Rocinante

Rocinante

The last few days of March of 2009 was the beginning of spring break for my teacher-wife. We planned to spend a few days in La Quinta, California, just outside of Palm Springs. That’s when it hit me. A road bike! When I mentioned it to my wife, I could see the doubt; yeah, but he’ll tire of it. The mountain bike will have a buddy in the garage. Nevertheless, she dutifully accompanied me to a few bike shops around La Quinta and Palm Desert. In one shop, the young sales associate told me he had lost 80 pounds in a couple of years of riding bicycles. That was encouraging. Of course I knew practically nothing about modern road bikes. The brands that I was familiar with no longer existed. You now shifted through the gears using the same levers as the brakes. Bikes now had up to thirty speeds! It was all very confusing. I really should have done some basic research, but what the heck, I had just had the idea, after all. Then I walked into a little bike shop on Highway 111 and I saw this beautiful bicycle.

I haggled a bit with the shop owner, and about twenty minutes later, I walked out of the shop with my brand new-old bike. I didn’t even test ride it. The shop owner assured me that it was my size. I was really ignorant about bike buying! But it didn’t matter, I had my new baby to try out.

I named my new bike Rocinante. Kind of fitting that I thought of Don Quixote and his quest for Dulcinea.  My quest may just turn out to be just as impossible.

My Rocinante is a 61cm Klein Reve X road bike painted in what they call "Silver Thunder".

The workmanship on this bike is superb. Typical of Klein bikes, the welds are so smooth, it looks like a monocoque carbon frame costing thousands more. Even the branding is painted on, they're not decals that are clear-coated. The cables are all routed inside the tubes and although not a lightweight, it's not bad at all for an aluminum bike.

Rocinante sports a full Ultegra drivetrain, ten speed triple. I think I need a triple for all the climbing I'm hoping to be able to do.

The rear cassette is an 11-27.

The seat tube also has this little elastomer insert that is supposed to reduce shock and vibration, making the bike more comfortable to ride.

I didn't really get fitted for this bike. At this point, I don't know too much about road bikes. It's been nearly 40 years since I rode a 10 speed. This one has 30! I probably don't need all of them or even most of them. I read something about real road cyclists not using triples (three chainrings up front) but then again, I'm not a real road cyclist... yet.

But I'm gonna take the next step to becoming one... I'm gonna dress like one!

270 pounds, 85 to go.

Am I gonna croak?

Here goes... My first post!

On my 54th birthday in October of 2008, I weighed 270 pounds (I’m 6’1” tall). I had just had my annual physical. I was sitting in my doctor’s office listening to him tell me there were some areas of concern from the results of my latest blood work.

He said my levels of Prostate Specific Antigen (PSA) were on the high side. He also said I should go see a specialist to have a look at my thyroid, which also had suspicious blood test results. He referred me to a specialist for my thyroid and sent me to a urologist to have a look at my prostate. He was concerned about the possibility of cancer in both areas. To top it all off, my blood sugar level was on the high side of normal and he mentioned I was a good candidate for diabetes.

On top of that, I have Obstructive Sleep Apnea, which was diagnosed back in 1999. I've been using a CPAP every night ever since.

Nice birthday present! I began to think the worst! I was sure that if both my prostate and thyroid had cancers, it was already through most of my body; at least up and down my torso. I wanted to know now! It took until November to get appointments with the specialists. New blood work was drawn and sent to the doctors, who then scheduled me for another round of appointments. In December, I got scheduled for a prostate biopsy and a thyroid scan in early January of 2009.

The prostate biopsy was awful: The doctor inserts a “gun” into you-know-where and proceeds to shoot a needle into your prostate to take core samples; six times on each side. “It’ll feel like a minor rubber band snap” he said. At each “snap” I nearly fell off the examination table. Although I was told to expect it, the bleeding went on for about a month and was pretty disconcerting.

If I thought the prostate biopsy was bad, I was totally unprepared for the thyroid biopsy. I was going in for a sonogram and I thought “at least it’s not gonna hurt!” Well, the sonogram didn’t hurt; but the doctor found a growth covering 3/4 of my thyroid which he felt required a needle biopsy. I told him that that would be OK, and I asked him when I should schedule it. He said “We can do it right now”. No time to get myself into the right frame of mind! As he pulled out what seemed to be about a 10 inch long needle (it wasn’t really that long at all), he told me not to worry, there was anesthesia in the syringe and I’d only feel a little pin-prick at the beginning. He obviously had never had a thyroid biopsy in his life. As I watched that needle go into my throat, I got into a cold sweat and nearly passed out from the pain!

Of course, you never get the results of biopsies right away. I had to schedule another round of appointments (more co-pay $!) to discuss the results with my specialists. They were scheduled in late January. I also had to schedule a follow-up with my primary care physician, also near the end of January. As it turned out, both of my biopsies were clean. When I went to see my primary care doctor, he walked into the exam room and shook my hand and told me I was the luckiest man alive. He told me that in his experience, when a patient had two suspicious areas of concern, he could expect that at least one biopsy would be positive. Again, he reminded me that my blood sugar levels were leading to diabetes if I didn’t do something about it.

My wife had been on my case for years to "get up off the couch" and get fit. But I didn't see myself as obese. In my mind's eye, I was still as skinny as I was when I was 16. I didn't notice that I couldn't ski for more than a couple of hours at a time. I didn't notice that I got winded climbing up the steps to my wife's classroom. I guess I never looked in the mirror either... And I spent a lot of time "photoshop dieting"; you know, photoshopping the belly and chins out of my photos!

So here it is, 2008 and I need to get active. I decided I needed a bike. So I started hunting around for one. It's now March, 2009 and while on a weekend in Palm Springs, I was walking along a sidewalk in Palm Desert and I dropped into a bike shop. I saw my bike. I bought my bike. It was a thing of beauty. A used Klein Reve X road bike in absolutely gorgeous shape. It had a decent Shimano Ultegra drivetrain and although it wasn't a carbon bike the aluminum construction was exquisite.

I got hooked.