Now more concentrated

My main priority this summer was to lose weight. My weight has very slowly increased over the years, I mean like 10 pounds in 25 years. After I got hurt this winter I get up over 182 pounds, the most I'd ever been, so I've been very much focused on getting back to where I'd been in days of yore, around 170 pounds. This required diet and exercise components. I'll write about the diet shortly, but the exercise has been mostly riding my bike.

I've always liked riding a bike. I went on AYH cycling trips when I was in high school and rode pretty regularly for a while. I guess I stopped around when I got married, more because we moved to the mountains outside LA than anything else, and by the time we got back east I was out of the habit. But my parents got me a bike for my birthday around 10 years ago and I've been back with it since.

Biking is a really fun way to exercise because most kinds of exercise don't have moments when you can say "Whee!" I used to be a pretty serious runner and I've done circuit training and used all kinds of equipment, and there's nothing in a session on a Stairmaster that makes you say "Whee!"

I was talking with a neighbor who I know rides a lot, and was surprised to hear that, even though he often rides his bike to work, he always rides on the sidewalk, never in the street. This seems ludicrous to me, because streets are not just for cars. But the thing with riding around an urban area is that you need a combination of caution and fearlessness. It comes to me fairly naturally, because I'm a city kid, used to negotiating traffic by feel rather than by such annoyances as traffic signs and signals.

You need to be careful and cautious about what kinds of situations you put yourself in and hyper vigilant, knowing where everything is in every direction (including the road surface and resident junk). But once you're in the moment, you can't freak out if a truck buzzes past you with 6 inches of clearance, like happened to me yesterday on the bridge across the river to Conshohocken, because if you do you will die.

With a schedule that allows me to ride 125-150 miles a week and a diet that, like me, is silly and practical at the same time, I've been able to lose 9 pounds in 2 months, which is not bad for a semi-old guy.

So I've managed to lose 5% of my total body weight, so either I'm in new, improved, more concentrated form or I've lost 5% of my soul to compensate. It only remains to be seen which.