Lets start this off with the highlights. 2021 was the year I completed the most cycling I have ever done in a year by a long shot.
Some of the simple stats
total 13,294 km
8,001 kms outdoors
5,293 kms indoors
242 days I rode
5 times I rode over 100kms
446 hours peddling
I have my buddy Dave to thank for all of this. It was he who prompted me to start the weight loss campaign back in March. However once that was over I continued. Up until that point I only had 500 kms for the year.
The chance of catching up to my yearly goal of 12,000 seemed a long way off. However since I kept up my 300km a week target I kept plugging away at the number and caught it earlier this month (December).
However being December I almost strung two weeks of 500kms. I outdid my target by 1,294kms.
Next year I am going to try for 15,000kms
Most of my rides were solo this year apart from a handlful with Shorty. Craig. Will see if we can change that a little next year
So this all started on March 3rd when David suggested on chat that he wanted to do a weight loss thing. Loose 10kgs
Daves initial suggestion
I was quickly on board. However to add a little bit more motivation we agreed to put $200 on it. So if one beat the other they had to cough up. The hope was that neither of us would be paying anyone as we would both have meet our goal.
We both started on Saturday the 6th of March 2021. My starting weight was 89.9kgs.. We both have a set of smart scales so keeping accurate track of our weight was going to be easy.
According to My Fitness Pal. My daily calorie in-take was going to be 1500 calories. On the first day I realized just how little amount of food 1500 calories actually is. Just my bowl of Saltana Bran and Ice Coffee in the morning is already 406 calories. To be fair I know the Ice Coffee is more than the 100 I record. It’s probably closer to 250-300. That leave almost one third of the daily intake gone already.
In order to make this work I was going to need to do more than just watch what I eat. Basically the more you exercise the more you can eat. You get more allowance per day depending on how many calories you burn exercising.
The plan was to cycle 50kms a day each day with one day rest each week. In all honesty this is not a plan even I thought I would stick to. get up 5 days a week at 04:10am and bank 50kms before work.
The first week I managed to pull it off . Surprising even me. Last time I did anything like that was probably 2011. After the first week though I realised I needed to come up with a different route for each day.
After some time on Strava and some tweaks to some route suggestions I four solid weekday routes which all varied enough. Fridays were sort of an anything can happen Friday and I tried a few different things else used it to do a route I missed due to rain days.
Days that did rain I did three laps of Tempus Fugit. Most of my Zwift sessions were before work but a handful after work or at night.
Due to the early starts each weekday morning Saturday consistently became my sleep in day and rest day.
I first reached my 80kg mark on Tuesday 20th April after my morning ride. However since I still had four and a half weeks to go I was not prepared to call it job done. Firstly I had to maintain the weight but I set myself a new target of 75kgs. This would make my total weight loss of 15 kgs.
I continued to keep doing what I was doing and things were progressing well. However the loss rate did slow down. The trend was still downward but the speed at which I was loosing it slowed down. I did let a few days slightly slip. Not from pigging out but our meals were a little on the high side of things.
We re-jigged our Hello Fresh order to the calorie smart options. I think but Rhian and I have noticed there is a little less in these but over the last couple weeks it has helped me get down to the 75kg mark.
I actually hit the 75.2 on Friday 14th of May. Technically that was the final day of the challenge. However since the plan was to go out Saturday night and celebrate my plan was to do the SPR ride on Saturday. See what number I could get with one last push. Was a crappy ride. I was tired and normally Saturday had been the rest day. However I wanted to bank the calories for that night.
To my surprise when I got home and jumped on the scales the magic number was 74.6 kgs. No 75kg goal tick and I am calling that the challenge done.
The challenge now is to keep the weight down. Even though I can now eat a little more I will still be calorie counting and trying to maintain the routine I have built up.
We went out yesterday and bought some new clothes because most of my current clothes are now too big and falling off. I do not really want to put the weight back on just to fit my clothes. My hope was to loose this weight so I could fit my clothes without a muffin top all the time.
Now some pictures and charts
I completed 73 rides over 107 hours and 42 minutes covering 3,130 kms.