After yesterday’s news that I have high blood pressure (130/90) and high cholesterol (221), I realized that my life is about to change. I realized that after my doctor’s appointment today, I will probably need to make additional changes to my diet. I realized, above all, that I’m probably going to have to say goodbye to salt and mayonnaise: my two favorite things to add to food.

At first, this made me sad. No salt? What good are tortilla chips without salt? What is Cholula but some hot peppers in a bath of vinegar and salt? No mayo? What good is a peanut butter, banana, and mayo sandwich without mayo?

Then I got mad.

Real mad.

The problem was, I didn’t have anyone to get angry at. The only thing that could be said to be at fault was my own body and the way it processes food.

Fair enough, then. I’ll get angry at my body, and punish it with food.

I resolved to spend the day eating with a vengeance.

Round One: Lunch

The only reasonably-short line in the cafeteria was the salad bar, which wasn’t exactly what I originally had in mind to kick off my act of gastronomical defiance. However, I decided to take it on as a challenge. I would build a Bad Salad.

This turned out to be almost disappointingly easy. On top of a very small bed of lettuce (put there mostly so that I could still claim it is a salad, as opposed to an ad-hoc casserole), I put a couple of hardboiled eggs, two different kinds of cheese, several cherry tomatoes (just for color), some cottage cheese just in case the other cheeses got lonely, croutons, a double-fistful of sunflower seeds, and then drenched it in ranch dressing.

Where I work, the way they charge you for the salad bar is by how much it weighs. For me, they had to bring in a special scale.

Round Two: Afternoon Snack

Within a few hours, I no longer felt like I was going to explode. This is not, mind you, the same thing as saying that I felt hungry. I was not in the same area code as hungry. But I was still feeling angry, so decided to continue to show my body who’s boss. Luckily, there’s a vending machine on my floor. "Take that, stupid heart!" I said, plowing through a Snickers. "Who’s got high cholesterol now?" I asked my blood, as I easily dispatched a KitKat bar. "What, you think I eat too much salt?" I taunted my blood pressure, as I munched with affected carelessness on a Salted Nut Roll.

And then I ate the rigatoni with chicken and alfredo sauce I had in the fridge. I had planned on eating that for lunch today, but I didn’t feel like I had sufficiently made my point.

Round Three: Dinner

My good friend Jeff was in town yesterday, so we went on a short ride — just to get our appetites worked up — and then he took me to dinner. Since he’s a Very Important Vice President of a Massive Publishing Conglomerate, he of course volunteered to pick up the tab when we went to the Acupulco Fresh taco shop.

Taking advantage of Jeff’s (employer’s) generosity, I ordered the Burrito Grande Al Pastor, with the red sauce enchilada dip. And an order of chips and guacamole. Don’t skip on the sour cream if you want a tip, OK? And hey, lookit all the tasty different kinds of salsa at the salsa bar. I think I’ll have some of each.

I dispatched the burrito quickly and efficiently — some might even say "savagely."

Jeff watched in horror.

Round Four: Late Night Snack

Apart from a lot of bike riding, I would say that the factor most responsible for my weight loss since I started this blog is a simple rule I set for myself: After dinner, I’m done eating for the day.

I broke that rule in every way possible last night. Golden Grahams were just the beginning of it. "Stupid body," I thought to myself (I might’ve been speaking out loud, it’s hard to say). "I diet and exercise and eat crazy amounts of vegetables and fruit and high-fiber cereal, and you’re still going to go all middle-aged on me? Well, then, I may as well eat Golden Grahams. And hey, there in the pantry: I spy with my little eye a box of Oreos. I bet I’ll have no trouble finishing those off. I wonder how Oreos would taste with peanut butter on them? Wow. Really good. Let’s do that again."

Was I done? No, I was not done. I was still angry. And the next expression of my indignation would take the form of a tortilla, heated for ten seconds in the microwave to get it nice and pliable, upon which I would spread peanut butter and chocolate frosting.

OK, arteries. Are you ready to cry ‘uncle’ yet?

Do I Have a Point?

Apart from the therapeutic effect of confessing my sins, does this little horror story have a point? Nope. I was just mad at my body for betraying me, and so punished it by eating like there’s no tomorrow. And I admit, I had a lot of fun completely ignoring — in fact, running contrary to — all my eating rules for a day.

And if my doctor’s appointment this afternoon goes like I expect it to, that was my last food frenzy for quite some time.

Today’s weight: Do you really think I would weigh myself the morning after eating like that?

PS: The Errorista — my sister — and a.Toad — my "Hot Blog Pick for Q3′05" (see my "Blogging Cyclists" list) — are both featured on MSN’s What’s Your Story site this week, which is not a small deal. Congrats to both of them.

As a person who has elected to be known to the world as "Fat Cyclist," I would think it’s safe to say that I have very few illusions about my how I look, where my blood pressure is, and what my cholesterol level is.

I would think that, but I would be wrong.

You see, at my fattest, I assumed that my cholesterol level would be high. And since every time I get my blood pressure checked, the checker says, "Woah, you’d better talk to a doctor about that," I’d assumed my blood pressure is a little high, too.

Brilliant Plan

But I had a plan: don’t go see a doctor until I’d lost the weight and gotten full-force into healthy mode. And that’s pretty much where I am now. See, I’m not really fat anymore — I still have about ten pounds to lose, but that ten pounds will put me into my "serious racer" weight range.

So I figured it was safe to go see a doctor and get the lab work done, to verify that I am, in fact, a superb human specimen.

Don’t Panic. Well, OK. Go Ahead and Panic.

You know, there’s nothing quite like a voicemail from the doctor’s office to completely freak you out.

My blood pressure is high. My cholesterol is high. The doctor would like me to make an appointment to see him at my earliest convenience.

That’s all the voicemail said. So I, quite reasonably I think, have interpreted that to mean: "You are the middle-aged poster boy for a heart attack."

So, I called the doctor’s office this morning and set up an appointment for my earliest convenience, which is not until tomorrow at 5:00pm. This, conveniently, gives me 31 hours to blow this waaaaay out of proportion. Which is what I intend to do. If at all possible, in fact, I intend to have a heart attack before the doctor’s appointment, just to underscore how seriously I’m suddenly taking all this. Which is to say, I’m as serious as a heart attack. Literally.

OK, I’m done with that joke now. Let’s move on.

The Dumb Thing

You want to know what the dumb thing is, though? I’m not worried about short- or long-term medical implications, I’m worried about how this is going to affect my riding.

Today’s weight: 161.8 lbs.

Where would you rather be: on your bike, or in the bike shop? If your answer is always “on my bike,” that means you’ve never had a really good bike shop.

A good bike shop is not just the place where you get stuff for your bike, it’s the place you go when you can’t think of anywhere else to go. You go because you like talking with other cyclists, or because you like watching an exceptional mechanic work on a bike, or — and I’m a little embarrassed by this one — you like the “new bike” smell.

It comes down to this: once you’ve decided you’re a cyclist, you need a place where you feel like a cyclist, even when you’re not on a bike. Like "Cheers," except they sell Clif Bars instead of booze.

Gourmet Bicylces

This is the shop I frequented when I started riding seriously. Most of my riding friends and I worked at Novell at the time, and when it wasn’t a good day to ride — or we just didn’t feel like riding — we’d go to Gourmet for lunch hour. Someone would go next door to Bamboo Hut to get noodles and rib sauce for everyone, and we’d eat and talk about bikes.

It was here that Greg, the owner, started talking about a crazy new bike he’d seen at Interbike: the Ibis Bow Ti. The day I told Greg I wanted to build up a Bow Ti and that price was no object (it would price out to around $7000) was one of only two times I ever saw him smile. The other time I saw Greg smile was when he was building the bike. We all gathered around at the shop, watching Greg build a bike that cost as much as a good car. For me, at least, it was a transporting experience, and Greg gave it the care it deserved. Greg was a cranky old coot (he was the same age as I was, but he seemed old), but he was a gifted mechanic, and we all felt at home in his shop. Plus, it was always entertaining to listen to Jeremy, a teenaged brat with technical bike skills unlike anyone I’ve ever seen, talk about his night life. When Jeremy went on about his evenings, I realized exactly how sheltered a life I led.

Frank’s

Sadly, Gourmet went out of business. I felt bad for Greg, but knew that at least there’d soon be a good bike shop close by — Jeremy took out a small business loan, gutted an old dry cleaner’s building, and opened “Frank’s” — named after our favorite trail. Frank’s was big, and Jeremy knew how to cater to his loyal customers; he set up a lounge in the middle of the store, as well as kids’ bikes for people to do in-store criteriums during lunch hour. Rick, dug and I went there pretty much every lunch hour during the Winter months, where we’d have races, talk about riding, and occasionally play dodge ball.

At first, everyone always asked Jeremy to fix their bikes. After a while, though, I noticed something about Jeremy that I wouldn’t have expected: he was losing interest in biking. Same thing had happened to Greg. It’s a pattern I’ve seen at other shops: Someone loves biking so much they buy a shop. Then they start spending all their time with the business end of biking, get sick of it, and forget why they loved bikes in the first place. They lose their passion, and it becomes a treadmill.

Luckily — for those of us who needed a place to hang out, anyway — Jeremy had a guy we all just called “Racer,” a great mechanic who also happened to clean up at local road and mountain races.

Racer’s

I guess it was inevitable: Frank’s closed down. I don’t think it even lasted 18 months. Maybe the core clientele (us) scared normal bike-buying types away. Part of it was legal trouble — a lawsuit followed Jeremy from Gourmet to Frank’s; he couldn’t recover from the legal fees.

Racer’s Cycle Service opened just about 30 seconds after Frank’s closed down. Racer had his own …um…unique way of operating, though. First of all, he didn’t sell bikes. Just fixed them, and sold parts. Second of all, he operated out of a garage-style storage unit — which is also where he lived (camped?). Racer was clearly not relying on drive-by traffic. I expected him to go out of business immediately.

But he didn’t. After several months (including one Summer, during which I would not go to his warehouse after 9:00am, out of fear of spontaneous combustion), Racer moved to a little downtown storefront, and had a company that makes Freeway signs make him a “Racer’s Cycle Service” sign. It looks—not surprisingly—as if his store is a freeway exit. And we all had a place to go for lunch again, although his space was way too small for a good game of catch.

To Racer’s credit, his “build slow” strategy seems to be panning out. He didn’t start selling bikes until he could afford to, he didn’t hire employees until he could afford to, and now he’s expanding to a larger space.

Now

Since I’ve moved out to the Northwest, I haven’t found a bike shop that’s like what I’m used to — a place to hang out, a place to exchange riding and crashing stories, a place where the mechanic knows how I like my bike set up by heart and will give my bike priority because he knows I’ll either tip big or buy/bring him lunch.

I think part of why I haven’t settled into a bike shop here is because I’m busier than I used to be. My kids are getting older, my job requires me to do actual work, and I have less free time in general. If I’ve got time, I’m likely to just go out and ride.

That said, last week I was picking up a bike at Sammamish Valley Cycles (I had left my road bike there when I picked up my new track bike) and one of the employees turned out to be Kent Peterson,  the guy who did the 2005 Great Divide Race on a singlespeed. He recognized me as the Fat Cyclist (the Ibis Ti Road and the black rectangle across my eyes gave me away) and we talked for a good long while about epic rides, and he gave me some advice on setting up a bike for riding in the rain.

He still said the next time they could work on my bike was seven working days out, but just you wait and see. Soon I’ll be camping out there lunch hour after lunch hour and they’ll hustle my bike to the front of the line, just so they can be rid of me and get back to business.

Today’s weight: 164.4

PS: My wife would like me to make it clear that if you do not go see the movie Serenity within the next five days, you are a bad person. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

PPS: I agree with my wife, but would like to go one step further: if you do not go see Serenity, you are a callow ne’er-do-well who needs to reevaluate what is important in your life. One caveat: you will like this movie 34% more if you watch the short-lived TV series Firefly (upon which this film is based, now available on DVD) first. Or, as an interesting experiment, see the film first and then see the TV series.

PPPS: Seriously, it’s a really good movie. Like, the best movie since Batman Begins. But without the capes, which I think we all learned in The Incredibles are a bad idea.