Exercising Journey

 Exercise is only half of the journey.      I have been having a hard time with getting to a goal weight and size. I am still in better shape than I have been in the past few year but I have been gaining the weight back. Dispite all the exercise I was doing I was still eating more than I should have been. In past updates I was talking about dieting again and I was eating less than was before the journey started but it was all still just what ever I felt like. I mean I was diong at least an hour of cycling every morning and walking I can eat what ever right? Well I was WRONG. I want to be clear about something though the exercise was not in vain it has plenty of benefits that are not about weight loss. At my last weigh in yesterday I was up to 177.5 but my pants all still fit. Prior in the journey when I was this weight my pants did not fit.      Since my last post I have been starting to log my food in Samsung health again and started to make...

I am stuck in some kind of rut! I have been trying to work on a bit of a post about how the cycling and walking are around me. I have been out there just about every day for the past 2 years cycling and walking palces instead of driving to them. It has been awesome and I wanted to show others the bad parts of doing this and some of the really good parts.  This is where my rut started. I had a plan to take some video and photos of the area and point out the parts I really like and the parts I really hate. I have been focusing on my exercise but I have focused less on the eating. I have not just eaten everything in sight and have still be sticking to healthy things but life things have got in my way. That being said I have started balloning up in weight again. Even with all the cycling and walking I have been gaining weight. This is where my rut has started its hard to think or do anything different when the things you have been working on have been not working even though they ...

The Journey is on going. I have been focusing on some of the things I have been having issues with recently. One of those things was the over eating again and not counting callories. I started doing that again and so far its been working out well. I have only lost 2 LBs so far but I know from prior weight loss that this is not a big deal. I also have been focusing on getting more of the exercising in than I had prior. It has been a bit of a colder winter and I do not mind getting dressed properly to go out in the cold but waking up and being tired and then having to get dressed to go out in the cold was causing me to not do it as much as I would like. I have been back to cycling almost every day again. The past 30 days I have done 250 miles of cycling and I am starting to feel good again.  When I do not end up cycling in the morning or at least going for a walk I end up feeling more stressed and upset about things than I should. It taking less effort to get out there and ride my bi...

Took a few weeks off of blogging.  I needed a little bit to just not think about writing anything. I am not the best writer in the world to begin with but I was noticing that I was not putting any thought into what I was writing. I started this blog a few years ago and had slightly different idea on what I was going to do with it. I intended to have it be all out the journey of getting myself back into exercising and losing some weight. I was going to focus more and more on the workouts and talk about the things that happen along the way. For a while I was writing about all of the stuff that I have been doing and the things I wanted to do but I feel into bit of a rut. I have not stopped exercising and my goals have not really changed but 2 years in and I started to just focus on cycling and lost track of losing weight. This has caused me to write almost the same thing over and over again just slightly differently. I was losing my ambition to keep writing about my jou...

 New cycling season. New cycling stuff. I have been a home body with more running inside on my treadmill and not so much going out of the house. I don't know what it is with this recent winter but I do not want to be cold for even a second in the morning anymore. I do not mind the cold normally and I have a fat bike to go riding in the snow but something has changed inside of me that just can not get with it to ride in the cold.  Today was not much of an exception except I got a new toy I really wanted to play with and I can not go cycling mid day becuase I have a full time job so I got dressed and put my new toy on the bike.  Its the bike computer in the picture. I will say I did not spend a lot of money on this bike computer and really just wanted to have it for the speed to be displayed as I ride. It offers a lot more than that such as syncing to Strava with a phone app. Lucky for me I have a very old phone that is not tied to any or my real accounts so I did test...

 Snow stopped me from exercising outside. It has been a few weeks after a few snow storms that had totals of around 2 feet. The roads were plowed and I was able to get out and ride in the road if I wanted to but there was not really enough space on the side of the road for a bike to fit and I am not about to get hit by a driver who is half paying attention and in a rush so I have been exercising inside. It has been a lot of treadmill runs and lifting again. I do enjoy doing those things but I was starting to miss my morning bike ride. A few days ago I decided that I was going to see if the path was plowed... This was just before another storm so there was an attempt at part of it but it just stopped so I rode in the street that day.  Three days ago I got annoyed that I was just working out inside so I went for a bike ride and picked a longer way to get to the main path that I know they plowed. Once I was there I noticed that the path I normally take to get to the mai...

 Happy New Year! I know this is a bit late for a happy new year post but things happen sometimes and I just did not have time to get around to posting. The start of the year was not awesome for me I ended up getting the flu or covid or something else I do not know what it was but I was sick for a week. That being said I never bothered going to the DR because it was not that bad and I don't have to leave the house for any reason so I just stayed at home and rested. I wish that I put more time into exercising but I was really just not well enough for it. Sickness was not the only problem there was a lot of work issues and extended family issues that came up that needed tending to so I was just not in it at all for the past few weeks. I have not gone over my calories for eating but I was not even walking on my treadmill. I want to say resting was good but I have not felt worse in a while overall. Its not like I feel sick but my sleep is not as good and it hard to wake up in the m...

 I broke my fat bike! I took a ton of time a few weeks ago to tune up the fat bike and it was running very smoothly. A few days later it started shifting poorly and I thought it was just because of bad cheap components. Well its not that its not because of cheap parts but it was not the parts I thought it would have been. After a ride where my chain kept falling off I flipped the fat bike over to check over the gears and shift cables. I noticed the freewheel was loose so I took the tire off... That is when I noticed there was a real bad problem, the whole freewheel just fell to the ground. I have had freewheel loosen up and get sloppy but I have not seen the whole thing just fall apart like this one did. I attempted to put it back on but thats when I noticed that it was far worse than I first thought. If you notice in the first picture there is something missing that needs to be there for things to work.  I zoomed into the problem part from the mess of cogs on the ground. That...

Progress is going but updates paused. I have still be doing the journey and taking keeping in a diet of tracking my caloires. I slowed down a bit on the exercise but I have not stopped and I do not plan on stopping anytime soon. I had the knee pain a few weeks ago that has mostly gone away for now unless I stand for too long then it starts to feel off again.  I also do not plan on stopping the blog either I just had to focus on other things in life and I did not want to put much thought into making anythig for the blog. Not that my process here is difficult persay but I do head out with my camera and think about what I am going to write while on my rides. Instead of making really awful updates with half thought out updates I just did not bother updating.  With all this being said I noticed after logging back in to make this update that blogger has a new beta feature for "creating more engaging content". I am not ever going to use AI to write anything on this blog or use i...

 Starting with the fun! The other week I was doing so well with excersizing and had a blast riding in the rain one morning.  Riding in the pouring rain is fun there is no one around and you get to just take in the ride. Sure I got wet but it was not cold out so being wet was fine. I was very happy ater this ride even thinking nothing is going to stop my morning rides not even pouring rain.  Then I started lifting again....  I do not know what happened but I put the weights on the rack and got ready to do squats. I went down for my first one and my right knee felt a little off nothing too bad but just off. When I finished my 5th squat it hurt. I thought to myself it must have been just the position I was in I will lay off of it for the day and try again. The next day I went for my morning ride and the knee pain was back but this time it was on my bike. It was not bad enough to keep me from riding that day so I kept going. This was a bad idea because later that da...

I took out my kayak! I had a few hours free the other day and decided it was time to take out my kayak. I have had this kayak for over 10 years now and I used to use it every weekend but I moved and had kids and just stopped using it. It is an inflatable kayak that I am a bit suppirsed it has not had issues in the years I have owned it. I tested it out before heading to the lake and it pumpped up fine so I went out to the lake near me and just set off for a quick lap around the lake.  The lake is about 2 miles from one shore line to the other and 1/3 of a mile wide or so. I did not get out any tools to measure it but there is enough space to kayak around and have some fun but its not a huge lake that would take all day to paddle around. I ened up going from the boat launch area to the other end and back in about an hour and that was a lot of just sitting there taking photos and taking in the moment.   It was a good time paddling around the lake and I got some fun photos from i...

 School for my kids means early rides for me. I have been waking up fairly early in the morning during the summer months. My kids are out of school and I do not need to wake up at 6AM for any reason other than making sure to get them ready for school so I don't set an alarm to wake up that early. Still I have been waking up with out an alarm clock at 6:30 and get on my bike by 7AM. I will say I have not been an early riser for years but after the CPAP and getting into a rutine of cycling and getting kids ready for school I wake up early ready to go. Anyway I am excited for the summer to be over as it means I will be out of my house and on my bike at 6:30 instead of 7AM giving me more time to ride. I was able to get out there early today and it was very foggy out making my normal ride prettier. I only stopped for one photo today because I had to get back home quickly but I can not wait for a few more early morning rides where it is foggy and cool enough out that I am not drippi...

Walmart is offering new Ozark Trail bikes.  I like to keep my eye on the bike offerings from Walmart because I like their Ozark Trail brand of bikes. They are cheap but very useable bikes. I currently own three of them and like all of them for what they are and what I use them for. The three I own are the Explorer G.1, Ridge M.2, and the Fat Tire bike I think its called the Ranger. I ride all of them for different reasons and find that at what they cost they are very good bikes to own. The Explorer is my favorite bike they offer and it is the one I ride every day and on all of my long rides. It has yet to let me down even though there have been some problems none of them are bad enough for me to dislike the bike. At a cost of 250 USD I do not mind riding where I would not want to ride a more costly bike. Riding in the rain sure what ever, to the store absolutely, or maybe in the woods where it was very much not made to go? YUP that is not a problem. I feel the similar about the oth...

 Heat Waves make cycling awful and awesome! I took a few days off from work to get things done around the house and just not think about work for a while. It just happens to be the week that my area is having a heat wave again. I do not mind the heat or the cold all that much but I do mind when sweating so much that my eyes sting after about 5 minutes of cycling. I decided today was going to be a longer cycling day. Nothing too crazy no 100 miles on a whim or anything but just not think about it and go out there and ride for as long as I felt like it. Well right at the start I was sweating. It was already 90 degrees when I left the house and it was not noon yet. I had a bottle of water and figured I could stop at a store if I really needed more than that.  I started the normal route I take and added a little extra on to it. Before the end of the path there is a another path I can take that crosses a major road and takes you onto another path section and into a state park....