The Long Road Back: Getting Back Into Shape

It all started as a plan to lose weight, as the number at
the  weight scale had been slowly and steadily
increasing for the last year or so. My fitness level had dropped dramatically
and I had become somewhat of a couch potato. However, the real wake-up call
came when during our Christmas trip to Colombia to visit my family, many relatives
commented on my weight gain. “Luces gordo” they said, which means “you look fat”.
I knew I had put on weight, but I just hadn’t realized how far I had let myself
go. At that point, I had not stepped on a weight scale for the last 6 months or
so and I decided to wait to do so until a few weeks after we came back from our
trip. When we came back in January, I was in a state of disbelief when I
stepped on the scale; I was looking at the number (179 Lbs), but I couldn’t quite
believe I had let it go this far without doing anything about it. Now, 179 lbs.
might not sound like a whole lot, but it definitely is for a guy my height (5’8”).

It was time to put a plan in place and get back to an active
lifestyle. It was time to get back into cycling! However, my fitness base was
gone and I realized it the moment I tried to do some cross training by using an
elliptical machine. It only took fifteen minutes on that machine, at what I
thought was a moderate effort and the cold sweat started trickling down my
forehead and I felt dizzy. Needless to say, I had to get off the elliptical and
lay down on the floor because I felt like I was going to puke.

Travel back in time 10 or 11 years and I was actually racing
road bikes, mostly in the middle of the pack and on occasion even placing in
the top 10. That’s why my current state of fitness had hit me even harder,
because the colossal drop had not been anyone’s fault but my own. Anyway, the
past is the past and now I had to look ahead and take the steps I had to take
to change things around. At the same time, my love for cycling was coming back
and I was yearning to get back into the kind of shape that  allowed me to make a long ride enjoyable rather than some sort of sadistic endeavor.

My road bike, a Trek 5200 from the year 2000, had been
collecting dust for the better part of the last two years. The original Ultegra
components (shifters and derailleurs) on it had thrown in the towel and I just
didn’t want to put the money into upgrading them, as buying photography equipment
was more of a priority at that time. The frame is the same frame that Lance
Armstrong used to win his first three tours and yet it was sitting in our
parking spot collecting dust with the tires deflated and looking overall as if it
had seen way better days.

Well, that was back in January, I graduated from 15 mins. on
the elliptical to 30, then 40 and eventually I started riding the stationary
bike at our condo building gym right after the elliptical. To make a long story
short, the exercise routine had moved from 1 hour to two hours and along with
cardio,  I had introduced some weight lifting. I had been doing the routine for nearly two months and felt that the very basic aerobic base I had built was enough to move to the bike.

To be continued…