Thoughts about Fitness. Part 2.

             Losing fifty pounds in a few months should require a major life change.  But it didn’t.  Looking back, although it wasn’t easy, it was much easier than I suspected it would be.   

The challenging bit was the group of preconceptions I had about fitness.   I had a lot of junk in my head.  Like the healthy necessity of having three square meals a day, shared in Part 1.  All of these little biases added up to my ridiculous fitness beliefs.  For instance, whenever I exercised I ate more food as a ‘reward’.  And if I exercised a lot, it meant I got to eat and drink a lot.  Especially beer. 

The key point is that once I changed my beliefs, I behaved differently.   Not out of rigor, but out of desire.  These changes in behavior impacted my fitness surprisingly quickly.  And because these changes in behavior were down to new beliefs, it’s been effortless to remain fit.  By effortless I don’t mean without industry.  By effortless I mean that it’s now part of the habit of being who I am, so I don’t think of any of the behaviors as an effort.  The discipline is effortless.

So my thinking had to change first.  No shit, Sherlock, I hear you say.  I make this point because previously I had interpreted a ‘change of thinking’ as idiomatic for ‘get motivated’.  I had been motivated to get fit before.  I once endured the misery that is the Atkins Diet for 8 weeks.   That takes motivation.  And I’ve played rugby through several English winters, never missing a single practice or match, in the effort to get fit.  That takes motivation.  So, I had presumed, I just wasn’t motivated enough.  Or maybe my biology was just hard-wired for lumpy bits.  Or perhaps I just didn’t have the requisite level of selfish vanity necessary to get fit, I had told myself.

It wasn’t my motivation that changed, and this blog probably won’t provide much help to someone looking for motivation.   It was my information that changed.   It was the stuff I didn’t know.   And of course, I didn’t know I didn’t know this stuff, so I was caught in a slightly vicious loop of thinking I knew stuff I didn’t and it was all really my destiny to be chubby. 

Now, the stuff I didn’t know won’t be the stuff you don’t know.  And you’ll know stuff I don’t know.  So I’ll just share the stuff I learned, and hopefully something in here will be useful to someone else, even if it just proves to them how much stuff they know compared to me.

Let’s go back to the impetus.   On my cycling trip I’d burned 12,000 calories a day for three days, and still gained five pounds.  Could this really be muscle?  This is one of the most commonly misunderstood facts about fitness out there.  Yes, muscle weighs more than fat.  But the process of creating muscle takes a lot of energy, and in doing so most people will burn off more fat.  An article I read in Men’s Fitness held that, unless you have less than 20% body fat, when you exercise and gain weight, it ain’t muscle.  

This was a truly eye-opening shocker to me.  To burn 12,000 calories in a day is friggin’ hard work.  To learn this was a waste actually made me angry.  What the hell was going on?

We all know the rules.  If you consume more calories than you burn you’ll gain weight.  I had simply consumed 12,000+ calories a day.  With that much effort, I gained muscle and fat, but with that much body fat, I gained more fat than muscle.  The truth hurt.   

The average man burns off about 2200 calories a day through normal activity, the average woman about 1800.  A friend taught me this when he lost about 40 pounds ten years ago (and kept it off).   He was an advocate of calorie counting.  I thought it sounded tedious.

Reeling from my cycling debacle, I surrendered and started counting calories.  A banana is about 100 calories.  A muffin about 400.  A glass of water has virtually none.  My latte has 300.  It’s fairly disturbing how many calories are in things.  Especially certain things.  Whilst begrudgingly modifying my drinking habits due to the ridiculous calories in a beer, it seemed patently unfair that orange juice had so many, too.

Nevertheless, an interesting thing happened fairly quickly.  I stopped counting.   It’s not that I’d quit.  You simply learn how many calories are in stuff.  I only counted calories for about a month, because by that time I knew how many were in just about everything I ate.  You just remember.  So it wasn’t nearly as tedious as I’d expected, and now I know the calories in my favorite things for the rest of my life.

Calories are, unfortunately, only part of the equation.  The other big factor is what type of food you eat.  There are whole books on this, and I’m just trying to get back in the habit of writing without making it a full-time job, so I’ll share an abbreviated version.

Carbohydrates give you long-term energy.  Protein gives you medium term energy and sugars give you short-term energy.  Most of us need long-term energy at the beginning of the day, and don’t need any at the end of the day.   Carbs in the evening easily turn in to fat while you’re sleeping.

So I started eating carbs at breakfast and lunch only, and in the evenings I had my lightest meal of the day, without carbs.  Often just a soup.  This was the hardest bit.  For the first 10-12 days, by hunger pangs were so bad in the evenings I had to take a sleeping pill to get to sleep.  I’m not an advocate of medicating your life, so I’m not suggesting anyone else do this.  I’m just sharing what I did.

Fortunately, as I’d hoped, within a couple of weeks my body got used to having really light meals in the evening and I stopped the sleeping pills.

The other corollary of this counting carbs malarkey is your daily total.  Previous to this regime, I would work out once or twice a week, for 1-3 hours, and make it a real sweat-fest.  With this new regime I worked out every day, with a goal of 30 minutes but for a minimum of 20 minutes.  I figured, you can always find 20 minutes in a day... and once I'd gotten my butt up and doing it, I was often able to find 30 or 40.  Within that goal, I wanted to burn 300 calories as a minimum. 

My plan was simple.  Eat 2000 calories a day and burn 2500 calories a day.  The weight began to fall off.

However, this was not the effortless part.  I hadn’t put all the pieces together yet.  I was often hungry.

Then I read an article in Rolling Stone about General Stanley McChrystal.  In order to avoid sluggishness, he eats one meal a day.  Now this was extreme, but I often felt sluggish in the afternoon.  And I hate feeling sluggish.  This reminded me of what Bill Bryson had shared about the Victorians inventing lunch.  It also reminded me of climbing Mt Kenya - the Kikuyu porters who carried the tents ate two meals a day, and laughed at us ‘fat westerners’ who ate three meals a day.  Gotcha.  So I decided to stop eating lunch for a month, and see what that was like.

In short, that was the easiest part of the whole thing.  Yes, I felt hungry a bit at first but, because I wasn’t consuming many calories in the middle of the day (I didn’t count a banana or apple as lunch – snacks are allowed), I was able to eat larger breakfasts and dinners that were more enjoyable.

I still avoided carbs in the evenings.   I just tried to eat whatever would sate my hunger, and leave the big meal of the day for breakfast.  And once your main meal of the day is breakfast, you start enjoying them a lot more.  I now make sure my breakfast has lovely fresh fruits, nuts and whole grain carbs.  It’s incredibly tasty.

Which is another point.  Personally, I think a banana and a snickers bar are equally good in taste.  I don’t actually prefer sprite or apple juice to a glass of water.  I like them equally.  But when I didn’t know the caloric difference in them, I treated them as similar decisions.  If I felt low in blood sugar, I was just as likely to go for a candy bar, even though I love fruit.  Now I just grab the fruit.  Which is not only better for you but costs less, too.

The best part was new ideas about hunger itself.  I noticed that I felt more effective in the afternoons.  Could hunger be a good thing?  I did some googling.  It turns out, hunger can be incredibly good for you.  Various research suggests it acts as a natural anti-depressant, increases alertness, and can be good for learning.  It also stands to reason from an evolutionary perspective.  Our hunter-gatherer ancestors would have benefitted if hunger helped improve their vision, hearing and olfactory senses.  I wasn’t able to find any research to support this last idea, but I can attest to it empirically.

This idea, that hunger is good, proved to be the major lynchpin in the whole puzzle of my new fitness routine.  It sparked a review of my associations with hunger since childhood.  As children we’re often asked if we’re hungry and, if we are, immediately provided a remedy.  Hunger is a problem to be solved.  Further, whenever we’re upset or ill, well-meaning adults offer food as mollification. 

Just imagine if, instead, we were told that hunger makes you strong, hunger makes you alert, or hunger makes you smarter.  Which is apparently true.  So I decided to try.  Every time I felt hungry I tried to say to myself something like, ‘excellent, now I’ll be really effective today’.  It seemed to work!

Of course, I’m not talking about starving oneself or being unhealthy.   According to the research on hunger, it’s not even physiologically relevant until one hasn’t eaten for 12-24 hours.  And throughout history, mankind has often gone a few days without eating.  It’s part of our biological makeup.  And I was only skipping an invented meal that one clearly doesn’t need.

And when I was having a particularly hungry moment, I took someone’s advice (sorry but can’t remember who) and just had a glass of water.  It’s amazing how often this satisfied the urge.

The final piece of the puzzle was some ideas about dairy.  I’ve saved this till last as I’m not sure it had much to do with the weight loss.  I’d lost about 35 pounds by the time I started this stuff.  But it’s certainly part of my routine now.

I read an article in Men’s Health that suggested reducing dairy could improve your energy levels.  So just as an experiment I tried some goat’s milk, soya milk and almond milk.  I found all three to my liking.  They’re a bit different, but pretty good after the oddity of the first sip or two.  So I replaced dairy from my diet.

Here’s a question for you.  What kind of creature depends on another for its entire life?  A parasite, right?   A fair and considered answer, my friend.  It’s also a slightly-excessive-but-passable description of my previous use of dairy.  Consider this.  In the west, we spend the majority of our lives consuming dairy - milk, cheese, yoghurt, etc - that was intended for bovine development.  So what - I quite reasonably asked myself.  Perhaps you get it quicker than I did.  We spend our lives drinking the liquid nature spent millennia designing for mammals to grow to an average weight of 1200 lbs.  And quickly at that.  A newborn calf weighs about 80 lbs, and by six months old weighs about 500 lbs.  Mostly from milk.  Isn’t that impressive?  So milk is perfect for getting fat.

Aside from this are the health risks.  It wasn’t until recently I read this article about dairy.  In short, there is mounting scientific evidence that milk is not only actively bad for you, but also that most people, an astonishing 75%, cannot digest it properly past the age of five.  So why continue having it?  I mean, really, it isn’t that good, is it?

            So that’s the stuff I learned.  I’ve gone from thinking that fitness has more to do with exercise than diet (which it may have done a century ago) but in our plentiful society the opposite is true.  You cannot be healthy by exercising a lot and eating anything. But you can be fit by monitoring your diet with only light exercise.   Whilst this may not be particularly revolutionary or insightful, as a package of ideas it’s working for me.  And it’s left me with a mild curiosity about all things fitness.  If you have an article or idea that you think I might enjoy, let me know.

Thoughts about Fitness. Part 1.

Two years ago this week I rode a bicycle across Britain.  It was a modest undertaking by these sorts of treks – starting from the Lake District the journey spanned 200 miles over 3 days and finished in Edinburgh.  It is a beautifully scenic stretch of land with much to recommend it, but that’s not why I was there.  I was trying to get fit. 

My whole life I’d been a big boy.  At 6’1” and 235 lbs, I’d enjoyed an active life of rugby, volleyball and other exercise, but was still chubby.  It seemed to suit my frame.  Even as a kid I was a bit heavy.  I had plenty of girlfriends, though, so I guess it wasn’t too bad.

Only once had I been close to being slim.  In a two-week period I’d climbed Mt Kenya and Mt Kilimanjaro and lost about 35 lbs.  I was startled.  The lesson was clear.  The secret to getting fit was massive, sustained aerobic activity for many days. 

So there I was pedaling a bicycle across Britain.  After several days of riding, the log of which is its own blog account, I arrived in Edinburgh spiritually cleansed by the experience.  I knew from my Garmin bike computer I had burned over 12,000 calories a day.  It was tough as hell at times, but I felt confident about my trimming strategy.  So I stepped on the scale with confidence.  Followed by confusion.  I had gained 5 lbs over the previous 3 days. 

         At first, of course, this was a triumph.  As we all know, muscle is heavier than fat, so I had created a lot of muscle in the previous few days.  Aren’t I impressive, I thought.

Nevertheless, the demands of logic began to gnaw at me.  If I had lost 10 or 15 pounds of fat, as I hoped, then I had created 15 or 20 pounds of muscle.  In three days.  Was this possible?  Think about a pound of beef at the grocery store.  It’s a lot of meat.  I should be able to see 15 pounds of new muscle, right?  Well, I couldn’t see any.  Even being conservative, let’s say after riding all those miles I had lost 5 pounds of fat and had created 10 pounds of muscle.  According to my grocery store calculations, this should still be a visibly palpable creation of muscle.  Only problem was, I couldn’t see it.

This deduction made me question what I understood about my body.  It made me stop and think.  I wanted to understand this stuff.  Over the next few months I learned some things that allowed me to get very fit and lose about 50 lbs (or nearly 4 stone for you Brits).  Two years on I am still 185 lbs with a 32-inch waist. The majority of the difference between then and now has been what I learned.  So I thought I’d share that journey for whoever might find it either entertaining or useful.

         That journey starts in the early 19th century.  Britain enjoyed an unprecedented onset of wealth.  As the sun rose in New Zealand each morning, spanned across its colonies in India and Africa, and set in the Americas, the coffers of British merchants filled with the lode of the British Empire.  It was a period of exploitation and invention.  The ever-resourceful British invented many things, but this blog’s introduction is about a particular invention that has come to permeate Western life.   Not only has this development become ubiquitous, almost everyone that enjoys this creation has no idea it was even invented.  In fact, most people think this discovery has been around for centuries… when it simply hasn’t.

         What had the British invented?  Lunch. 

         As ever, necessity was the mother of invention.  According to Bill Bryson in ‘At Home’, the expanding wealth of the British Empire expanded the role of society in everyday life; the rigors of social etiquette produced a bewildering array of new social graces.  When invited to a meal one must not only accept the invitation but also had to return it.  Which had to be returned.  And so on.   This created a social diary so packed that new occasions had to be created to deal with the overload.  This is why not only lunch was invented, which has been embraced by the majority of Western society, but also tea-time, which hasn’t.  

         To be completely clear, lunch as a midday meal wasn’t what was invented.  In 1750 if you were invited to “dinner” in Britain it was most likely held just after midday.  In much of the north of England, the midday meal is still called dinner.  People ate two meals a day, in the morning and early afternoon.  At the end of the day there was no ‘meal’, although some would enjoy a snack.  By 1850, however, dinner was a formal meal held in the evenings and had become the largest meal of the day, inculcated with Victorian ritual.  With such a long period between breakfast and dinner, and a flourishing social diary to satisfy, the invention of lunch as a third major meal of the day was almost inevitable.

         This was an extraordinary revelation to me.  My entire life, I was taught one should have ‘three square meals’ a day.  It was the healthy thing to do.  Here was evidence this was simply untrue.  Three meals a day weren’t a careful gastronomic strategy for humanity – they were a tool for social climbing in Victorian Britain.  It wasn’t something the adults who taught it to me had thought about.  It was a habit.  Their parents had simply told them the same thing.

         This got me to wondering.  How many other false assumptions lay deeply buried in my psyche?  How often had I tried to make a healthy choice, only to inadvertently fall prey to a habit carried on by generations of unsuspecting supplicants?  What did I actually know about being healthy?

         This multi-part blog is going to share some of the ideas I came across in trying to answer these questions.  Previous to this journey, I thought all the books and articles about this subject were tedious and slightly extremist.   Having spent the last two years exploring this arena I can relate that, essentially, I was right.    So part 2 of this blog will share some tedium and extremism.  I think the essential aspects of learning this stuff is part of why our cultural habits are so much easier to perpetuate.  Hopefully, I’ll be able to distill what I’ve learned in a way that’s enjoyable to read.  In return, I hope you'll share any interesting ideas about fitness you've come across with me, either via comments or email.  

Before and after.  The first was taken on day one of my cycle ride to Scotland.  Actually felt pretty fit at the time.  The second one is a few months later.  Slightly embarrassing to share it, but hey, these things need proof.  And not feeling too embarrassed at 40.

         

The Caterpillar

'The human body grows a new stomach lining every five days. The average lifespan of a taste bud is ten days. The body grows a completely new skin every four weeks. The liver is replaced every six weeks. The human skeleton is replaced every three months.'

I just read this on the BBC website and was utterly surprised.  I wouldn't have shared it  without the venerated source, but... really?  We replace our skeleton every three months?  I'm gobsmacked.  It is simply amazing to think we are constantly changing at a deep cellular level.  At least physically.


The question is whether we do it mentally.  My friend Simon Larcey is convinced we are fundamentally the same throughout our lives.  He thinks we have a kind of 'spiritual DNA'. So our innate level of charity or ambition, for instance, is hard-wired at birth.  Simon suggests the circumstances of life simply provide a foil for a particular trait to display its depth.  For instance, he accepts that a personal failure might provide the environment to exhibit one's personal level of determination.  But it was always there.


It's a clever argument.  I think he's right.  


As James Allen and Proverbs would teach us, "as a man thinketh, so is he."  It's an utterly amazing idea.  When I was four years old, I had my first Damascene moment.  I stood on a six-foot hay-bale and knew, just knew, that the secret to flying was simply believing you could fly.  I also knew, just knew, that as a four-year old I was uniquely qualified to believe I could fly.  Silly adults couldn't believe it.  But I could.  So I jumped.  And I flew.  Yes, I flew.  It may not have been for very long, but I remember it clearly.  


I don't remember landing, but I must have landed as I broke my collarbone.


Despite this early success, my mind's power to change the laws of physics remains limited.  Fortunately, my mind's power to change my context, its ability to focus its perspective and the potential for these to help me fly mentally seem unlimited.


I think perhaps what Simon has yet to appreciate is that we have all-of-it within us.  I think we share the capacity for boundless love and merciless cruelty... at least at birth.  So he's right.   Wherever we are in our journey, we had it in us all along.  If we're down, it was always there.  If we're inspired, it was always there.  And if we choose to have an insight, if we choose to change our minds, if we choose to believe we can fundamentally grow and change as a person, it was always there.


There's another area of this thought I wonder if Simon has considered.  It seems to me his view perceives tragedy as a possibility that might bring out a set of traits.  IF you have this disaster, THEN you'll discover your level of courage or patience (or whatever trait you discover).  I think he's right again.  It's just that everyone has calamity.  We are guaranteed heartache.  It's not if.  It's not when.  It's when next?  And the response one chooses has these wonderful opportunities to develop.  Viktor Frankl said, "When we are no longer able to change the situation, we are challenged to change ourselves."


So at both a physical and mental level, you're developing today.  You may or may not be developing in a healthy way.  Regardless, a completely new you, at the cellular level, is being created today.  Just how are those energies being directed?  If it takes 3 months to replace your skeleton, how long does it take to replace your mind?

Stealing Made Legal. How Cool!

Except this isn't cool at all.  

I've come across an article from my newfound 'personal newspaper'.   On the one hand, I've found it too disturbing to fully distill here.  I'm afraid of my hyperbolic potential.  Plus, this blog isn't intended as a home to geo-political commentary; I'm just not a very geo-political person.  On the other hand, my moral compass impels me to share it.

Therefore, with the reader's understanding, I'll summarise the facts as I understand them.   A recent law was passed by the US Congress requiring the Fed to open its books on the bailout.  Firstly, well done Congress.  It’s a testament to democracy.  Commentators are just starting to pick through the mountain of paperwork - apparently over 21,000 transactions.

In itself, I found this number shocking.  I thought the bailout was just a few payments to a few large banks.   Am I alone?  I've read two books on the crises, and although I'll admit they were more about the general financial conundrum than the specific bailout decisions, I felt educated and would have guessed 50 major bailout transactions.  Twenty-one thousand?  So there were 21,000 separate and distinct payments, bound my contractual law, agreed in the haste of that financial and political cauldron?  This number alone, in that environment, began to prepare me.  

I've always understood corruption existed in America.  I've factored it in alongside poor Referee/Umpire decisions in sport.  Sure, the Braves would have won (at least) 3 World Series in the 90s without crap umpires, and yes, it was amazingly painful to be the best team of that decade but lose that official mantle to the team of Mickey Mantle.  But we had our chances and that's the way the cookie crumbles.  The Braves were not robbed.*  We simply lost a few close games by a few inches, and since we won a few that way, all was right in the world (if not exactly fair).  This was my perception of corruption in today's America: both common and criminal, but hardly a major factor in the general swing of things.  Was I naive, ignorant or stupid?

The article to which I refer was just published in Rolling Stone.  Whilst Rolling Stone is certainly a left-leaning publication, a) this article criticises left and right equally and b) their standard of journalistic integrity is strong to my knowledge.  I'll only include an excerpt.

"Instead of lending directly to car buyers and credit-card holders and students — that would have been socialism! — the Fed handed out a trillion dollars to banks and hedge funds almost interest-free.  In other words, the government lent taxpayer money to the same people who caused the crisis, so that they could then lend that money back to the taxpayer on the market virtually risk-free, at an enormous profit.

"Cue your Billy Mays voice, because wait, there's more! A key aspect ... is that the Fed doles out the money through what are known as non-recourse loans. Essentially, this means that if you don't pay the Fed back, it's no big deal. The mechanism works like this: Hedge Fund Goon borrows, say, $100 million from the Fed to buy crappy loans, which are then transferred to the Fed as collateral. If Hedge Fund Goon decides not to repay that $100 million, the Fed simply keeps its pile of crappy securities and calls everything even."

Out of respect for anyone who doesn't read me for politics, I'm stopping there.  But this is simply the most easily digestible excerpt.  There's more (like the $200 million given to a banker's wife).

I hope this article isn't accurate.  I hope it's a bunch of invented hippy claptrap.  But it sounds to me like it might be the tip of the iceberg.   If it is, I hope it is.  It would be an unfortunate boon to the capitalism inferred in the Federalist Papers by James Madison (vs Alexander Hamilton or Adam Smith's faith in business/elite).  It would perhaps be the painful truth needed to stem the tide of the plutocracy America seems to be becoming.  

Hope springs eternal. 

At least you see why I'm not very geo-political.  This stuff is too bloody serious.

Rick.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-real-housewives-of-wall-street-look-whos-cashing-in-on-the-bailout-20110411?page=1

* Do not talk to me about the '93 series against the Twins, and definitely do not bring up the name of umpire Drew Coble.

Man Motivated by Poem.

While enjoying a beer with a friend recently, he confided his start-up business idea.  It was based on some clever sounding technology, the weather and Twitter.  The conversation soon turned to the 'social media revolution', of which I have been at least a skeptic, at worst a cynic.  So I railed.  I lambasted the shallowness of trawling the internet for opinions.  I ripped into the emptiness of tweets about trivia.  Yet here I am.


Two separate 'logs' broke the camel's back.  The first and smaller log was my friend's description.  He informed me that one isn't required to follow Charlie Sheen or Lindsay Lohan; one can choose to follow Malcolm Gladwell, for instance, who may be a greater 'social media revolution' skeptic than myself.  Interesting.  Employing the vehicle against itself.  He also informed me there were several other regular tweeters and bloggers whose links were thoughtful and enriching.  Like Andrew Sullivan, TED and the New Yorker.  Essentially, he described it as having the ability to publish your own newspaper.  I began to feel both stupid and inspired.

Of course, the immediate drawback to publishing your own newspaper, for me, is the risk of constantly reinforcing my own views and never challenging my intellectual comfort zones.  See Michelle Bachmann.  But this could be countered by following a breadth of commentators.   I have done this, but I'd be grateful for any recommendations.  I've already found choosing who to invite into my Twitter feed is quite a commitment!

The second 'log' was a poem.  I tried to cite it when chatting to my friend, but whether it was the beer or the decade since I'd last read it, my version was woeful.  Written by my favourite poet, e. e. cummings, here's the text in full.

may my heart always be open to little
birds who are the secrets of living
whatever they sing is better than to know
and if men should not hear them men are old

may my mind stroll about hungry
and fearless and thirsty and supple
and even if it's sunday may i be wrong
for whenever men are right they are not young

and may myself do nothing usefully
and love yourself so more than truly
there's never been quite such a fool who could fail
pulling all the sky over him with one smile

It stills makes me think, 'wow'.  I first read this poem when I was 17.  After a childhood raised in the Bible belt, 'even if it's Sunday may I be wrong' hit me like the proverbial ton of bricks.  In the two+ decades since reading this poem, I still find it's message overwhelming.  'For whenever men are right they are not young'.  Simple.  Beautiful.  It invites us to be open-minded and willing to learn.  So here I am.

Cycling Blog - Lake District to Edinburgh.

Prologue
Earlier this year I made it a goal to ride a bicycle from London to Rome. I'm not sure why really, maybe because nobody told me I had to.

Well, this week is my first mini test of that adventure. I'm cycling from Kendal, England to Edinburgh, Scotland over the next 3 days, about 162 miles. If you google it, and select terrain view, it makes my ego feel a little better to take 3 days to do what a TdF rider would do in 3 hours.

I'll be keeping a short blog which you're invited to read. Right now I'm waiting outside the station to embark - friggin' bomb alert. Dont worry Mom, it's just the nanny state at work.

However, I already managed to have an inauspicious start. On the ride to the station, I was closing in on a healthy, fit-looking male cyclist and thought to myself, 'ah, if I could overtake this guy, with fully laden panniers, that would be a major serving of humble pie to start his day' so I started peddling furiously. Closing the distance, I started smiling to myself. Within 50 metres, ha ha! 40 now, so I'm going as hard as I can on a decline. Just then, a chap on a fixed gear*, with his legs pumping wildly, overtakes me like nothing.

Right then. Humble pie served. Off to the north where I can compete with grannies getting groceries.

*if you don't know, a fixed gear bike is one with only one gear, which doesn't allow you to free wheel. So you only have one gear, for inclines/declines/straights. In theory, I shouldn't get overtaken by one, especially on a decline.

Day 1
Perhaps it says it all that I have very little inclination to write this report. It was a fine afternoon of cycling, but I'm just exhausted.

Just the facts to start. 37.58 miles today with an average speed of 12.8 mph. I was still standing in the saddle in the last mile, so that's a good sign. My avg speed came down a lot in the last hour, which is a bad one.

Along the ride, I think I had all the weather possibilties of the Lake District. Everything from glorious sunshine to fog to spitting rain to driving hail. At one point it was so thick I felt like I'd ridden into a lake - my iPod was convinced as it stopped working.

Somewhere in the midst of all this I was treated to a glorious beauty one can scarcely imagine on a small island with 70 million people. It reminded me of the rolling hills and farming communities of my youth. Of course, that's been invaded by a horde of strip malls which, regardless of their necessity, have the design sense of cotton candy. The Lake District has mercilessly avoided this fate. It's buildings all appear to be rugged and timeless, with a nonchalant austerity. Obviously, it enjoys a lot of tourism, so you'd expect a certain aplomb in the town centers. But I was cycling through back roads, too. Even in the farms and personal homes, which must be subject to the vagaries of economy like everywhere else, a touch of class prevailed. I was smitten.

Despite the weather, or maybe it appeals to my masochistic side, I could imagine living, or at least writing a book, here.

I now sit in a village pub enjoying an over-priced but aesthetically amazing evening.

Tomorrow is 62 miles including, if I remember right, a 22 mile long climb. Oh joy.

Day 2 
Today started with all the promise of a legless rugby player. My Garmin sat-nav charger didn't charge my Garmin. Which is no big deal if you just have handy written directions, but I've come to be spoilt by my Garmin. It not only tells me when to turn left and right, which on these country lanes is a necessity, but also my heart rate, speed, distance, time, incline, gradient, reps and horoscope. None of these is that important, except my heart rate, but they become excellent motivational tools. 'I shld go faster on this incline' or 'Jupiter says to slow down'. So. I go online at the B&B and write down the succession of towns and villages I'd be riding through. Sorted.

Except that within 4 miles the wee slip of paper fluttered out of my pocket, gone with the wind. Ok. Not even handy written directions. I'm cycling through the border villages of England and Scotland with only the sun, which mercifully peaked through the clouds, to guide my internal compass.

I don't know how many miles I rode this morning but it was certainly more than the planned 34.

Along the way I was treated to more Cumbrian architecture with its seeming effortless endurance. It was a quality I would admire more and more as the day wore on.

Soon enough I was riding into Carlisle. Here is a city that shines as an example of how the Lake District's design sense has failed to gain universal adherence in Britain. Grotty, spongy and plain. Its saving grace was its shops, and I was able to replace the Garmin charger. Otherwise, I couldn't pedal through it quickly enough.

As I did, the ensuing climb began to loom in the distance. This would be my first attempt to traverse a mountain range, which is an elemental part of the London to Rome goal. These are tiny compared to the Alps, like a bear cub to his daddy. But they are still bona fide mountains, and I was going to ride across them.

FDR famously said, "we have nothing to fear but fear itself," and every year I appreciate the wisdom of those words more deeply. As I rode the 12 miles north of Carlisle for my appointed lunch break, I felt the tendrils of fear weaving their way into my legs, heart and mind. My legs were already deeply sore from the 70 miles I'd ridden before the lunch break - more miles than I'd ever done in a 24 hr period. And ahead of me lay a 26 mile ascent. No breaks. No free-wheeling. Every mile fought and sweat for.

That's fear talking though. And I could hear its insidious whisper with every revolution. But the secret to cycling, as much as I've been able to work out, is the same as everything else in life. Attack. Push forward. With patience and discipline, of course, don't go off crazily. As a hero of mine once put it, "Courage is the first of human qualities, because it is that which guarantees all the others." 

Over lunch I resolved to pray/meditate over the idea of courage, and to attack the climb on every single wretched mile of it.

It was also over lunch that the driving sleet started pouring outside.

Upon arriving in Hawick, said by the locals as 'Hoik' with a pronunciation similar to the sound made by one bringing mucous from their throat to their mouth before spitting, my first question was where are the mountains? Either I possess hitherto unknown powers of self-hypnosis or those weren't mountains I'd just climbed. More like downs really. Yes, big hills. Yes, tiring. And yes, my climb to Hawick was a long slog, but the gradients were mostly about 3-4%. And despite what my trusty website planner had told me, only about 10 miles of it was a truly constant incline. I could freewheel and catch my breath over most of it.

So where did I get the idea they were mountains? From several Brits, that's where. Quite a few people I'd shared my plans had said, "Oh, crossing over the mountains, are you?" So either I've taken the non-mountain route, or these are only mountains by some kind of technicality, like being x feet above sea level.

So this afternoon's ride wasn't nearly as bad as I'd feared before and at lunch. It's funny how often the fear is worse than the deal. One thing that helped was adopting the strategy to 'attack every mile' literally. As the Garmin had been charged over lunch, I could now track my distance, speed, etc etc. So for every mile ridden, I made sure to spend at least 20-30 seconds out of the saddle, attacking. It may not sound like much, but instead of looking at each hill with a foreboding 'oh dear, another one' I was thinking 'shall I attack here, or wait for a harder one'. The difference in the feeling while riding is immense.

The countryside is gorgeous and unspoilt, unless you count sheep shit. Its fumes occasionally threatened to tarnish some soulful vistas. Fortunately, the land here is so vast, or the wind so forgiving, it remains a splendid sojourn. The rolling hills and pockets of forests mingled with farms and streams really are my idea of heaven. If it weren't for the weather, which somehow avoided drenching me today, though I could see it unleashing on nearby hills, I could spend a few days relaxing here.

Arriving into Hawick, I couldn't have been more underwhelmed. Industrial, worn and insecure were my first impressions. Whilst not a mountain climb, I'd still cycled 112 miles to get here, and endured a reasonable slog. So quite unfairly, I expected the destination to somehow deserve the effort. It doesn't. 

Fortunately, the B&B is exquisite. I have not only an en suite bedroom, but also an anteroom with sofas and a wide screen telly. So I watched Harry Potter, a surprisingly enjoyable film.

I'm now off to bed feeling very confident about the ride to Edinburgh tomorrow. Only 52 miles. Can't believe I just typed that. Surely a good sign.

PS The Garmin doesn't really do horoscopes. That was a joke.

Day 3
A cycling friend tells me the Norwegians have a saying, "There's no such thing as bad weather, just bad clothing." Rubbish. If there are cycling Gods, and I now suspect there are, they viewed my post yesterday as derisive hubris and chose to redress the balance this morning.

Before leaving Hawick, for which I've changed my 3 words to tired, insecure and helpful (the people are just lovely), I noticed a warble on my front tire. I'd managed to shear some spokes on my front wheel! I found a local cycle shop to repair it, but didn't get a start on today's ride until nearly 11am.

This delay produced a head-on collision with a storm as I left Hawick. Perhaps this wouldn't have been so bad had I not finally found the 7-8% inclines I'd been promised. Add to that a 20-30mph headwind (actually felt closer to 40mph but I'm trying to be objective here) and you have the recipe for a gruelling morning. At times, I struggled to get the bike to 5mph! If it weren't for the winds, I'd have probably toppled over at the speeds I was going. 

The rare descent provided little respite. On a 6% one, where I might expect to go 35mph quite easily, the headwinds kept my top speed to 20mph. To be fair, with the stinging sleet battering my face, I didn't want to go much faster. On occasion I'd be treated to a gusting cross-wind, which destabilised the bike. Combine that with the sucking currents produced by large trucks overtaking at 50mph, and you have a somewhat frightening cocktail.

I know what you're thinking. Whinge, whinge, whinge.

Well, after enduring this cacophany of joys for 16 miles, I stopped for lunch in the town of Galashiels. From what I could see through the shroud of clouds, mist, rain and fog, it's an attractive place that hasn't coped well with the new economy. As if to puncuate the idea, the one local I asked to suggest a restaurant advised I go to the cafe at Tesco's! Determined not to patronise such a chain, I found a warm, friendly and attractive local place. They dried me off, warmed me up, and even flirted with me throughout. Guess they don't see many yanks, but there's still something disquieting about the suggestive leer of an ugly woman. Fortunately, the attractive ones were flirting with me too. Or maybe I was just road-weary and they were laughing at this drenched idiot actually riding in this weather. But you choose your reality, eh? I say it was flirting.

I think I naively expected the weather to lighten up in the ride after lunch. In London, storms like this pass over in a couple of hours. Not in Scotland. Today became a cruel exercise in futility.

I cannot think how to accurately convey the dispiriting effect that riding into a strong wind, hour after hour, has on the psyche. Every move is countered. Every attack depleted. After several efforts at standing in the saddle and getting my speed up to something pathetic like 10mph, a huge gust, seemingly sent directly from the cycling gods, would knock me back to my pre-attack speed. Even when I was going downhill I was required to push, the wind stronger than gravity. And because I was drenched, and I mean soaked through, I often forgot to drink my water and became slightly dehydrated. Not good.

I later discovered on Scottish telly that major highways were closed due to the flooding. It was a bad storm even by Scottish standards.

At one critical stage, having ridden 36 miles at an average of 8mph, I stopped under the shelter of a bus stop to eat a power bar. And I don't know, I'll never know, but if a bus had come along at that moment... 

So I can't say I attacked on every mile. I can't even say I looked up on every mile. It was a simple life lesson on what it means 'to endure'.

Finally, as the landscape changed with about 10 miles to go, the headwind almost vanished. It was euphoric. I had become so angry at the wind, I know - very silly, but somewhere in me I found a fierce desire to finish strong. Suddenly, finally, I was able to get out of the saddle and have it make a difference. I sang and hammered the pedals and rode into Edinburgh triumphant, at least in spirit. It was nearly 7 hours of riding on the day. I'd finished it.

Edinburgh warms the heart. It's mature, dynamic and globally provencial - one of Europe's great cities. I could walk around and just inhale the lively mojo of this place for hours, in fact I plan to. 

So there you go. 165-ish miles in 3 days. I'm taking the train back to London on Sunday. Perhaps today's journal lacks salesmanship, but I'm inexplicably still determined to do London - Rome. If you fancy joining me for a prep ride, or part/whole of the real McCoy, let me know.

Surgery Malarkey.... what happened.

Er....that sucked.

I'm now home from hospital, and not a minute too soon. Overall it's been a horrible experience that I'd like to avoid ever again. For sheer curiosity value, here's what happened. First the surgery. Obviously I don't remember anything from the surgery itself, but before surgery I did attempt to tell the anaesthetist a joke to see if I could somehow struggle against the tide of opiates and manage to get the punch line out before I went under. Didn't get close.

After surgery they send you to intensive care and apparently I've either got too low or high a threshold of something, but I came out of their drug-induced stupor many hours too soon, waking up to find myself on 100% life support, intubated and unable to consciously control my limbs enough to do anything, but semi-concious and semi-alert. This really sucked. It was like all those horrible 'buried-alive' scenarios except you wake up to find a river of inert bells, lights, monitors and technicians all streaming around you in a detached, slightly nightmarial procession. But I was only able to come out for a few minutes before falling back into the sea of drugs.  I regained ‘consciousness’ about once per day. Breathing was a forced, mechanical requirement, with air shoved inside and sucked out again, relentlessly. I was in this state for days and days. I could see the same other patients each time I awoke and they looked in really bad nick – completely lifeless and catatonic. All the while I’m trying to work out what state I’m in and why I’m being treated this way when clearly I can think. Tubes are everywhere but I’m not catatonic. I try to resist the lung machine and it’s just too strong so I figure I’ve got to fight my way out of this friggin thing. After about 8 days, I finally worked out how to move my hands and put my hand over my mouth. That’s when I felt the tube forcing the air and out. I hadn't understood until now. I was a machine. I tried to pull it out but I wasn’t strong enough.

I see a faceless woman in a white coat floating by and I wave to her to remove my tube. She says, “just a minute” and disappears. I lose consciousness while I’m waiting for her to reappear. When I wake up I guess it's the next day; it's been forever and there’s nobody around. Again I try to get the tube out, make a sound, figure out some way to let people know I’m in here, but nobody is there. It just felt incredibly cold and lonely. Until I fade away. There wasn’t really any physical pain I can remember, just the swimming and drowning and ebbing of consciousness twinned with a spiritually desperate screaming. I wake again, and see a woman but she has a bit of a face this time, and again I motion to the tube and again she says, “just a minute” and disappears. I try to follow her but my eyes won’t track to that part of the room or I can’t move my head or something. I’m determined not to fade away this time. I don’t sense any malice in the situation, just clinical uncaring distance. And I know I need to convince her I’m in here. So I start to look around the room to try to get my bearings but it’s all so foreign and white and sterile I just can’t think anything. 

Finally, I see her again and I motion to my tube again but she doesn’t seem to notice or care and I’m feeling very desperate now as I start to fade away again, really struggling not to lose myself but being pulled under all the same, all the while feeling the machine force the air in and out of my lungs, but I’m fading again and there’s nothing I can do.

And then, just like that, it’s out. The woman is next to me now, talking to me, trying to reassure me, and she even has water for me. That was such an overwhelming moment of complete gratitude as it is hard to describe. Euphoria. I’m so thirsty I drink about 2 or 3 cups of water and ask where I am - I tell her I'm not a vegetable! but I don’t really know what she says, I’m really just enjoying inhaling these massive breaths of fresh air. And then I’m out again.

This time when I wake up I need help, I’m going to vomit and I just scream out as loud as I can “HELP” and somebody new comes with something and I can vomit. And vomit. It’s pretty painful but in a nice way. Somehow, despite the toil and intestinal wrench of involuntary vomiting, despite the inability to breathe, despite the ripping feeling inside, it's nice to interact with the world, to know I'm alive, to feel the pain of life. This is when I ask how many days I’ve been in here. The woman says I’ve only been here a day. I don’t believe her.  It felt like it'd been days. She shows me a clock and says for me to just keep an eye on this. Over the next several lapses in consciousness I work out I’ve been coming and going in about 20-30 minute cycles. They keep giving me more morphine, but I won’t stay out.

Then they sent me to the High Dependency Unit where I continued a similar cycle for another 24 hours. At this stage I can count about 14 tubes coming in and out of my body in different places. The five biggest ones are drains to allow the excess internal bleeding an outlet. This is also where I notice the unexpected set of 18 metal staples holding together my groin and thigh. Apparently they had to use the femoral artery with the heart-lung machine this time. Thanks for telling me. 

The nurse comes over and asks me me to try to get out of bed, to stand, two days after surgery, which sounds about as likely as me singing a fucking show tune at that moment in time. But I try. After much finagling of tubes and wires and beds, a couple of nervous starts and a complete loss of dignity, to my immense surprise my legs don’t completely fall out from under me when I stand on them. I’m shaking and dripping and weak, but I’m standing. It’s not a great feeling, it just is. The only feeling I really have is a desire to get all these god-damned tubes out of me.

The next morning I’m still not dead, so they can take the tubes out of me now. I remember this from last time being the most painful part of the entire show, and ask why they have so many more in this time. Surgeon’s choice. Obviously. To be fair, open-heart surgery never gets properly painful. I’d say it’s below a broken bone or a torn ACL, but above a sprained ankle. As it turns out, pulling the tubes wasn’t as bad this time. Maybe it was because I didn’t watch and did Jedi mind tricks on myself, chanting and whatnot. Or maybe I was a big weakling during my previous open-heart surgery.

They decide to try a new drug on me, but they have to let some of the morphine wear out first, so I clear up mentally for about an hour or something and have some conversations with people, but I can’t remember them now. I remember having felt good in them, even fun. I also saw the incision for the first time. Bigger this time, with about 30 metal staples holding my chest together.

But the new drug is insidious. You’re awake for lots more of it…and outwardly you ‘feel fine’. You don’t ease in and out of consciousness - you walk around and have conversations. But with some people this new baby has mind-altering side effects, and guess who is one of the ‘lucky’ ones. So the next 4 days become a blur between reality and fiction, dream and nightmare, unable to tell the difference between the two. I just didnt understand what was real and what wasn't. It was so bad, I actually don't want to describe it, don't want to archive it, don't want to ever remember it. Just imagine if you really didn't know what is real, if you couldn't tell if you were awake or asleep. Ever. I started to suspect something in the drug as early as last Friday and starting taking less then the nurse portioned me, secretly hiding part of my dosage.

Finally on Sunday morning I confessed to the doctor that I was having trouble with reality, was concerned I was losing my mind, to which he simply replies, “ah, yeah, ok, one of the drugs you’re on sometimes gets that as a side effect.” Great. Thanks for telling me. You’ve got to be FRIGGIN KIDDING me! I couldn’t believe it and still feel sick just thinking about it. I felt like a Timothy Leary experiment, or one of those soldiers that 'helped' test the effects of atomic warfare.

So Monday I informed the hospital, my family, everybody who would listen, I would be checking out that day. Politely, with tact and diplomacy, I’m leaving. Anniken and mom thought I was bluffing. So I pack to walk home. What do you need before I go. Anything to sign? Because I’m leaving today. I will not be a guinea pig. I will walk home if needed.  I am leaving.

I’m now at home. Anniken, Freya, my mom and sister Kathy are here and it’s great and I feel like the recovery has finally begun. But, whew. That sucked.