I stood in our kitchen crunching and gulping down chip after chip of Doritos, my arm and mouth working together like a mother bird and a baby chick. I could eat a whole bag of these things one at a time without stopping, but I had restraint! One whole bag at a time is just too much. No, I would not eat them all in one continuous binge. I would wait and finish the bag after two binges. And, who’s to say how much time must elapse between binges? Well, at least an hour. I had to have some control. Ohhh, the thick coating of cheesy-spice. If only Frito Lay could manufacture them so every chip were coated thickly enough with their amazing, addicting powder that not one molecule of chip would be exposed to the air. Crunch, gulp, crunch, gulp. Mmmm.
My mom was visiting, and she sat across from me at the kitchen counter. “You’ve got to do something about that gut,” she said. “You won’t be able to fit in your britches.” Yea, yea. I know. Who cares? Why don’t you stop smoking? I thought.
But before I knew what I was saying, I replied, “Okay, I’ll stop eating Doritos if you stop smoking. In fact, I’m done. I’m not eating these anymore. Deal?” My mom seemed to evaluate me to see if I was serious. When I had started my sentence, I had been trying to be being a smartass. By the time I had finished the sentence, I had felt real conviction. As she glared at me with a furrowed brow, I realized I had already made a commitment to myself. I didn’t care if she took the deal or not. All I had to do was make the decision, and I’d already done that. It was time to change things. The date was May 1st, 2007. I was almost 42. My mom’s expression relaxed as she realized I was serious, but I could tell that she wasn’t ready to take the deal.
Six months before, I had begun feeling unwell. My heartbeat had become very noticeable to me, sometimes pounding loudly and annoyingly fast even when I was just sitting and watching TV. Sometimes, the heavy pounding had kept me awake. I had often panicked when it did this, causing it to beat even heavier and quicker. I didn’t know much about blood pressure, but I imagined mine was too high. A little whisper at the back of my mind had told me I should exercise but I didn’t. We had gym memberships for more than 10 years, and I hadn’t gone 20 times in those years. I had thought about it once in a while, feeling more comfortable keeping the membership than actually canceling it. I guess I hadn’t wanted to give up on myself completely.
I can’t imagine now why I didn’t do anything about my health the previous December when the loud warning signs had tried to break through my ribcage. Maybe I believed the stress of owning and running a business gave me an excuse for having bad health, and that I would just take care of the “health” thing at some later date. Now, the later date had finally arrived. What next?
The first thing I did was close the Doritos bag and push it across the counter, symbolically letting go of my poor eating habits. It wasn’t that Doritos were the cause of my woes; it was more about what they represented to me: Clearly, as long as I ate lots of snack chips I would not be able to improve my health. I could eat them as a meal even though they were never intended to be a meal. But I couldn’t eat just one, so it had to be none. That was the first step. I didn’t have a plan, and I didn’t know what to do next. I never liked the idea of “dieting” or following some expert’s advice on slimming down. Because I’m tall and wear loose clothes, most people who saw me would not have classified me as someone who needs to slim down, anyway. But the fact was, I weighed 215 pounds and was not fit, so that extra weight was just fat.
So my first step became a rule. I had to quit the “o’s.” My typical lunch had been a sandwich, an apple and all the “o’s” I wanted: Doritos, Fritos, Cheetos: cheesy, salty, spicy and absolutely worthless as nutrition. Now I completely stopped eating Doritos and other snack foods like them. No exceptions. Next, I addressed portion size. I would eat less of what I did eat. Those two steps got me going in the right direction. They seemed logical to me. I didn’t need a book or an “expert” to tell me this.
After that, I went to the grocery store and started exploring. I went through the produce department looking for things I could eat for lunch that wouldn’t need much preparation. I chose carrots and broccoli for the first week. I was already aware that eating breakfast every day was important, but I had always ignored that piece of “common knowledge.” Now, I decided to add breakfast to my new way of eating (I refused to call it a diet because I always had thought of diets as being temporary fads). I assumed that most cereals with low fat and high fiber would be good for me, so I started eating cereal and fruit every morning. In addition, I added cereal bars as morning and afternoon snacks. I was eating food that was better for me, eating less food overall and eating more often. That would start fixing my nutrition problem.
Exercise was the next thing to address. I already had the extremely expensive gym membership, which I figured cost me $150 per visit based on the number of times I had used it in ten years. Time to start getting my money’s worth. I looked at every major muscle group and chose exercises to condition them all. Then I separated the exercises into three major categories that I would assign to three separate days, 12 exercises each day. Because I was uncomfortable maintaining a fast heart rate for too long, I chose not to address “cardio.” That was one of my biggest mistakes.
I stuck to these choices for more than a year. I improved greatly. My weight dropped below 190 pounds as I replaced fat with muscle. I felt better, and because of this, had no problem sticking to my routine. I did not deviate: Good food; no junk snacks; breakfast every day; more than one hour exercise each day, five to six days a week. That’s it, boring but effective. The gym became my addiction because it also helped me get rid of stress. I became more relaxed and handled life’s difficulties without getting upset as often as I had before I started exercising. My only problem was that I still had not addressed the cardio situation.
Much of my workout success came from pure determination, but I still had trouble because I ran out of breath easily and often felt as though my heart was pounding too hard. I decided to start using a machine called an orbital, which would give me a good workout without causing too much stress on my knees. I could stand in it and work it like a bicycle without a seat.
When I was 19, I had taken up jogging for all of two days. Day one I had gone two miles. That had felt fine to me; so on day two, I had decided that eight miles should be fine, too. I had run until I couldn’t feel my legs, and I discovered that my knees were very sore. That was the end of my running career. The ill-advised choice of running too much without proper conditioning had led to permanent damage to my knees. Until now, that had been my excuse for not using exercise machines that would allow me to run in place. The orbital, because of its smooth, non-impact orbital motion, left me with no excuse.
I was not thinking of cycling at all, at the time, but the orbital was the machine that would allow me to condition myself for cycling. I still had no long-term plans. I was just doing what I felt I needed to do. I never let up. The worst part of using the orbital was dealing with the boredom. Even with six or more TVs in front of me at the gym, 20 minutes of exercise on the orbital felt like hours of clothes shopping with my mom when I was a child (I didn’t like it).
Over the months, I increased my time on the orbital to one hour, also increasing the resistance. I studied more about exercise and nutrition, too, resulting in my changing some routines. I discovered that my muscle type would not lend itself to my becoming muscular in the sense of a bodybuilder. Hoping that I would have some advantage in more endurance type activities, I started looking into what I might do that would be more suited to me physically. One month before I reached my two-year point in this new lifestyle, I woke up on a Sunday morning, pumped up the tires on my Trek cruising bike and went for a ride. My wife, Colleen, and I had bought bikes for ourselves a couple years before so we could ride in the neighborhood. We did ride sometimes, but only for short distances. I often took my bike to the gym, which is not even two miles from my house.
When I set out on April 5th, 2009, I still didn’t have any plan to take up cycling in a serious way. I just decided to go, and I went. I had been reading Swimming to Antarctica: Tales of a Long Distance Swimmer by Lynne Cox. It is a gripping account of a woman who swam long distances throughout the world in freezing water. Her accomplishments go beyond what I thought was possible. It certainly inspired me, and is likely the reason I rode that morning.
As I headed out, I aimed for the first major street to the west. When I got there, I headed for the next major street. Riding up Desert Inn, a six lane road in Las Vegas, I stuck to the sidewalks because I thought that was the safest place to ride. I had not seen any bike paths, and would have been apprehensive about riding in them anyway, so close to motor vehicle traffic. I reached one more major intersection, and realized I was not too far from a bike shop managed by a friend of mine named Shawn. It was early, and when I reached McGhie’s, they were closed. So, I kept riding west, up the hills. Riding up Flamingo Road, I found a bike lane and almost no traffic on the road. The hill was steep to me, and I was now approximately 8 miles from home. This was already farther than I had ridden since I rode my old Univega (which I still had) in the late 80s. I was truly “expanding my horizons” and discovering a whole new world.
I kept going up the bike path as it curved into some neighborhoods I had never visited. I grew up in Las Vegas but had not kept up with checking out new developments as the city expanded. I knew this area was here, but seeing it for the first time while riding a bike provided a unique perspective. The weather was cool; the wind was calm, and I was inspired. Feeling the movement of my bike, made possible only because of my own efforts at pedaling, gave me a sense of freedom I had not felt when I rode long rides more than 20 years before. This was something I had been destined to discover, and as I drove my destiny toward itself, I knew my life had changed, and I had found something I had not known I was seeking.
I kept going up, following the road through peaceful, picturesque neighborhoods at the base of the mountains until, to my surprise, I reached Charleston Boulevard. When I had ridden with my future step brother-in-law, Randy, in 1987, my first long ride had been up Charleston to an amazing desert/mountain park named Red Rock. Back then, the road I had just ridden to reach Charleston did not exist. There was little in the area but Yucca plants and lizards, certainly not houses. As I thought back on that first long ride to Red Rock, I wanted to head up there again. But I wasn’t prepared for that, and made the prudent choice of turning around. I did not need to push myself too far, especially knowing how detrimental that can be without the proper conditioning.
The ride back down the hill was almost effortless. The cool air whistling past seemed to embrace me as if to say, “This is it. You’re here, now.” I stopped at McGhie’s again, and now they were open. I hadn’t seen Shawn in a few years and was excited to tell him about my adventure. I knew my little ride was really nothing to real cyclists, but I didn’t care. He was happy for me, too. Knowing this would change everything, I asked him what equipment I needed to get started riding seriously, even with my beach-cruising type bike. He showed me bike pants, spandex with padding inside, which I would wear like swim trunks: no underwear. He insisted they were one of the most important things for cyclists.
When I finally bought a pair of bike shorts a few weeks later, I would never hear the end of it from my daughter, Athena when I wore them. “No, Dad.” She would turn her head. “You can’t go outside in those!”
I told Shawn how I had just ridden from street to street, deciding to go one more block each time I had finished the previous one. He said, “So you Forest Gump’d your way here.” Yea, that’s right, I thought. Would I have kept going if I had known I would ride 20 miles? Maybe not. Now, I plan my rides, but I still only concentrate on just one block at a time. Would I have kept to my improved nutrition and exercise plans if I thought of losing 30 pounds all at once, knowing I could not eat Doritos again? I doubt it.
Piece by piece or one pedal stroke at a time: That’s a good way to go. If we always think of everything we have to accomplish all at once, we might never get out of bed.
