Preparing for AIDS/Lifecycle in 2023

I did the 545-mile AIDS ride in 2019, and it was a tough one for me.  I weighed a bit too much, and I was not properly trained, as I was investing too much time in work and packing up our house to sell and move to Berkeley.

I've determined to do things much differently this year.  Much of this story is on my fundraising page, so I will not repeat it here; I will give more detail on my training and the lead-up.

• I have been losing weight and have lost 35-40 pounds from my weight four years ago. Lately, with bike training, my weight is declining ever so slightly, but my body fat percentage is still dropping, so it's all in the right direction.
• While I do get out and ride regularly for 2-3 hours, I don't do it often enough or do the long rides. My solution to that was to sign up for century rides for consecutive weekends in April and March.  The events are:
• Tierra Bella in Gilroy, which was the very first organized ride I did in 2001.
• Chico Wildflower, a bit north of us in Chico, CA.  I did this ride in 2002 as I was getting my bike training going, so it will be fun to go back. 2002 was the year I did three centuries over three weekends and I still remember being in great shape at the end of that.
• Grizzly Peak Century which is in my backyard in the Berkeley/Oakland hills. It's known for great food.
• I Care Classic in Morgan Hill. This was another standard Los Gatos ride, partly because my accountant was a member of the Lions, which sponsored the ride. Their claim to fame is being the cookie ride, where there are homemade cookies at all the stops.
• Strawberry Fields Forever, which I always wanted to do but somehow skipped. It's out of Watsonville, known as the strawberry capitol of the world, and there is supposed to be great food and, of course, strawberries at every rest stop.  I'll see if it's true.

I'll add some commentary on each of these rides as I complete them, along with pictures so you get an idea of beautiful California. You'll also hear a bit about my fitness.

The long training begins, back on my old turf (Tierra Bella in Gilroy, CA)

I started my organized rides back in 2001 with ACTC's Tierra Bella ride.  The first one I did back then was the metric century, 62 miles.  In case you don't know my history, I had a heart attack and double bypass in September 1999 and decided to take up cycling to get some aerobic fitness. I set a few goals, such as riding my bike 420 miles across Nevada (OATBRAN) in five days, so I was training up for doing long multiday rides. 

Since that early metric century, I've done this ride at least a dozen times and did many of my personal rides south from Los Gatos.

No pictures for this one.  It was just a day to enjoy the ride, as well as me not having the idea of blogging this for others fully in my grasp yet.  

The high points of this were:

• Riding up Gilroy Hot Springs road, which is a nice climb and country roads.  I even did this ride for MS back in 2015
• Riding by Chesbro and Uvas reservoirs.  It was wonderful to see them overfull from all the rain.  The last time I rode by here was at the height of the drought. Back then in 2014 you could see the bottom of the reservoir, as it had gone completely dry.  I didn't take pictures on this ride, but will on the next one.

Here's a map of the route from my GPS bike computer.  

All told, 78 miles and 3600 feet vertical. Not too bad for the major start of the year.

It's time to start blogging again

It's funny when you look back on things and realize how long it has been since you touched a property. 

I haven't written content here since 2018.  Life got more interesting after that year.  In early 2019, we decided that we'd had enough of living in Los Gatos (a nice 24-year stretch) and moved to Berkeley. One of the reasons is that we wanted to be closer to Peter, Oravanh, and their two boys. It was hard to have them 90 minutes away if traffic was good.  They are now 20 minutes away, so we can see soccer games, school concerts and the like.  We sold our Los Gatos house in mid-June and bought a house in the Berkeley Hills that we knew would need some work.  

I also kept riding, doing the AIDS ride in 2019 in June (545 miles in seven days)as well as the MS Waves to Wine in September (150 miles in two days).  I resigned from my spot at Support.com and decided to go back to consulting life.  Little did I know that Covid was around the corner.  I think we all know how that worked out. And it was especially challenging with construction starting on our remodeling in January 2020 and having numerous quarantine and other rules slow things down. 

I did start working at a startup, Capital Rx, in May 2020 and have been there since.  

And you'll be hearing more from me again.