It began last October (oct 2011). I guess that I had already begun "training" a month or two before then - nothing serious though. I learned about a bike tour around the Verde Valley to benefit some charity or another. It was a road bike affair... not my thing. I had a road bike, but I had only ridden it a handful of time. I am a mtn bike fanatic (that was the story I told myself anyway) - road biking is for pussies. It was early September. All 240lbs of me was sitting at a local bike/coffee shop where I was pretending to be as hardcore a rider as everyone else in there. Someone had dropped of a flyer for 100km road bike ride called the Sedona Century. "I wonder if I could do that?" I asked aloud.
"Sure you could," replied a friend who works there with a tone in his voice that said sure John, ten years and 50 lbs ago.
That was all it took. I started riding every day from that day forward. I stopped eating carbohydrates. I started to have a secret fantasy of being an athlete again (a fantasy I have not dared to share aloud until the inception of this blog) at a level like I had been as a young man. I had been an all-american swimmer a million years earlier - if I had been there once I could again. So I rode. Mountain bike. Road bike. One or the other nearly every day.
A month later I was finishing the Sedona Century in the top 5 or 6. I was not uber-fit by any stretch of the imagination; but, I was on my way. There was a little bit less of me; and, the too much of me that there was was a trifle harder.
I went for a mtn bike ride with my pal Mak the very next morning and signed up for my first triathlon in 10 years from my smartphone while on a water break on the Lama Trail in Sedona, Arizona.
"Sure you could," replied a friend who works there with a tone in his voice that said sure John, ten years and 50 lbs ago.
That was all it took. I started riding every day from that day forward. I stopped eating carbohydrates. I started to have a secret fantasy of being an athlete again (a fantasy I have not dared to share aloud until the inception of this blog) at a level like I had been as a young man. I had been an all-american swimmer a million years earlier - if I had been there once I could again. So I rode. Mountain bike. Road bike. One or the other nearly every day.
A month later I was finishing the Sedona Century in the top 5 or 6. I was not uber-fit by any stretch of the imagination; but, I was on my way. There was a little bit less of me; and, the too much of me that there was was a trifle harder.
I went for a mtn bike ride with my pal Mak the very next morning and signed up for my first triathlon in 10 years from my smartphone while on a water break on the Lama Trail in Sedona, Arizona.
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