Time to get my sh!t together

All right. It’s time.

Time to stop messing around and get serious. My diet’s been off the rails. My focus has waned over the last few weeks.

This is when it gets hard.

I’m 8 weeks out, and I’m feeling the pressure. I’m feeling all of the bad food I’m consuming. I’m feeling all the stress of work and life right now. It’s feeling so easy to feel like I “earned” the right to just take it easy. Nobody judges you if you give up, right? If you say you tried? Nobody would judge you too harshly.

But we’re no longer that person that just says, “Well, I tried my best.”

I mean, sometimes I suppose I am, because you can’t do that to yourself all the time, that feeling of never good enough. You do just have to accept things the way they are sometimes.

But I mean the stuff I can control. And that means these extra 5 pounds have got to go. I’ll tell you what I don’t want to carry over 22,000 feet of elevation, and that is all this ice cream and all these candy bars.

No thank you.

And so we’re doing the diet thing. It’s not severe, and I’m still treating myself from time to time. Especially as my calories allow. But real food comes first. If I have something to fill at the end of the day, a little ice cream or cookie won’t hurt, for sure!

I’m also making sure the majority of my calories center around activity. Fuel the muscles properly before, during and after to maintain strength and stamina. I will never compromise on this.

But we’re done with the junk. I’m feeling better already. I’ve made a big effort over the last couple of days to take the step in the right direction. Now that I’m here, I’m not looking back. At least until my event is over.

Goal weight: 112 lbs. by mid-August. Let’s see what we can do!

I’m also amping up training. This is going to be a string of long-ish rides on the weekends. So maybe you’ll see me out on the streets of Cheyenne plugging away as I steadily increase the mileage. I have one event in the middle, the 719 Ride, after which I’ll take a week of recovery, then I’m gonna jump back in.

I would like to do the Ride for Sight century in early August, so we will see how that goes. That was my intention to use that for Bike MS, which went virtual. But we will see how my legs feel and how rested I am around that time. It’s a long and desolate ride, it can be tough physically but more so mentally. I spent many hours on last year’s just completely alone, and it was a bit of a struggle. I even almost turned around too early because I just thought I was lost.

That’s all part of the adventure, though, I suppose.

This is going to be two months of razor-sharp focus. I’ve got to get my shit together. It starts now.

I’ll see you out there on the road (or on the gravel)!