Originally Posted by
bikingbrad
Just finished a great read today. It's called "Heft on Wheels" by Mike Magnuson. Picked it up at Barnes & Noble over the weekend. Especially relevant for us Clydesdales who are desperately working towards non-Clydesdaleness. I'm pretty sure I'd be dead if I approached it as he did (and he's lucky he's not), but it was certainly inspirational none-the-less. Anybody else read it? Long story short... he lost 75 pounds, stopped smoking, and stopped drinking, all within the span of three months by immersing himself in cycling.
Finished this book in early March and had the same observation as you, BUT laughed at myself for thinking it. 19 years ago when I turned 40 (weight 248 and 5'11", 48"waist) I was thinking to myself that I had never thought that I would live to be 40 (smoking since I was 13, drinking not quite like Magnuson--just generall unhealthy sluggo lifestyle), and if I was unlucky enough to live another 40 years at this rate I'd be a helpless stand-in for Jabba The Hut. My daily schedule was: get up, go to work, eat lunch, come home, eat dinner, watch TV, have some ice cream around 9:30pm, go to bed by 10pm, and start over the next day. I know that my Guardian Angel came awake at that time and whispered in my ear the following highly illogical (for me) reasoning: "You know (says I to myself) I stay at 248 neither gaining when I eat or losing when I don't, so if I maintained my usual eating habits and did just a little bit of "moving around", I called it, then I might lose some weight. So I did like all normal humans, went to Sears and bought al ill-fitting bike that I started riding almost every evening after work (during the summer with daylight savings, and 2 years post divorce, so I didn't have the usual impediments). What I enjoyed most of all was seeing things I never saw at that time of day, and this got addictive to the extent that weight-loss was relegated to the back of my mind, so I chased no goal. The damned angel was right----The first time I realized I was changing was about a month later: one morning I got up to go to work and in putting my belt on realized that I had no hole to put the prong in; I had lost 2 belt holes without knowing, and had to look down and realized that my pants looked "pleated" all the way around as well ---but damn, I could almost see my waistline. This spurred me on like Magnuson, and 3 months later I found that I weighed 205 lbs with a 40" waist.
Been hooked for years since then, my body wants to stabilize now during the winter at 190, and with the increase of spring activity I can ride and starve to 178, which is less that I was as a sophomore in high school.
I never raced like Magnuson, but fell in with "bad company" in the local bike club, keeping up in speed and distance with a bunch of late 20's early 30's "tourists".
My motivation is all in my head now, since over the years with developing families, the poor job market in the 1990's and then Katrina's forced exile all those people have moved away from the New Orleans area. So I do about 150 average miles a week, and look forward to riding in BRAG (Bike Ride Across Georgia) in June.
Yea, Magnuson was crazy..