I’m sure you’re asking by now why I’ve decided to ride a bike to help me lose these 100 pounds. For me the reason was simple. Riding a bicycle is the only endurance sport that I’ve ever been any good at.
Running is out of the question. Ever since I can remember I’ve always had a difficult time running long distances. It always hurt my calves to run much further than a mile and it still does to this day. In high school the max distance I ran was the 200 meter sprint. My bread-and-butter was the opening leg of the 4×100 meter relay. I was fast out of the blocks and a very good sprinter over short distances. In the off-season we would run long distance just to build endurance and I hated it. Even after joining the military I never became accustomed to it. I attended Officer’s Candidate School (OCS) in the mid-90s and was forced to run long distance. I had to in order to graduate. Not to mention that those Marine Corps drill instructors were very motivating! Man I’ve got some stories! Anyway, I left OCS in the best shape of my life but that quickly deteriorated because of my lack of desire to run. About five years later I had to have surgery on my ankle to remove bone spurs and some floating bone fragments. Needless to say my dreams of becoming a long-distance ultra-marathoner were over. Seriously, that was never a dream of mine!
