During the holidays of 2010-2011, we had gone up to Vancouver to visit my folks and do some skiing. My sister and her husband flew out from New York to join us. We spent three days at Whistler Mountain. I discovered that despite being able to ride my bike for hours at a time, skiing really took it out of me. On the third day I only managed two or three runs. My more or less skinny, polo playing brother-in-law had no trouble skiing hard all three days. I began to reminisce about my high school days and skiing. Back then, I skied six out of seven days every week. Five nights a week (after homework, of course!) at Grouse Mountain, one of the now four local ski areas scattered around Vancouver. On Fridays we would drive to Whistler and spend Saturday and Sunday skiing. Now, I couldn’t put together three days of consecutive skiing. Granted it was almost forty years earlier, but I felt that I should still be able to ski at least five or six days without feeling completely spent.
Whenever I take a road trip I tend to analyze the route for its suitability for road biking. The drive to Whistler seemed like a monstrous seventy mile uphill pain fest. I could never do it. Then, I decided that I would try the ride the following summer, in September of 2011. There is an organized ride from Vancouver to Whistler called, can you guess? The Vancouver to Whistler Gran Fondo. It’s about seventy two miles from start to finish and you get to do it with a few thousand other riders in a more or less controlled environment. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police even close off intersections on the highway so that cyclists can go through without having to stop. Gotta love those Canadians, they do these Gran Fondos the right way! And so my next milestone began to form in my mind.
However, even though I have finished my first century and I'm riding a lot, sometimes 200 miles in a week, I wasn’t losing any weight. Sure, sometimes I’d drop to about 235 but my weight was hovering at around 240. I knew that there was no possibility that I would be able to ride the Whistler Gran Fondo weighing 240 pounds and expect to finish before winter set in. I had been frustrated by my inability to get firmly below 240 pounds and I really didn’t know what to do about it. I knew I didn’t want to get into any fad or special diets, because I was certain that as soon as I got off the diet at whatever my goal weight was, I’d just put the pounds back on. My cousin Miguel, an opera singer, had done it and he kept the pounds off (today, he still keeps the pounds off). There had to be a reason why he was dropping pounds permanently and I wasn’t, even though we were both more or less doing the same thing: Regular and relatively intense workouts. He ran and I rode.
In early March, I was at Scripps Clinic for a routine blood test to check my PSA levels, and I noticed a little poster asking for volunteers for a weight loss study. I called and asked for information. They told me that they were testing a weight loss supplement and that half of the participants would take a placebo and the other half would take the supplement. They also said that I could not change my eating habits during the study, and most importantly, I couldn’t be under the guidance of a nutritionist with the aim of losing weight. Wait a minute... Nutritionists do that? Hmmm, I called my primary care doc, and asked his office to refer me to a nutritionist. At the end of March, 2011, I walked into the doctor’s office for my first “weight loss” appointment, and this is where it all began. The crazy notion of riding my bike from Vancouver to Whistler.
