Well, I’ve done it!  I’ve made it to the mythical 100^th blog post.  It’s my 69^th of 2018, and I’ve totalled over 102,000 words since I began blogging on January 1, 2016.  It’s been an interesting, fun, exhausting experiment telling my story as a bicyclist as well as exploring other topics like health, politics, culture and more.  In this post I’ll review my progress thus far this year and look at what I still need to work on.  I stayed in today and unpacked more, organized alot, and cooked, and so I’m itching to go on at least a metaphorical ride.  Got your helmet on?  Good, let’s go!

Bicycling

Mostly due to various health challenges, I’ve only ridden my bicycle 513 miles this year.  But I also had reduced my goal from 100 miles per week to 50 to focus on job searching and blogging.  So I’m still on track to make my real goal, which is to average 4,000 miles per year.  Counting 2015 before I got my Garmin vivoactiv watch, which I estimate at about 3,000, and the 10,000 miles I biked in 2016-17, I only need 3,000 this year to make 16,000 in four years.  So I am on track to accomplish that.  More would be better, but A Dude’s gotta prioritize.

Biking still takes me about 10 miles an hour including breaks, stopping for traffic lights, and the occasional photograph, so 5 hours a week is plenty.  Hopefully I’ll get healthy enough to go on some longer rides.  But no charity rides for me, because I need to raise funds for the Keep A Dude from Becoming Homeless Foundation, i.e., get a job, various gigs, or some other income.  I continue to be carless and commute for the most part, although housesitting did require use of a car.  Don’t judge me!  I was helping a friend.

Eating / Weight Loss

This has been a challenge.  I started the year very strongly by going on a juice fast for three days and very healthy vegan diet for another four.  But that lowered my iron to unhealthy levels which created some scary symptoms from which I’m still recovering with an iron-rich diet and supplementation.  I have managed to reduce eating processed carbs to less than 1% of my diet.  That means no:  bread, cookies, chips, tortillas, crackers, cake, pastries of any kind, eggrolls and  the hardest one to give up of all:  pizza.  Here and there I’ve had something containing flour but I’ve rediscovered rice cakes, puffed kamut cereal, popcorn, quinoa and other whole grains.

This has not lead to any weight loss, however.  That could be because I’ve not been eating as many vegetables and I stopped taking psyllium fiber and apple cider vinegar to reduce my appetite.  Eating on a regular schedule would be a good choice, one that was hard even when I had a regular job.  So would sleeping enough and regularly, another big problem for me.  I will continue trying to be a little less of a fathlete, but like any addiction, the struggle is real, and lifelong.  I do plan to lose the rest of the weight I want to all at once when I die.  Hopefully not anytime soon or because of a car, but rather natural causes.  Saving the life of someone else in heroic fashion would be alright.  But not yet.

Walking

This has been a successful accomplishment.  I walked 30’ every single day so far in 2018, and twice a day for almost three weeks with good old Buddy the dog.  Today I took the long way to the store and unintentionally ended up doing over two miles.  Compared to many, it’s nothing.  But I’m not doing that; I’m comparing myself to myself, and I’m kicking my butt!  I would like to get faster and at some point where I feel I won’t injure myself by running or at least jogging a bit.  I do feel better  for the most part, except when injuries flare up, and then it sucks.  All I can do then is suck it up and go slow.

There were times I did not want to do it, was sick, or fatigued from the anemia, so just shuffled around, and that was probably not very helpful.  But in following advice ascribed to Jerry Seinfeld – Do Not Break The Chain – I was able to get over that hump of resistance, so now I look forward to the walk.  It would be more skillful to get up and out and do it first thing in the morning, or at least before dark or right after dinner.  Or even twice a day, maybe for shorter times.  When I’ve hit 10,000 steps that’s been gratifying, and that may be a good goal for me at some point.

Writing

Blogging daily has been great! But also tougher than I thought.  While I usually didn’t lack a topic, waiting for the end of the day was sometimes very counterproductive, because I was tired and it took a lot longer to finish.  I also was not aware that engaging one’s audience is expected and takes as much if not more time than blogging.  However, I really like doing that.  There are some amazing poets, fiction writers, and other non-fiction/ exercise / memoir-type bloggers like A Dude out there on WordPress.

Most bloggers seem to agree that writing is more important than responding to every single interaction.  But I’m really grateful to everyone who has viewed, liked, commented and especially followed my blog.  If you’re one of those folks, you know who you are, and thank you very much!  I hope to continue to engage as time allows and to even feature some guest blogs, particularly if they relate to bicycling.  If you’re interested, be in touch with what you have in mind, and I could do an exchange where I write something that goes on your blog, too.

However, my stats are still very modest — 148 total followers — mostly because I do not promote the blog on social media.  That may change if I want to go down that rabbit hole, but I don’t want to spend even more time away from writing.  So we’ll see about that.  I’d love for more people to read what I write, but if Facebooking-Tweeting-Instagramming etc. takes more time, I am not sure where to get that, especially when I find a job.  My plans are to reduce blogging to 2-3 times a week, and to spend 30 minutes the other 4-5 days re-starting my book.  I may also look into self-publishing a collection of these blogs.

Yoga

This is a well-established practice that I do daily for 30 minutes without fail and have since December of 2013.  I wrote a post when I reached 1,500 days of consecutive yoga.  Sometimes when I’m tired it’s very gentle asana, all on the floor.  Occasionally I assume the corpse pose and take a power nap first.  The month of Yoga With Adriene was useful.  Sometimes I do feel like I’m in a rut, so I may go back to YWA occasionally or others online.  There are some videos I have and there are occasionally free or donation-based classes.  It’s more efficient to just strike a pose here on my own.  This is along with walking something I want to do in the morning or at least before dark.

See You Soon on A Dude Abikes!

Tomorrow it will be weird to not publish a blog, but I’ll still be writing, and that’s what matters.  Or maybe I’ll find I will still want to post something short, or just photos, or re-blog my first blogs.  There are few rules here in the blogosphere, as far as I can tell.  Well, that’s all for now, folks!

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