What I wouldn’t give for a pizza.

I’m trying to lose some weight.

That probably puts me in the same boat as thousands of other Americans – the primary difference being that I’m attempting to do so via lifestyle alterations rather than expensive surgeries or shady supplements. Of course, I have a semi-rare advantage in this area: I already did it once before so I know it can be done again.

During the seven or so months I spent living in Japan I managed to drop a significant amount of weight. This was entirely by accident and, if you can believe it, I actually recall being surprised when I caught a glance of myself in a mirror whilst touring China. The weight loss was the result of lifestyle changes that were made completely unconsciously and enforced by the culture I was living in and the circumstances in which I found myself (poor). Of course, upon my return to the States I gained most of that weight back within a year or so but eventually managed to reach equilibrium by removing soda from my diet in all its forms.

Since moving to Madison, though, old habits returned. Of course the blame really rests with my own lack of self-control but, in true American Spirit, I will instead blame the cooler at work. It is chock full of succulent free drinks – fruit juices, vitamin waters (how fucking stupid are they?) and sodas of all kinds. Their low cost and ready availability would be my demise, along with the general stress of being a working man in a new city. Getting home tired each day, the thought of actually preparing healthy foods generally lost to the ease of frozen French fries, boxed macaroni and cheese, hotdogs and Pizza Hut. Combined with the typical sedentary office life, these factors conspired to make me…well, kind of a fatass. Let’s not pull punches here.

Anyway, I decided something had to be done a few weeks ago and, thus, set out to change my lifestyle as best I can. The first two major changes: strictly enforcing a 1600 Calorie daily menu and riding my bike to and from work twice a day (in the morning, home and back for lunch, and home in the evening). The former started out very rocky. Having gotten used to eating way more than I should, I found myself almost constantly hungry. However, the thought that I’d certainly existed on a similar diet for half a year in Japan reminded me that if I could only get used to the smaller, healthier portions again things would get easier. And, I’m happy to say, they mostly have.

I’ve managed to stay pretty much on this program for an entire month so far, during which I’ve dropped around 6 pounds. In the past two weeks I’ve added a 22 mile bike around one of the local lakes to my Saturdays which should, hopefully, help me increase that rate. Having bought a fairly accurate bathroom scale was also a good idea. I was on the fence at the start. I knew I was overweight – that much was obvious just by looking – but it didn’t gel until I saw the dreaded number two in the hundreds column of that seven-segment display. I have never, at any point in my life up until now, weighed that much, and the realization of such galvanized my motivation.

The long-term goal is to get down to around 170, which should put me safely in the healthy weight range for my height. For now I’m just hoping to see 189 by the time I head to my little brother’s high school graduation party in July. That’s a pretty conservative target, I know, but I figure it’s better to aim low and surpass it so as to keep myself motivated.

The ability to convincingly lie to oneself is probably the single greatest success factor in weight loss.

In which I am injured for your amusement.

The following is a true story. It may seem, on the surface, to be a ridiculous string of coincidences in which the universe decides to play middle school bully to the small, defenseless kid. It seems that way because that is exactly what has occurred.

It starts off with a rather savage wind storm around my current place of residence, winds strong enough that it toppled a few trees right in front of my eyes. These were not live, healthy trees, of course, but old dead ones. Nonetheless it is a pretty entertaining and perhaps slightly dangerous situation outside my window. Me being me, I decide to hop on my bike and ride around to survey some of the damage and make sure none of the trees that I heard fall (but couldn’t see) have landed on the driveway.

This is probably my first mistake.

As I’m turning onto the sidewalk and generally finding the high winds and whipping branches to be pretty invigorating my cell phone starts to ring. Being an expert cyclist I answer the phone with my right hand, a maneuver I’ve successfully completed hundreds of times in the past. I stop pedaling but the sidewalk is sloped downhill here so I’m maintaining most of my speed. The call turns out to be from my father, and we exchange a few pleasantries at which point I ask if he can hear me clearly. I explain that any difficulty he may be having is likely due to the very high winds around me.

It is at this point, no more than ten seconds after I got the call, that I hear the sound of a tree snapping. I can’t actually see it, but the sound in unmistakable. It is almost immediately followed by a bright orange flash and a very loud explosion sound, not unlike what you would expect from a particularly large firework. All of this commotion appears to be happening a dozen or so meters in front of me and to the side, and in a pure instinctive reaction my left hand squeezes down on the brake.

We can safely refer to this as my second mistake.

I realize my error almost instantly, releasing my phone (and sending it flying down the sidewalk in the process) and trying to get my other hand onto the handlebars. Unfortunately, by this time the momentum is too great to stop and shifting my weight backwards is not enough to keep me on the pedals. With my weight gone the bike comes to a swift and abrupt stop; sadly, my feet are not built to the same exactly quality as my transportation’s brakes. I continue forward and pitch over the handlebars as they catch me just above the crotch, cart wheeling in what I imagine must have been a wholly impressive manner. I do this down a few meters of concrete and eventually come to a stop on top of my bike.

The road I live on does not typically carry a high volume of traffic. Naturally, at the instant I’m making my spectacular dismount there are no less than four cars passing by on the left. The lead car pulls into the next driveway, which is a fair distance away, and out steps a very attractive young lady who shouts to me, asking if she should perhaps summon an ambulance.

I admire her civic minded nature, of course, but I also don’t think that my ineptitude requires official intervention. Thus, I attempt to stand and signal to her that I am fine or, at least, as fine as one can be after catapulting down the tarmac. It is at this moment that I realize that my bike’s seat has become impossibly wedged in the back pocket of my jeans. When I say I have no idea how it got there I am not exaggerating – the physics of the situation are mind boggling. Nonetheless, the seat remains wedged in defiance of all known physical laws and, in a very real application of the rest of them, keeps me from standing up since I’m lying on top of the bike.

This results in a very comical rendition of my stupid ass flailing about in a grim parody of intelligible sign language. I assume she either understood what I was getting at or found my seizures to be too frightening to stick around, because she quickly gets back into her car and drives off. At that point I manage to find the quick release on my seat and proceed to awkwardly slide the pole out of the bike frame, eventually standing triumphantly with the seat hanging jauntily from my pants.

In the meantime, my father has no idea what has occurred. He heard me speaking of high winds and then heard a rush of noise, then a distant female voice shouting about ambulances. He concludes that a tree has fallen on me and proceeds to leave a rather frantic message on the home answering machine wondering if I continue to draw breath and if he should, in fact, be sending emergency personnel to my location. Luckily, my phone still works even after its trip down the sidewalk and I manage to let him know that such measures are unnecessary. I then try to ride the bike back home only to notice that the chain has slipped off during my theatrics. I consider trying to get it back on, but a second glance at my bloodied and battered hand leads me to decide that wrestling a greasy chain might not be the most prudent course of action.

To assuage your no-doubt burning fears: I’m fine. I ripped up my right hand and shoulder a bit and have some nasty bruises almost everywhere else, but all in all I got off pretty well. It turns out that the explosion was the result of a large branch landing on a nearby power line.

As always, it is my fondest wish that my misfortune can provide entertainment for somebody, somewhere.

Nice rack.

Although I haven’t made any public statements before now, it’s been my intention to reduce my gasoline usage this summer. This was, as you may have guessed, one of several ulterior motives behind my bike purchase a few weeks back. The decision was based primarily on an overall desire to be more environmentally conscious about the things I do and the way I live my life – money did play a small role, but considering how much I spent on the bike it’s unlikely that I’ll see a net savings for quite some time.

In any case, I’ve been doing a pretty good job so far. Being a suburb, Novi definitely doesn’t go out of its way to be bike (or pedestrian, for that matter) friendly. Sidewalks are spotty at best…most streets simply don’t have them at all, and those that do rarely have them along the entirety of the street. This isn’t such a big deal, though, because there are generally ample (if heavily graveled) shoulders when there aren’t any proper sidewalks. The real problem actually stems from a critical lack of bike parking. That probably doesn’t seem like an issue until you remember that suburbs are made entirely of quarter-acre subdivisions and strip malls.

I have the advantage of living very near the “center” of Novi, which means that most of the places I want to go on any given day are within two or three miles (let’s ignore, for a moment, the fact that Novi itself is only twenty-five square miles). Unfortunately, like all the suburbs around here, it’s composed entirely of varying sorts of malls, be they strip or otherwise. Last week I took a ride around almost all of these places looking for potential bike parking and came up largely empty-handed. In aggregate, all of downtown Novi has approximately eight bike racks, all of which are on the small side.

Of these eight, six are located in the Novi Town Center, a single strip mall-type location. The other two are at Fountain Walk, the formerly pedestrian-friendly outdoor mall a half mile away. What this means is that none of the dozen or so other commercial centers have any bike racks whatsoever. The degree to which this is a problem varies somewhat – for example, Twelve Oaks mall has light poles along most of the entranceways which I’ve been using to lock up. However, I’m betting that they don’t actually want me to do that, and I imagine that one of these days I’ll come out to find a ticket and a note that my bike has been impounded.

As a result of all this, I’ve been working on a proposal for the city council. I understand that suburbanites love their SUVs and are unlikely to give them up for any reason, but I don’t think that means wealthy suburbs like Novi and Farmington can’t attempt to make themselves more bike-friendly. Perhaps I’m being naïve, but I like to think that suburbanites would use their cars less if their cities were designed to make bike and foot travel easier, safer and more…well, expected. I don’t think that making sure all the downtown shopping areas have a couple of bike racks would be a bad start.

I don’t wear bike shorts.

About two weeks ago I decided it was time to get myself a new bike. Having left my (decidedly inferior) bike in Houghton when I left, I’ve been using my father’s old, poorly-maintained bike in the interim. Unfortunately for my bank account this proved to be completely untenable. An exhaustive list of the bike’s problems would be pointless, but it’s sufficient to say that the brakes, tires, shifters and derailleur all probably need to be replaced. The practical consequences of this? I couldn’t shift out of the middle gear on the main ring and only three of the seven gears on the rear ring were usable. Oh, and I was entirely unable to stop. So there’s that.

Anyway, I dropped by American Cycle and Fitness with my brother and walked out an hour later with a Trek 4300 Disc. It ended up being more than I wanted to spend by nearly a hundred dollars but I’m quite happy with my purchase. It’s significantly lighter than my old bike, which is great, but the real draw was the shifters. Looking around at other bikes, it seems that in the years since I bought my original bike shifting technology has gotten better, or cheaper, or both. These new shifters are basically a pair of triggers – pull one to shift up a gear, push the other to shift down a gear. The whole thing is very digital and takes a lot of the thought out of shifting on the fly. No worrying about getting halfway into a gear and jumping the chain, no worrying about over-shifting while climbing a hill, no accidental shifts when you nail a particularly difficult root or pothole.

Since buying the bike I’ve done two different trails, one at Lakeshore Park in Novi and another at Island Lake in Brighton. Both of them are highly technical trails, though I’d say that the Novi one is much more difficult in terms of obstacles. There are tons of logs, log piles and tight curves to deal with.

That isn’t to say that Island Lake is easy, at least not for me. In fact, when I did the trail this morning it was like a clinic in “things Norm can’t do.” The problem, when you come down to it, is sand; I am simply incapable of making tough climbs on sandy slopes. What’s worse, the heavy rains we got earlier in the week washed tons of sand onto the trail surface itself. The net result of this was no less than five wipeouts on my part, almost all of them on curves just after descents that were covered in inches of sand. As the morning wore on I got better about maintaining my balance and sticking to the extreme outside or inside of corners where the sand was shallowest, but the climbs never really got any better.

Nonetheless, I’m pretty excited about my new trail escapades. I’m not nearly fit enough to try doing them daily, at least not yet, but for now my goal is every other day. Hopefully within the next month or so I’ll see major improvements in stamina, trail confidence and general physical fitness. I wouldn’t mind losing a couple of pounds, either.