“I need to exercise more”

Eric was idly musing on his glory days:

I used to exercise all the time (6+ times a week) and weigh about 30 pounds less. I did half-ironman races. Then I met the wife.  While not it is not her fault, it is much more enjoyable to spend time with her than to bike for three hours in the cold. Eventually this becomes a pattern of sitting on the couch and eating excellent food.

Ha, HAH! been there done that. Lemme see now, “race weight” used to be 172.5. Peak fitness EVAH had me down to 168. Yeah, yeah, I’m hardly the ideal native physique for this crap. It showed then too. Flash forward to something more like real life and body maturity and I still managed to hold it together in the 180-185 range. This may have had something to do with the switch to MTB racing as well. OK, so now I’m a good solid 40 over any plausible semblence of decent shape. Suck it Eric!

 For a change, I went on a bike ride this morning with a friend of mine for the first time in a long time. The weather was beautiful and we went 30 miles (which used to be really easy). About halfway through the ride I realized something. The voices had stopped. I could barely sustain one train of thought, let alone 6. I could think almost calculate the amount of time back to the car or what the slope of the trail must be based on my gear and cadence, but nothing else. I was actually relaxed and not thinking about lab. Damn, I need to exercise more.

Yeah well the bro’ dragged my fat ass out on a 60 miler last week. Now, in my defense it wasn’t actually supposed to be a 60 miler. Far from it. But things sorta happen. And it looked like we were going to bring it in at a respectable 40+…which was just manageable. I’m not stupid. I can suck wheel all day long. The ride profile was pretty flat. So far, so good….

The cutoff apparently didn’t actually cutoff as much as we thought. And the original ride specs given by the bike shop (oh yeah, did I mention we were in a new locale for both of us?) were apparently a little under the mark.

Would’a been okay.  We had a nice long downhill for the last 15 miles. Then, we ran into road construction. And made the stupid ass decision to take the “minor re-route”. Which added a good 10 miles. And some additional upslope.

Have I mentioned fat burning? I don’t think so. The thing about being slack out of shape is that not only are you out of shape and carrying a bunch of extra dead weight. That would be manageable with slow pacing and wheel sucking. Oh no. The big problem is that you don’t really run on much other than glycogen. And you run down the tanks pretty quickly.

So I bonked. Hard. Easily in the top two bonks ever. I was crawling the last 8 miles. Just crawling.

But you know what? I had a blast. Great ride. Fantastic scenery. And 4 hrs of riding. NEVER do that anymore. It was fucking awesome.

I need to exercise more.