Weigh In 1 and 2 And ...Riding

Last week I walked into Health Services' scale room and mounted the platform.... 173.75 #. Hmmm, not bad but geez, I felt the weight melting off all week and somehow had 8-9# loss in mind. Coming in at 6.25# lost, I felt an odd sensation of "Hey! I worked harder than that. Were my brake pads rubbing of something?" - just like in a post-race review where everything went well but you end up slower than last year's race, or slower than the guy you beat last year. That just goes to show me it'll come off as fast as it does, but there is a redeeming explanation too: my weight has just been moving around! Ah, yes, surely the bench presses I added to my weight (pun irresitable) routine 4 weeks ago must be adding muscle mass in my upper body as I lose it around the middle! Eureka.

Today I stepped on and my weight was 171.75. What the?! I ate less calories and exercised more than the week before. Conclusion: my upper body must be bursting forth like Arnold or Rocky. Impressive. My mirror says otherwise so there must be a mysterious force at work. Logical huh? This morning's weigh-in also taught me something else, that MLW and my decision to discard our "other" scale at home was fraught with ego... we kept the one that was 5-6 pounds less than the discard some years ago. I stepped on it today before leaving home and it showed 166 pounds. OK, so my scale at home is 5-6 pounds light - which means race weight is really 160# and I had 20 to lose, not 25.

Somewhere on my body is a chamber labelled "super dense fat inside". It has a tiny little hole from which yellow ooze eminates and dissolves into my bloodstream when aerobically exercising.
Which brings me to riding.
Saturday morning I ventured out on my Canterbury loop 22 miles of solid riding on snowmobile trails, marshes, some road and plenty of hills. It was 16 when I left and 24 upon return... I stopped three times for a nice 2.5 hours ride on stuff that was solid and offered some long continuous pushes. The legs felt pretty beat later on but not enough to keep me from going out again on the same route on Sunday with a new riding buddy, Pete. 22 more miles. 5 hours in the dead of winter on that route. It puts a smile on my face like the one that grew across my face last night when New Orleans intercepted Manning's pass. That's all folks.