How mountain biking changed my life
When I started riding motorcycles in my 20’s there was a gravel pit in my area and when that closed I had to load the bike in my truck and drive 3 hours to have anywhere to ride. I remember thinking to myself on one of the long rides back home, ” I wish I had trails under a hour near the house. Then one day it occurred to me, there’s a paved path 2 blocks from the house.
This was my first mountain bike, a Cannondale CX4 $600.00. I rode this bike for about a week and broke a spoke on the back, followed by a handful of spokes to come. In the past I could always do my own work on motorcycles from basic maintenance to major engine repair. Now I was at a loss and realized soon I had a lot to learn.
I don’t know if it was my weight at the time ( 240 pounds) or that fact this bike was laced with 15 gauge spokes. It soon made me pissed about owning this brand regardless if it was a beginners bike or not.The local bike shop was more then happy to sell me the spokes and the tools needed to do the work. I ended up going to 4 bike shops in my area and buying bikes from 3 of them and had completely different experiences at all of them and I may go into that later. In the end, I ended up getting really good at changing spokes on this bike and finally developed a love for it when I realized this could be the bike I learned bike maintenance on, rather then a more expensive mountain bike that cost thousands. When a squeak does occur or any other sounds, I am going to drive it till the wheels fell off and learn how to fix it as I go.
I started biking a couple times a week and running in the morning before work and I started to lose weight, got in the 230’s. Everything started to change when I downloaded a free app for my phone called MyfitnessPal and logged my calorie intake.
http://www.myfitnesspal.com/
During the same time of getting this app I also purchased my first smart watch, a Fitbit and later ended up liking the Garmin Vivoactive Hr better. The smart watch showed me just how many calories I was burning during exercise and the fitness app synced with the watch to show me my intake vs calories burned.
It didn’t take very long to figure out I was doing this balancing act of getting enough exercise to compensate for the beer I drank on the weekends. Talking to the guys I work with soon taught me there are a lot of men that do this, it’s almost as your killing yourself to just drink beer and stay the same weight.
One day I friended a guy on Facebook I went to High School with and I noticed that he worked in a bike shop. I looked up their website and poked around. After a couple of months the wife and I decided to check out this bike shop, I had so much trouble with my first bike, I figured maybe a better bike was the answer.
As soon as I walked into Wheels in Motion in Ann Arbor MI, there was a used Trek Farley 9 in the showroom and I couldn’t stop looking at it. As soon as I test drove it, I knew I had to find the money to buy it, but buying used? Are you kidding me, after all the trouble I had with a new bike; I rolled the dice anyway. A lot of older guys like me ride Fat bikes, there not just for riding in sand or snow, but that’s where they really perform. I started riding in the woods with this bike, single track and oh boy did it really remind me of the same feel of riding single track on motorcycles in my 20’s. Buying this bike used I did have a cable problem after about owning it a month and the bike shop took care of it for free, I really couldn’t believe it, the staff at Wheel n Motion are just awesome and it was the reason I did buy another bike from them recently.
I split my time to running in the morning before work ( 4 times a week) and biking the paved path on my Cannondale on the weekends I would ride my Trek Farley 9 at the local state park riding single track and I really felt good. After riding the single track on weekends I would go home and relax and drink a bunch of Heinekens while watching TV. Heineken is the only beer that didn’t give me a hang over, I could drink 10 Heinekens and get up and do work around the house opposed to drinking 10 Budweiser’s and feeling like I was stuck to the bed sheets for hours and could only get up to pee. Heineken was always worth the extra money over other beers for me.
Weeks went by and my weight didn’t change and there would be days on the weekend I wouldn’t workout at all and one day I just had enough and cut out all beer from my diet.
August is when this happen and while biking and running plus watching my food intake did help, it was the beer that was the biggest dramatic effect on my overall weight.
Mountain biking, so many calories.
If I get up and have a good day running a 5K on a treadmill I can burn 378 calories and after work If I hop on my bike and ride our paved path (13 miles) I can burn about twice that (742 calories). However If I load up the bike and drive to the State Park and ride it’s crazy how much more calories I can burn. The hunting season combined with Winter season has ceased riding in the woods and I will have to get creative.