Best of 2015: Adventure

In absolutely no logical order, some scenes of Cheryl and I pushing our limits this year.

By the end of the year, we'd look back on this fondly as one of the easier bridges to get across.

Once you start collecting conchs, it's tough to stop.

Sunset at Murrell's Inlet

What we looked like a few minutes before launching on our 100 mile bike ride. There's a good reason we don't have "after" pictures.

Cheryl out on a limb.

This log cabin isn't on the official map of Eno State Park. We found it by following the very faint remnants of an old road.

At Hanging Rock.

At Tory's Den.

A winter's walk.

No one said there'd be dinosaurs!

Perched atop Cthulhu.

New River Trail, about 40 miles in, just before the last ten miles ground our spirits to dust.

Old tunnel on New River Trail.

Cheryl grooving on the ponies at Grayson Highlands.

A little together time at the top of the world.

Some alone time at the top of the world!

Reaching the top of the world ain't easy.

We took a lot of selfies in front of water and rocks. This is one of them.

Abandoned trestle off the Mountain to Sea Trail.

Literally pushing the boundaries at Eno State Park.

Neuse River Trail.

Warrior Dash!

That might be Cheryl near the top. The camera was a little muddy....

Definitely Cheryl!

We also posed in front of fields. Lots and lots of fields.

Advanced selfie taking while bike riding.

Not the only time this year we were caught by rain.

Biking after rain turns the pavement into mirrors.

Nothing like sharing adventures with family!

I've always liked Popeye. All this biking is giving me his legs.

Cheryl spend much of the year with a bike chain grease tattoo.

Best of 2015: Nature

Cheryl and I spent a good part of this year outdoors, keeping an eye open for the wonders of nature. Nature was happy to oblige!

We didn't have to journey far for this taste of spring. It's from a tulip tree in our front yard.

A stretch along the Eno we nicknamed "the Shire" for its idyllic beauty.

Farm creek on the New River Trail.

Colorful gravel beneath water at Hanging Rock.

I think this little guy is from the Mountain to Sea Trail near Old Oxford Road.

Petal suspended in a spider web, Eno State Park.

Off the marked path in Eno State Park, exploring an old road to nowhere.

Skinks near the Durham Farmer's Market.

A hitchhiker in a conch we found, just before we returned him to the marsh.

Dragonfly at Murrell's Inlet.

Dunes across from Murrell's Inlet.

This was taken in my mom's back yard.

Congregation of butterflies, looking somewhat like sailboats.

Sunset at Occaneechee Mountain

Fall at Jordan Lake.

Flower at Duke Gardens. Cheryl told me what it was, but I've forgotten. It reminds me of dragon scales.

Taken as we were leaving Duke Cancer Clinic.

This one was still occupied, so we left him.

Turtle in the Trent in New Bern.

Albino faun at American Tobacco Trail.

Blue heron near American Tobacco Trail.

Training for Cancer

Last weekend, Cheryl and I both went over our 2015 goals of 1200 miles of measured activity on Endomondo. Since it’s shaping up to be a warm December, we think there’s a good chance our combined mileage will go past 2500. This includes biking, hiking, kayaking, walking, and running.

It’s been over three years since we decided to no longer be couch potatoes and made ourselves get outside. Before we changed our lifestyles, a six mile bike ride would wipe us out. This year, we did a century ride, 100 miles in a single day. Five years ago, we hiked at Hanging Rock and were so fatigued by the three miles round trip to the eponymous landmark that we just sat at the picnic tables while our friends walked less than a quarter mile to look at a waterfall. Now, we’ve hiked to every peak in the park, over 11 miles of strenuous terrain, in a single day. We’re as fit and healthy as we’ve ever been in our lives.

And now Cheryl has breast cancer. We got the news the day before Thanksgiving, and only a week after her father passed away from a brain tumor. There’s never a good time to be told you have cancer, but this particular timing felt especially challenging.

If there’s any bright side at all to the news, it’s that Cheryl received her diagnosis this year instead of three years ago. Three years ago, Cheryl was on three different medications to control her blood pressure, her blood sugar, and her cholesterol. As she’s shed pounds and logged the miles, her cardiovascular health has improved dramatically, and her doctor has been taking her off these meds. Her heart is definitely stronger than it was three years ago. She has great physical stamina, and, just as important, amazing mental stamina. She’s learned she can reach the tops of mountains. She’s learned she can paddle against powerful tides in the ocean to reach calmer waters.

All this will come in handy in the coming months. The chemo regimen she’ll be undertaking is especially dangerous if you have heart problems, high blood pressure, or are diabetic. If we’d not changed our lives, she’d probably be dealing with all these things. Chemo is also notorious for inducing fatigue. But, she’s felt the fatigue that hits when the sun goes down on a 100 mile bike ride and you’re only at mile 95, and now you have to fight both exhaustion and the darkness to make it back to the car. She’ll go into this battle with cancer with more muscle, guts, and sheer stubborn toughness than she had at her command a few years back.

When we started this fitness regimen, our primary goal was to lose weight. After we both dropped pounds and our weights plateaued, the new goal was simply to go further. We became addicted to seeing parts of the world we could never have seen from the front seats of our car. You can’t drive to the hidden beach on Sandy Island. You can’t drive to the top of Hanging Rock, or to the remains of log cabins tucked away in hidden parts of Eno State Park.

We also got obsessed with numbers. We’ve biked fifty miles in a day. Can we do sixty? Seventy-five? How far can we hike? Kayak? Run? We don’t bring a lot of speed to the game, but we have found an amazing capacity for just moving forward, mile after mile after mile, and not stopping.

We didn’t know at the time we were training for cancer. For Cheryl, there’s only three weeks from diagnosis to starting chemo. If she were still dangerously overweight, she might not of have found the tumor while it was still so small. If she were borderline diabetic, with her blood pressure out of control, three weeks wouldn’t be enough time to correct these health issues to improve her odds of toughing out the chemo. Three weeks aren’t enough. Three years were. I’m so grateful we started when we did.

Back to My Fitness Pal

In last month's blog post I wrote: "I logged over 170 miles of activity in July, and still gained 10 pounds, because while on vacation for two weeks I pigged out on ice cream and soft drinks and junk food. Soda was an especially weak spot for me. I don't keep any at my house, so in my normal life I can usually avoid it, but the refrigerators were full of it on both vacations. I'd come in from kayaking and think, eh, I just burned a thousand calories, a can of Mountain Dew isn't going to hurt me. Or, I just biked ten miles, so let's splurge and have a milkshake. The truth is, exercise doesn't protect you from excessive sugar. Fortunately, now that we're back home, I can resume more sensible eating habits and hopefully shed the pounds as quickly as I picked them up."

As I was writing this, my weight was roughly 265 pounds. I was still close to 20 pounds lighter than when I'd first started my fitness life three years ago, and still feeling good that my body composition was a lot different than it had been when I hit 265 on my way down.

But, August continued to be a disaster for me. I felt like I was eating more sensibly, but every time I got on the scale, my weight continued to creep upward. Finally, near the end of August, I hit 274. Worse, most of my pants were getting really tight. When I started my fitness habits three years ago, I had a 42 inch waist. At my thinnest six months into my dieting, I'd been comfortable in 36" waist line pants, but for most of the last two and a half years I'd been most comfortable in 38" pants. That was still four inches off my largest waistline, and I felt pretty good about it. Now, I was starting to put aside pants as being too tight. The thought of buying pants with a larger waistline bothered me. But... I felt like I was eating pretty well. Why couldn't I get back to what I felt was my healthy weight and waistline?

The reality was, feeling like I was eating pretty well and actually eating pretty well are two different things. On September 1, I went back onto My Fitness Pal after being off of it for a month. I started faithfully tracking all the food I was eating, and discovered all the areas where I'd been letting calories sneak back into my life. One of the biggest problems was portion size. Now that Cheryl and I are weighing and measuring everything once more, we can see where we were likely slipping up. For instance, when we measure calories, we are careful to use exactly one tablespoon of olive oil to brown onions and garlic. When we weren't counting calories, I'd just pour enough olive oil into a pan to coat the bottom and go for it, easily tripling or quadrupling the calories from fat. Also, when you start tracking calories faithfully, it's a lot easier to throw mayonnaise and cheese onto a sandwich.

We've also been less likely to pig out after exercising. I mentioned that we'd go for a long bike ride then feel like we deserved a milkshake. If we'd made our 100 mile bike ride in the spring like we'd originally planned, we'd probably have celebrated with a huge steak dinner afterwards and likely have had dessert. When we did it last weekend, afterward we split an order of hot wings, and no dessert.

I'm already seeing a good trend down. After months where every day my weight seemed to be going up, it's nice to see the numbers going in the other direction. I only ever want to contemplate needing new pants because my current ones are too loose.

Fitness Milestone: 3000 Miles

My legs, 3000 miles later

 

Endomondo Summary, showing total distance I've tracked.

 



Two weeks ago, I logged into Endomondo to see how our activity for this year was comparing to last year. Back in June during the Warrior Dash, Cheryl seriously bruised her tailbone, which kept us off bikes all the rest of the month. We've hustled during July to make up miles, but summer heat keeps us from making really long bike rides. We've logged a lot of miles via kayak, but kayak miles are much, much slower than bike miles. Fortunately, we've had two weeks of vacation, so lots of little trips do add up, and we're back on track to reach our goal of 1200 miles for the year.

However, when I logged into Endomondo to look at my stats, I noticed for the first time the "Total Distance" stat. At the time, I was sitting at 2950 miles. I was stunned to realize I was about to reach 3000 miles of travel as tracked by Endomondo. I started using the app in December 2012, only logging 12 miles that month. So, it's taken me two years and eight months to travel 3000 miles in a combination of biking, hiking, running, kayaking, and just plain walking. Endomondo helpfully tells me how far I've travelled toward the Moon, but I thought it would sound more impressive to say that I've travelled from my house to Los Angeles via my own power. However, it turns out that I passed LA some time back, since that's only 2500 miles from my house. So I looked at the furthest point I could reach in the contiguous United States, and it turns out I've even managed to propel myself past Seattle, a mere 2839 miles away. Thanks to kayaking, I could now be sitting about 170 miles out into the Pacific!

With Endomondo, I only track actual exercise. I know some people use FitBits or other tracking to monitor their total steps during the day. I'm actually on my feet a good part of my normal work day, but worry that if I counted the miles I log as part of my regular movement, it might demotivate me to log exercise miles.

Three years ago, I hadn't heard of Endomondo. Three years ago, I was a couch potato who thought that moving 100 miles in a year via hiking and biking was an insane amount of exercise. 100 miles a month wasn't even conceivable. Running 100 yards was out of the question, let alone running 5k. And at the time, I thought of myself as relatively active. We'd occasionally go on two mile hikes, or go out and bike for three or four miles. We just didn't know how our world was about to change.

A few random thoughts on being active:

First, Cheryl and I often go out and push ourselves with long bike rides (40 miles plus) or long hikes (10 miles plus). But our health benefits kicked in with much more modest activities. One and two mile walks around the neighborhood are the backbone that supports the more ambitious activities. By sheer luck, we bought a house that's exactly one mile from the nearest shopping center with a grocery store, a few restaurants, and our gym. Walking there and back a few times a week really adds up.

Second, the physical benefits are nice, but the mental benefits are astonishing. Study after study shows that physical activity improves mental health, and I can testify that, compared to who I was three years ago, I'm now more optimistic, less stressed, and much more confident. If we've developed any unpleasant mental traits, I would say that we both now have a tendency to feel a bit smug when we're out biking, thinking about all the people we know who are probably sitting in front of a television as we zoom past trees.

Third, for the first time in my five decades on the planet, I feel like an actual part of nature. Nature used to be a place I'd occasionally visit, but I spent the vast majority of my waking life under a roof. I'm sure in terms of actual hours, I'm still inside more than outside, but now I've journeyed to the tops of mountains, I've kayaked into the depths of swamps, I've seen rivers and meadows and forests that I could never reach via automobile. We've gotten familiar with the sky. We schedule our lives around sunsets and full moons and good breezes. We've learned to handle heat and sun, how to hike through snow, and we've discovered that hours in the rain will not melt us.

Fourth, a word of caution: When Cheryl and I started our fitness kick a few years ago, our primary objective was to lose weight. One thing I believed at the time was that exercise was more important than diet. If I went out and biked 50 miles, that would certainly offset any number of Whoppers, right? Heck, if you look at the Endomondo stats, it even shows how many burgers I've burned with all my exercise. But I logged over 170 miles of activity in July, and still gained 10 pounds, because while on vacation for two weeks I pigged out on ice cream and soft drinks and junk food. Soda was an especially weak spot for me. I don't keep any at my house, so in my normal life I can usually avoid it, but the refrigerators were full of it on both vacations. I'd come in from kayaking and think, eh, I just burned a thousand calories, a can of Mountain Dew isn't going to hurt me. Or, I just biked ten miles, so let's splurge and have a milkshake. The truth is, exercise doesn't protect you from excessive sugar. Fortunately, now that we're back home, I can resume more sensible eating habits and hopefully shed the pounds as quickly as I picked them up.