Ok so I totally stole the title from the awesome show: "An Idiot Abroad" featuring none other than the unintentionally hilarious Karl Plinkington. If you havne't seen it you totally should.
The plan here is to detail some of my experiences in riding my bike and improving my diet as I start to take better control of my life and concentrate on doing and eating the things that make me feel good. It won't be written in the third person and it won't involve discussions about wattage and power output., but it won't be completely about just riding to ride either. I enjoy riding my bike but I find I enjoy it even more when I ride it faster so the end goal here is to be able to ride faster and longer.
I hope to achieve that goal with a two pronged approach:
1) Stop eating like a pig. I don't have the worst diet in the world but it's certainly far from clean. Biggest culprit is eating out too often, followed by portion control.
2) Ride my bike more. It won't be an everday murderfest and there will certainly be fluctuations in how much I ride but I want to be out a couple of times a week. I also run and do general outdoor stuff so days off the bike won't mean I'm sitting on the couch watching Tosh.O reruns all day and night.
I won't be obsessing about calories or total time on the bike/mileage but I won't be completely ignorant of them either.
So today was the first official start of my journey. Bouyed by the change of Daylight Savings Time as well as a good weather forecast I decided to commute into work today.
The commute is from Edison up to Warren Via: River Road to Thompson Ave over Rt 22 to Chimney Rock Road to Mt Washington Valley Road to Mt. Horeb which turns into Liberty Corner road which ends my commute right after it crosses over rt 78.
All told it's 19.5 miles door to door and this morning it took me 1:20 minutes. That's complete time with stoplights/signs so it is just under a 15mph average.
I am hoping after some miles and some more experience I can knock this down to about an hour on good days and on bad days it takes no more than 1:30.
Driving time is usually 45min to 1hr so all told I am only taking an extra half hour but getting a 20mile ride in. (Now if only one day I could actually ride 20miles in 30min maybe I'd join some of the pain trains I read about hear).
On the diet front: Biggest change is forgoing the morning coffee at Dunkin Donuts. I take my coffee way too sweet and way too light to be consuming it on a regular basis (which I have been for the past couple of years) so I am going to try and scale back to a few cups a week from 1-2 cups a day. That alone should make a noticeable change. I've also been starting to make sure that if I'm going out to eat I only eat half of the meal.
I don't obsess about my weight but the goal is to try and drop 10-15lbs at a minimum with a max weight drop of 20lbs. As it is right now I'm not a huge guy @ 168lbs but I carry a belly that while smaller than most of america's is far too noticeable for me to be happy about.
This won't be a daily blog but I do plan on somewhat frequent updates as I see fit. It's more about me having a place to track some of my progress than anything but I certainly welcome comments/insights/suggestions (Especially around commuting).
In closing the highlight of the day was when I was locking my bike up at work this morning and a coworker (I work in a 5 story office building so I don't know who it was at all) smiled at me and said "This is a good thing". I couldn't have said it better myself.
The plan here is to detail some of my experiences in riding my bike and improving my diet as I start to take better control of my life and concentrate on doing and eating the things that make me feel good. It won't be written in the third person and it won't involve discussions about wattage and power output., but it won't be completely about just riding to ride either. I enjoy riding my bike but I find I enjoy it even more when I ride it faster so the end goal here is to be able to ride faster and longer.
I hope to achieve that goal with a two pronged approach:
1) Stop eating like a pig. I don't have the worst diet in the world but it's certainly far from clean. Biggest culprit is eating out too often, followed by portion control.
2) Ride my bike more. It won't be an everday murderfest and there will certainly be fluctuations in how much I ride but I want to be out a couple of times a week. I also run and do general outdoor stuff so days off the bike won't mean I'm sitting on the couch watching Tosh.O reruns all day and night.
I won't be obsessing about calories or total time on the bike/mileage but I won't be completely ignorant of them either.
So today was the first official start of my journey. Bouyed by the change of Daylight Savings Time as well as a good weather forecast I decided to commute into work today.
The commute is from Edison up to Warren Via: River Road to Thompson Ave over Rt 22 to Chimney Rock Road to Mt Washington Valley Road to Mt. Horeb which turns into Liberty Corner road which ends my commute right after it crosses over rt 78.
All told it's 19.5 miles door to door and this morning it took me 1:20 minutes. That's complete time with stoplights/signs so it is just under a 15mph average.
I am hoping after some miles and some more experience I can knock this down to about an hour on good days and on bad days it takes no more than 1:30.
Driving time is usually 45min to 1hr so all told I am only taking an extra half hour but getting a 20mile ride in. (Now if only one day I could actually ride 20miles in 30min maybe I'd join some of the pain trains I read about hear).
On the diet front: Biggest change is forgoing the morning coffee at Dunkin Donuts. I take my coffee way too sweet and way too light to be consuming it on a regular basis (which I have been for the past couple of years) so I am going to try and scale back to a few cups a week from 1-2 cups a day. That alone should make a noticeable change. I've also been starting to make sure that if I'm going out to eat I only eat half of the meal.
I don't obsess about my weight but the goal is to try and drop 10-15lbs at a minimum with a max weight drop of 20lbs. As it is right now I'm not a huge guy @ 168lbs but I carry a belly that while smaller than most of america's is far too noticeable for me to be happy about.
This won't be a daily blog but I do plan on somewhat frequent updates as I see fit. It's more about me having a place to track some of my progress than anything but I certainly welcome comments/insights/suggestions (Especially around commuting).
In closing the highlight of the day was when I was locking my bike up at work this morning and a coworker (I work in a 5 story office building so I don't know who it was at all) smiled at me and said "This is a good thing". I couldn't have said it better myself.
