rides themselves were very good and they’ve left me feeling better about myself than I did last week. It’s amazing what a little exercise will do for you.

I suffered my first injury, Trouble Down Below, but a switch to another pair of shorts seems to have alleviated the problem.

I discovered some great folks over at Bike Forums. You should check them out if you are new or coming back to cycling after a long layoff. Lots of great information. Another website that’s helped me this week is Bike Noob. It caters to the biking newbie and has some great articles by Ray.

Week 2 Goals

With week 1 in the books I want to try and improve every week. Therefore, I’ll be implementing weekly goals for myself. Looking at week 1′s total stats ( 48.37 miles, 3.78 hrs, 12.65 mph average speed), I believe I want to push my weekly mileage to at least 50 miles total for the week, a total time to at least 4 hrs, and a Saturday ride of at least 20 miles. If I hit 50 miles and 4 hrs exactly that’ll be about a 1% increase over my week 1 numbers. I think that’s doable.

Day 1 recovery – no problems

Posted by Bryan on Apr 22, 2008 in Blog, Uncategorized | 4 comments

Going along with my plan to slowly ease into it, today was a planned rest day. I feel much better than I expected to with no noticeable effects from the ride yesterday. I had no soreness whatsoever except for a little in my neck later in the day. All-in-all not bad. As I ride more this week I expect it to get worse.

I do feel “better” today. Is it psychological? Maybe.

I begin saving my life tomorrow

Posted by Bryan on Apr 20, 2008 in Blog, Uncategorized | 0 comments

With tomorrow being 21-Apr that means I’m on the eve of the day I will begin to save my life through riding my bike. I’m excited but cautious. I’m ready to change but know it will be a long, hard road both on and off the bike.

I made final preparations today ensuring my bicycle checked out ok and that I had all my gear (helmet, gloves, water bottle, shoes) prepped and ready to go. I put my bike up on a makeshift work stand I had created using a bicycle trunk carrier and an old Black and Decker Workmate Bench I had. While on the stand I lubed the chain and pedals. Eventually I’m going to have to purchase a quality workstand in order to maintain my chariot of life.

My wife has readied for tomorrow by preparing a special detox drink that will help clean me out. After that I’ll be going on a strict diet to help shed these 100 extra pounds I’ve accumulated. Strict may be too harsh a word. Anything I do with regards to my diet is better than what I was doing.

Everything seems to be in order so I guess it’s time to turn in and get some sleep. This is another area of my life that will need dramatic improvement. My last few years in the military I became accustomed to surviving on anywhere from 2-4 hours of sleep a night. Sometimes more and sometimes less. You can only imagine what that does to your energy levels. Since leaving the service I’m probably averaging about 5.5 hours of sleep a night. That has got to change as well.

Ok, it’s off to bed now. I’ll see you on the other side.

Biking To Live now has its theme

Posted by Bryan on Apr 17, 2008 in Blog, Uncategorized | 2 comments

After some tedious searching Biking To Live now has its theme. I always have a hard time deciding on a theme for a blog because I want it to be just right. That’s hard to do when you’re using a free theme though. For Biking To Live I wanted something that wasn’t too dark and not too bright. I also wanted it to be easy to navigate, soothing to the eyes, and easy for me to add functionality to. After some careful consideration, I settled on the Notebook theme I found at Skinpress. I wanted a biking related them but there just weren’t any. If Biking To Live becomes popular I may have a custom theme commissioned. I think the Notebook theme is appropriate though since this blog will serve as my journal (journey?) to a new me.

Here’s a picture showing some of the functionality of the theme. Click on it to get a bigger view.

I’ve found a route to do my biking

Posted by Bryan on Apr 16, 2008 in Blog, Uncategorized | 0 comments

This evening I went for a short drive and found my route for the morning ride. It’s an eleven mile loop that starts and ends at my garage. There are bike lanes for 95% of the route which will be nice but one section of the route is on a very busy road. With the time I’ll be riding, though, I don’t plan on running into much traffic. Another good thing is that there are sidewalks and streetlights for most of the route as well. Another handy feature is that there are a couple of opportunities to extend the route for longer rides on the weekend. It’s like this was made just for me. Thank you city engineer for taking my future riding into consideration when you constructed this pristine loop.

Today is 16-Apr. I plan on embarking on my journey to the new me on the morning of 21-Apr.