02.16.2012 | 9:49 am
I find it really startling that I am not the only one around who tends to put weight on in the winter. And I find it equally astonishing that I am not the only one who needs some kind of external motivation.
So, it seems that we’re going back to the beginning: back to the original reason I started this blog. But this time I’m taking you with me.
I’m starting work, right now, on some kind of contest that we can use to do the following:
- lose weight
- motivate each other
- win prizes
- trash talk
But setting that infrastructure and the rules up is going to take some work, and it’s not ready. So, meanwhile, you can help me shape this contest by answering the questions I’m trying to answer myself:
- How would you like the competition matchup to work?
- How should we set up who competes against whom?
- Each person competing, individually, against me
- Each person competing against one other person each week
- Two teams competing against each other
- Some other interesting way
- Should the contest go for a certain period of time or until you reach your goal weight, or something else?
- There will be an entry fee. Specifically, to be in the competition you’ll have to make a donation to my Boston Marathon LiveStrong account. I’m thinking $50. Are you cool with that or would that be too much?
- Also, to play, you’ll need to put up a prize to go in the prize pool. I’m trying to decide whether that should be money or some cool item you will provide. Money’s easier, stuff is more fun. Got a strong opinion on this?
- Got any other ideas on how this game ought to be played?
- Would you be more interested in playing if there were a t-shirt and / or other swag?
For those of you who haven’t been with the blog too long, this is not the first time I’ve done a big group weight loss challenge. Check out the B7 Challenge from 2006 to get an idea of what this might (or might not) be like.
Even if you don’t have strong opinions on the 6 questions above, leave a comment if you’re interested in participating, to give me an idea of the scope of this project.
Comments (112)
02.15.2012 | 1:53 pm
I have a horrible, horrible secret, which I will reveal in just a moment. As soon as I can work up the courage.
I should warn you that what I am about to reveal is very, very shocking.
Are you ready? I don’t think I’m ready; I still need to collect myself. Find my center and stuff.
There. I’m ready.
The secret I have to reveal is the following: my weight is now 171.4 pounds.
Yes, I intentionally made that text light grey, so it wouldn’t jump out at you. And also because I am not super proud of the fact that I am up approximately 15 pounds from last year’s racing weight.
This is a problem, which I really want (and need) to fix, starting now. I have my reasons for the “starting now” part:
Crusher in the Tushar
On July 14, I’ll be racing the “Crusher in the Tushar,” a nearly new (this will be its second year) race that has a massive amount of climbing and descending. Some on pavement, some on dirt. I’ve talked with a couple people who have done it (Mark and Adam), and it sounds like I should absolutely positively not arrive there fat and out of shape.
Although I have to admit, my stories about epic rides are more entertaining when I ride fat and out of shape.
So maybe it would be OK if — for the sake of my “art” — I did this ride before working on losing the weight.
The Leadville 100
I just (as in “an hour ago” got my confirmation: The Hammer, The IT Guy, Kenny, Heather, and I are all in for The Leadville 100. This will be my 16th start (and hopefully, my fifteenth finish).
Last year, on my fifteenth try, I finally finished this race in under nine hours. I kind of would like to do that again.
But honestly, if I don’t finish it in under nine hours, nobody will be surprised. Especially me. So that’s not the real reason I need to lose all that weight.
The Breck Epic
Six days of mountain bike racing, starting the day after the Leadville 100? Why should I worry about being in shape for that?
Honestly, this is the race that I’m most afraid of. I have no experience with racing multiple days of anything, and seven days of racing is frankly a little bit incomprehensible to me. But I’m excited to try it.
The Park City P2P
OK, I’m not even registered for this, yet. Registration opens tonight, and it will fill up instantly. But if I can get in, I’m going to try it again. Even though this is the only race that has ever made me cry.
But you know what? This race isn’t the reason I need to get into shape, pronto, either.
One More Thing
The reason I absolutely positively must start losing weight and get into shape right now is…OK, actually I can’t reveal the reason. Seriously, I’m not allowed to.
But it’s a good reason, and I’ll be able to talk about it in a couple weeks.
Meanwhile, I’m going to start posting my weight again. And if I don’t make substantial progress, quickly, I’ll come up with an additional incentive (although considering the motivation I already have, I’m hoping that I won’t need to do a contest).
What is this motivation? Well, feel free to guess. Here are some (intentionally misleading but entirely true) hints to (fail to) help you out:
- It is not a race
- It is bike-related
- My vanity is involved
Excuse me while I now go fix myself some eggs and avacadoes.
Comments (54)
02.14.2012 | 8:30 am
A Note from Fatty: I’m working on filling in the gaps of Susan’s and my story, to eventually be collected in my next book, Fight Like Susan. Yesterday’s installment can be found here.
On the drive to the hospital — the same hospital where three of our four children had been born — I told Susan the same thing I had told her countless times in the past couple weeks.
“Everything will be fine.”
I said it with an intentional sort of conviction. Sure, I understood the possibility that things wouldn’t be OK, but what value is there in dwelling on that kind of future? Just assume everything’s going to be good, all the time. Then, whenever something isn’t good, you fix that thing. And meanwhile, at least you haven’t been fretting over something you couldn’t have fixed anyway.
I wasn’t new to that kind of thinking. I had evolved this philosophy during Susan’s pregnancy with the twins. See, I had made the mistake of ordering all kinds of books about twin pregnancy and infant years. Then I had made the further mistake of reading all those books.
I’m pretty sure that the authors of all thsoe “twin pregnancy” books had gotten together to try to convince parents of twins that there is a 0% chance that the babies will be born healthy and normal.
The more I knew, the more my anxiety grew, until I finally made a decision: since I couldn’t affect the outcome, I would rather assume a good — no, great — outcome than know all the possible bad outcomes.
So, for the first time in my life, I threw away some books. I didn’t even give them away or donate them or anything; I didn’t want to be party to someone else freaking out the way I had.
And the twins had been fine. Happy. Healthy. Perfect. All the worrying had been useless.
So I said it again: “Everything will be fine.”
First Call
I sat with Susan while the surgeon talked with us about what he was going to do. None of it registered. I just kept thinking CANCER SURGERY JOB CANCER JOB BILLS SURGERY.
Everything’s going to be fine. Everything will be fine.
I asked Susan how she felt, and whether she was scared. “No, I just want this over with,” she said. “I want this out of me.”
They let me stay with Susan until she was asleep.
I went out to the waiting room and sat, but I couldn’t stand it, so I went back to my car, with the plan to drive around. As I got out to the parking lot I turned my phone back on (remember how you used to have to turn your phone off when in the hospital?).
There was a voicemail waiting.
I sat down in my car and called my voicemail number; it was the recruiter from Microsoft, asking me to call back. Knowing it could be either really good or really bad news, I called.
“How are you doing?” she asked.
“I’m hanging in there,” I replied — my stock response for the next several years (it’s not as dishonest as “fine,” but doesn’t force the person I’m talking with to listen to a long story.
“I have good news,” she said. “I’m calling to make you a verbal job offer.”
I’m probably not the world’s best negotiator; I immediately replied, “Awesome! I accept.” She laughed and then told me about the terms of the offer, which were so amazingly generous I wouldn’t have been able to find much to negotiate over anyway. They would pay to move us out, with professional packers and everything. They’d pay for a couple of househunting expeditions. They’d pay for three months of a house rental, and would even find a three bedroom house since we had four kids.
And they would be fine with my start date being six weeks down the road, to give Susan time to recover from her surgery.
Second Call
Having just accepted a job, I now needed to make a second call: one to notify my employer that I’d be leaving the company.
I was nervous about this call; I felt like I was critical to the magazine and that it would be a hard blow to them to have me leave. I expected Mitch Koulouris, my boss, to take it hard. I resolved to get straight to the point, though.
“I’ve been offered a position at Microsoft, I’m going to have to leave the magazine.”
“That’s wonderful, Elden. Congratulations.”
“What?”
“It’s a tough time here; you don’t need that while you take care of your wife.”
“What about the magazine?” I asked, now — strangely — making the arguments I had worried he would be making.
“I’ll find another editor. Now tell me how Susan’s doing.”
“She’s in surgery right now. I’ll talk to you tomorrow, OK?”
Third Call (and Fourth, and Fifth…)
I went back into the hospital and found someone to tell me how Susan was doing. “She’s still in surgery; she will be for a while,” I was told.
So I went back out to my car and made a third phone call. This time, to a neighbor who is also a real estate agent.
“I’ve got to sell my house,” I told him.
Then I called my parents and Susan’s mom, letting them know that Susan was still in surgery, and that our lives were going to get even more hectic during the next few weeks.
Telling Susan
I went back into the waiting room to wait for the surgeon. He came in and told me everything had gone reasonably well. I went in to the recovery room and sat with Susan, waiting for her to wake up, so I could tell her everything.
She had one less breast. She still had cancer. She’d have to start chemo with a different doctor, in a different state, far from everyone we knew. I had a new job. We’d be moving while she recovered from surgery and we took care of four little kids, two of which were two years old.
I had done what I needed to do, but I still felt incredibly guilty. The truth is, even now, I still feel guilty about what I made Susan go through. At a time she should have been able to rest and recover, I made her go through three of the most stressful things a person can do, all at once: new job, big move, and cancer.
If I had known how bad things would be for her, maybe I would have turned down the job at Microsoft. Maybe I would have tried harder to find something local.
But I didn’t.
I took the job, thinking it was the right thing to do; the best way I could give her good treatment options. And, I told myself, everything will be fine.
So, once she was awake, I told her.
“Well, guess what I’ve been up to while you just laid around and slept all morning.”
Comments (41)
02.13.2012 | 2:26 pm
A Note from Fatty: I’m working on telling the story that will eventually be in the book, Fight Like Susan. Click here to read the previous post in this series.
I felt a strange mixture of disgust and relief. Disgust with the company, and relief that I had found out what kind of people I would have been working for, before I had joined them and moved to New Jersey.
Mixed in with that was a pretty big chunk of fear. I had four children, a wife with cancer, and a job that wasn’t paying the bills today — and I honestly didn’t know if I would still have any job at all within a few months. Or weeks. Or days.
Then, on the first working day of the new year, I got a call from Microsoft.
“We think there’s a job here that fits you a lot better than the first one you interviewed for,” she said. “Could you fly down for a day of interviews?”
Not wanting to start down a dead-end road, I told her, “You should know my wife just got diagnosed with breast cancer.”
“I’m so sorry,” the recruiter replied. “We can do the interviews later if you need.”
“No,” I said, still thinking about how my hopes for a new job had just gone belly up and not wanting to start down a path that wouldn’t go anywhere. “I just wanted to make sure that this isn’t going to be something that affects whether you can hire me.”
“Of course not,” she replied. “Usually I don’t go into our benefits ’til we’ve made an offer, but when you’re here, let’s set aside some time to talk about our health coverage. I think you’l find that it’s the best there is. Anywhere.”
Inside Track
Within a week I was at Microsoft for one of their famous interview circuits, where the first person who interviews you takes you to the next person who interviews you, who takes you to the next, and so forth.
You can kind of tell how you’re doing as you’re interviewing, because at any point during the day of interviews the person you’re talking with can say, “Thank you for your time,” and that’s it. You’re done.
If you make it to the lunch hour interview (where a person interviews you while you eat in the cafeteria), you’re doing pretty well. If you make it to the end of the workday, you’re doing really well. And if you make it to the secret-bonus interview where you talk with someone a couple levels above who you’d be reporting to, you’re at least a finalist.
I managed to stay sharp throughout the day (not as easy to do as you might think when you’re being interviewed by 6-8 very precise thinkers). During the five or ten minutes between interviews I’d sit in the lobby, awkwardly conversing with the other person who was interviewing for that job that day.
I did not tell this person that I had an inside track — the person who was the hiring manager for this position (Matt Carter) had been my manager once before, in another company.
And I’m pretty sure that he had written the position with me in mind.
I got called into the secret-bonus interview, had a good conversation about mountain biking and how riding in Utah was different than Washington, and then the day was over.
Nothing to do but wait, now.
I went back to the hotel, drained, and ordered room service. I called Susan, told her how things had gone, and that I was about 70% sure I had gotten the job. But all I could talk about was the medical coverage.
“Everything’s covered at 100%,” I said. “You can go to any doctor you want. Get any prescriptions we need. We wouldn’t pay a dime for any of it.”
“No way,” Susan said.
Susan and I agreed that even with this possibility, we couldn’t put off her mastectomy. It needed to happen right away — later that week, in fact.
Next, I got a call from my friend / former manager, asking me how I felt the day had gone.
“Really great,” I said, truthfully. But Matt could tell something was up and asked what the problem was.
“Susan’s got breast cancer.”
“Oh shit.”
“I know.”
Then Matt said something that stuck with me, maybe because he honored the statement so literally in the coming years: “Tena and I will take care of you guys.”
In a way, it was my first glimpse into how incredibly generous people can be.
Comments (26)
02.9.2012 | 12:27 pm
This post is going to be a little gooey. Not gooey as in a “Hey, here’s a recipe for marshmallow and mozerella kabobs I just whipped up.” Gooey as in I’m going to be pretty much shamelessly gushy about some bike-related stuff.
So you may want to put on some gloves or something.
We Live In The Future
It’s been the strangest winter. Instead of sweating on rollers, we’re out on the pavement (and sometimes even out on mountain bikes). It’s the November that never ended.
I’m not complaining, mind you. Far from it. Really, really far from it. (You’ll see what I mean in a second.)
So last weekend The Hammer, The IT Guy, and I were out doing a nice half-century ride (for locals: From Alpine out to Cedar Fort and back). We were on the return trip, each taking 1-mile pulls. I was taking my turn pulling for a mile, enjoying the ride and everyone’s company, when the thought struck me:
We live in the future.
What I meant was that, in a lot of the ways that are important to me — in other words, in terms of bike gear — stuff is so amazingly advanced and well-engineered and attractively designed and light and reliable that it might as well be Star Trek.
As I faded right (the shoulder of the road coming back from Cedar Fort is huge; three riders can ride abreast) and dropped back to let The IT Guy take his turn pulling, I yelled my epiphany to The Hammer.
“We live in the future!” I yelled.
“What?” She replied, which is pretty much the most commonly-used word in on-bike conversations.
“We live in the future!” I yelled, more loudly.
“I heard what you said the first time,” yelled The Hammer. “I just didn’t know what you’re talking about!”
“I’ll explain later,” I yelled back, and dropped onto her wheel. And I thought some more about how incredible bike gear is now.
Think about the bike itself. If you like carbon, you have an outrageous number of frame choices, all of them outrageously light (and many of them ridiculously strong). If you like steel, your options are better than ever before, especially as handbuilt bikes seem to be surging in popularity.
My road bike’s Shimano Di2 drivetrain hasn’t needed to be adjusted in more than a year, and I charge the battery maybe every five months. And that’s just Shimano. Amazingly, there are now three companies turning out fantastic drivetrains. The awesomeness of your choices is incredible.
Without really even trying now, you can build a 16-pound bike. If you try a little bit, you can build one that weighs under fifteen pounds.
That’s fifteen pounds. For a bike you ride all the time.
Of course, if you’re going to ride a mountain bike, the bike’s going to weigh a few pounds more. As in, it could weigh up to 25 pounds if it’s a cross country racer. Or it could weigh a ton if it’s a downhill machine, but in that case it’s going to be able to absorb hits you wouldn’t even have expected a motorcycle to tackle ten years ago.
Oh, and if you want to go all minimalist — rigid single speed — you can, without difficulty, build a mountain bike that weighs 17 pounds.
And then there are the wheels.
Thanks to tubeless tech, I hardly ever flat — road or mountain. And with some geniuses figuring out that larger, wider wheels are better for pretty much everything, my riding experience is now just unbelievably good.
And how about bike computers? Remember when there was a little wire that snaked along your stem, down the fork, and then kinda-sorta aligned with a magnet and then rewarded you with…your speed? And remember how you never had to replace batteries in your bike computers because bike computers never lasted more than the batteries they came with?
Now there are GPSs. My Garmin 500 is just remarkable, giving me all the information I could ever want (and more).
But that’s not all. Bike helmets have gotten measurably better. And so have clothes. And shoes. And pedals. And glasses. Everything, really.
It’s all so amazingly good now.
And so I wanted to say “Thanks.” Thanks to Ibis and Gary Fisher and Specialized and Orbea and Shimano and SRAM and Stans and Oakley and Garmin and Time and Giro and Twin Six and Pearl Izumi and Bontrager and Smartwool and Honey Stinger and CarboRocket and Action Wipes.
And thanks to the dozens — hundreds? — of other companies out there that I haven’t mentioned, because I can’t remember right now or I haven’t tried your stuff. You’re designing and building unbelievably good stuff that is so good I think back to just a few years back and laugh at how much better bikes and bike gear have become.
You guys in the bike industry work hard. And you make great stuff. Stuff that’s better than I would have ever even thought possible. Stuff that’s so good I can’t imagine it ever being better.
Cyclists have never had it so good. Really, we wouldn’t have even dreamed of having it so good.
So again, to you people who invent and design and manufacture: thanks. I love riding, and you’re a big part of why.
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