Well, it’s that time of year again.
You guys, I went for a ride.
It wasn’t even close to being my first bike ride since arriving in Berlin, but it was my first bike ride in Berlin with the deliberate decision to get where I was going in the healthiest way.
I wasn’t going to post about it, but I just finished watching a pretty great video (below) and felt inspired to say so.
I’ve come and gone from fitness in my life, but the past 10 years have been a very extended phase of ‘and gone’.
In that time, we’ve welcomed two kids into the world.
I’ve entered my 40s.
My work life has gotten more intense (and frankly so has my parenting life).
I now work from home and don’t leave the house anywhere near often enough.
And… yeah.
None of that is an uncommon story, of course, but y’all know some folks deal and adjust better than others when those life changes come along.
I used to do about 180 kilometres each week on my pushbike, through a combination of commuting and recreational riding. I once even did 245km in one day with the Around The Bay ride in Melbourne!
But that’s now all dwindled to near zero.
All that riding was my sole source of fitness (and a relatively slim build), along with a faster metabolism than I have now.
So the loss of those parts of my life, without changing much about my diet in the journey from young idiot to old idiot, has had exacty the effects you can imagine they’d have.
I weighed between 85-90kg in my early 30s – eating poorly but riding a lot. (I know 85-90kg doesn’t sound good, especially at 176cm tall, but I’m legit big-boned! Jibbidy tells me that’s not just a made-up concept. 😂)
Nowadays, I’m 130kg and largely inactive. Frankly, a single flight of stairs will get me breathing more heavily than it should.
The frustrating thing is that a big, big part of my desire to move to Berlin was that I loved the idea of riding everywhere. Just like the old days, before we moved to the outer suburbs of Melbourne and the places we needed to go were much further apart and so… we just drove everywhere.
We got here, though, and it was Summer and the weather was in the mid 30s. Now it’s winter and the weather is sub-5 or even down to the high negatives. It bites, figuratively and fairly literally, and so I’ve probably only ridden with legpower about a dozen times since we got here.
Habits. That’s the thing, isn’t it?
When it’s been years since you had the fitness and habit-driven mindset that comes with regular riding – and thus a general willingness to jump into the saddle without much thought for the weather – it’s really damn easy to forego the pushy in favour of the tram or the bus or even a Lime scooter.
(We’ve so far refused to buy a car, so at least we’re doing right by the future in that regard.)
So let’s call this a resolution: Pushbike life. No more Lime scooters, as much as I love them. No more trams and buses whenever practicality and extreme weather don’t need to be factored into the trip. If I don’t need to get anywhere distant, I’ll walk instead of ride. And if I don’t need to get anywhere at all, I’ll walk anyway.
While we’re at it, let’s throw in – as Pumphrey puts it in his video above – some effort on the food front. I’m not committing to anything structured, as it’s too damn hard with ADHD, but the very least I can do is sink less booze and ease up on the sweets and creamy condiments. That’s not nothing!
That’ll do, I reckon.
Wish me luck! Let’s bring this fella back from 2013:
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