ChrisCowan.us

It was HOT!…. got to see some friends and family… ate some good food… didn’t take any photos… probably won’t move back there…

Every adventure starts out the night before doing some last minute maintenance and bike prep. Tighten down all the hatches, make sure everything is in working order. One of my concerns was some rubbing my rear disc was making on the calipers. So I took my wheel off and stared to inspect everything. I took a look at the rear hub. It was loose. I logged on to ParkTool.com and looked up how to rebuild the rear hub. An hour and some cussing I got it dialed in and on the bike (The cussing was because I didn’t have the proper tools to make the fix). Everything was working perfectly. I hopped on the bike and took a victory lap around the block just to confirm.

After my maintenance, I went to bed around 9 pm. My wife makes fun of me for going to bed early but when you have to get up at 5 am to go riding you need all the extra sleep you can get. I fluffed my pillows and laid my head down and began dreaming of the next day’s adventure.

beep… beep… Beep… Beep… BEEEEEP… BEEEEEP… BEEE… I hit the snooze. 5 am is freaking early! beep… beep… Beep… Beep… BEEEEEP… BEEEEEP… BEEE… I turned off the alarm and hopped out of bed. That’s my new thing… HOPPING! I went through my morning ritual of pooping, weighing myself, getting dressed and eating a Cliff bar while reading the morning news.

I started gathering up the gear. Helmet, shoes, camelback, extra water bottle, sunglasses, headband, gloves, tools, first aid kit… first aid kit… “Honey! WHERE IS MY FIRST AID KIT?”… “I DON’T KNOW! I HAVEN’T SEEN IT SINCE WE MOVED!” Ugh! I hop in the car and go to the local Safeway. NO GAS!… ugh! I stop in at the Shell next to the Safeway to fill up. Once there I walk down the pharmacy aisle and low and behold a perfect size first aid kit, it has 96 lifesaving items. PERFECT!

I get home pack the car and start to drive towards the Santa Cruz mountains. Every adventure starts with winding roads through the mountains. In California, the birth place of mountain biking, every thing happens in the mountains. IT REALLY IS MOUNTAIN + BIKING. You have to ride up the mountain and then back down. You get fit really quick. Where was I… right… driving on the winding roads up to the trail head. I come across a sign that say “Road Closed in 3 Miles”… wtf… then in three miles there is another sign that says “Road Closed”. I’m not at the trailhead so I figured “Go For It!” (that’s the mountain bike credo.) Past the rock slide and the one lane pass where the road caved in I come across the trailhead.

I get out of the car and start getting all my gear on. Then two guys ride past me and I ask which route most people take. The first guy replies, “Are you CrankyMonkey?”… “Yup!”… “I’m SCNEWBIE! Sweet, we are heading up this way… we can wait for you.” I posted on MTBR.com that I’m newish in town looking for a good place to ride. SCNEWBIE replied and said they where going to ride DEMO on Saturday and that if I made it up there to look for them around 8:30. Since I was late due to the first aid escapade I figured I missed them. Bonus!

We started up the 5 mile climb to the top of the trail. The first three miles was on a two lane road which was pretty easy. Then we turned off onto a dirt fire road and begin some steeper climbing through the trees.

SCNEWBIE brought his Downhill bike and was about 15 minutes behind us. Once we got to the top there was this awesome view of Monterey Bay covered by the clouds (the picture from my shitty camera doesn’t do it justice).

We then hung out chatting with other riders and waited for SCNEWBIE.

Once he caught up we started down this awesome flowing singletrack. It had a few spots that where a little challenging but only because we where in the trees and my sunglasses where too dark. It was super fast and flowed with banked turns. This is the trail that every mountain biker dreams about. Then we came to Saw Pit. It was just as flowing but with a lot more rocks and technical sections and STEEP.

SCNEWBIE flew through these sections with ease. The 6 inches of travel in the front and the 9 inches in the back really smoothes out the trail. I took a few spills on some loose turns and ran off the trail cause I couldn’t see where I was going (damn sunglasses). But at the end I was smiling from EAR TO EAR!

After our decent it was time to climb out to the parking lot. We all took off our helmets and put on our iPods and prepared for the climb.

I started out with SCNEWBIE’s friend (I forgot his name… sorry…), but shortly after we started I got into the groove and took off. Climbing on a bike is very challenging psychologically. You have to keep telling yourself that you can do this all day long and that it’s not really pain your feeling. It feels good… I can do this… this is nothing… relax… keep your body relaxed… only use your legs… don’t be a pussy… don’t hold back… don’t stop! It can be very challenging to motivate yourself. The iPod makes the climbs easier cause the beat sets a good pace.

Once back at the parking lot, SCNEWBIE’s friend shows up about 5 minutes behind me and we start the post ride BS session. He pulls out and ice cold Gatorade and tosses it my way. LIFESAVER!!!! After an awesome ride a ice cold Gatorade is exactly what the doctor ordered. We chat for a while until SCNEWBIE shows up on his 45 pound behemoth… exhausted! His effort to lug that beast around can only be described as HEROIC! We finish our Gatorades and and said our goodbyes…

(Me at the top…)

One of the most common questions I get related to my weight loss is, “How did you do it?” I’m always a little reluctant to answer this question because it requires a lot of time to get into the way I think about things. And since blogs are a great forum for rambling on about one’s inner most thoughts and crackpot theories I will now subject you to it.

Diets are for keeping FAT people fat. The whole idea of “Going on a Diet” implies that someday you will go off a diet. I always thought of a diet as a temporary thing. I will diet for a couple months, loose some weight and then go back to business as usual. I think most people approach diets in the same manner. If you are serious about changing your life and loosing weight you have to do exactly that… Change your life. You have to get rid of the notion that this will be a temporary change in your lifestyle.

So when you decide to change your lifestyle you need to come to grips that it’s not going to be easy, it’s going to be fucking hard. That right there will discourage most people from changing at all.

Change is difficult because people like to have comfort in knowing what will happen next. Change creates uncertainty and stress. If you want to change your weight and get healthy it’s going to be hard. Did I mention that change is hard. That’s why most people will work dead end jobs for 20 years and never be happy because are afraid that changing will be hard and their life might be worse. Sometimes it’s easier to live your life in a rut then to pull yourself out. Even if you know deep down that life outside the rut will be better.

I have a philosophy that I stole from my quality assurance class, if you want to change your habit you have to do it during life altering events. At the end of WWII we dropped the atom bomb on Japan. Everything they knew was completely wiped out in a bright flash of light. One minute they where conquering nations then next minute they were defeated. They had to start over. They changed from a nation of war to a nation of industry. Everything they knew was gone and then had no choice but to change.

You need to put yourself in that state of change. You need to make a change to your life and piggy back other changes on top of it. A good time to take on new habits and loose old ones is during a job change or moving or having a near death experience. You’re already uncomfortable because of the catalyst change (I just made that up!), your routine is not going to be the same. So start a new one and try to incorporate the health changes and goals. It will make it easier.

For me I changed jobs and moved to California. I’ve already become so comfortable with change in the last six months and changing the way I eat and exercising more wasn’t any more painful then deciding how I was going to get to work or navigating my new surroundings. Every time I walk out the door to go somewhere new I get lost, it’s very uncomfortable.

So that’s the first part. The next thing you need to do is understand why your are fat. I like to think back to our ancestors, thousands of years ago we didn’t have an abundant supply of food. Our bodies are designed to survive. Part of that design is to store energy when we have an excess supply of food. The first homo sapiens would hunt for food. When they found it they would eat everything they could. They would gorge and eat more calories then they burned for the day. Because their bodies where in starvation mode, they would convert the excess calories into fat to be use later when they didn’t have any food.

Not much has changed with our bodies, they still respond the same way. Except we are not constantly in starvation mode. We have so much food that our bodies can’t burn off the excess calories so we store it. It goes straight to our asses and bellies. The trick to loosing weight is to burn more calories then you eat. But not too much more, if you go overboard then your body will go into starvation mode and your body will hold on to the extra calories.

There are two ways to do this. One, eat less calories then your body requires to sustain itself in your sedentary state. Two, burn more calories then you eat (by exercising). What I’ve found is there’s a point where you have eat enough so your body doesn’t go into starvation mode when exercising. I have no scientific proof or equation to find the sweet spot, I just experiment till I start loosing weight. At some point you will be loosing weight and saying to yourself, “Damn I’m eating like a pig but I’m still loosing weight!” That’s the sweet spot.

The first method sucks cause you can hardly eat anything. It’s like a typical diet. You control your weight with the amount of GOOD food you eat. The second method is awesome because you eat a lot of GOOD food and you get the added high from the endorphins from exercise. You can also eat some crappy food like pizza and candy and not be effected. But the majority of what you eat needs to be healthy. Just think of the food pyramid and you pretty much can’t go wrong.