(photos courtesy of 7th Decade Redhead)

The year 2018 was filled with changes for us. My husband had retired, I had sort of retired and we embraced our new-found freedom by doing some things we’d always talked about doing. In June, we finally made it to California for the first time to visit family, In September, we toured the Netherlands and Belgium on our bicycle:

Getting Lost in Haarlem (that’s Haarlem with two “a”s) (publish0x.com),

During this year of adventures, my husband convinced me to participate in the annual Cycle the Erie Canal Bike Tour that is put on each July by Parks and Trails New York:

Parks & Trails New York :: Cycle the Erie Canal Bike Tour (ptny.org)

He had done this ride with a college buddy a few years prior and had wanted to do it again with me. He was confident that it would not be a problem for me at my current level of fitness and cycling ability. I decided to invite a couple from work who have done bike tours with us before to do it with us, and the four of us were going to have a grand ole time, riding through New York from Buffalo to Albany, along the Erie canal, in mid-July.

I was very excited about this tour as we got closer to the actual event, thinking about all the fun we were going to have. Then one day, I got a phone call from our friends telling me that they had decided not to participate. They felt they hadn’t trained enough to do the ride and were worried they wouldn’t be able to complete the daily mileage.

You ever have those times where a higher power sends you a sign, and you ignore it, and the only way you see it is hindsight after the fact?

In a previous post, I mentioned that I am the worrier, and my husband is not. He can be eternally optimistic in many things. He is that way about my abilities. I love that… and hate that… about him.

We had a great beginning to this adventure. We arrived in Buffalo, New York a day or so early, having driven up from Florida. We had made some friends on another bike tour that lived on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls so we had dinner with them that night and the next day we all rode down the Canadian side of the Niagara River to the falls. What a great experience that was.

Then the Erie Canal ride began….

It was during this adventure that I learned several things about myself. I don’t like ‘rides.’ I like ‘tours.’ I need very loose time constraints so I can take a moment to stop and smell the flowers (rest), so to speak. Time pressure to arrive before a deadline is not enjoyable for me. I’m also not a fast cyclist, like my husband, which made things worse.

Each day, I started with two full water bottles for the 40 miles or so of riding... in July. The only way to refill those bottles was at rest stops set up by the ride organizers. There were always two rest stops, a morning rest stop, and an afternoon rest stop at different points along the day's route. If you missed the deadline for the rest stop, you had to find a convenience store to buy water or get your water bottles filled at a restaurant if you stopped at one for lunch. Rest stops were the oasis along the route. They were where you could rehydrate, get a snack and refill your water bottles. If you didn’t arrive at the rest stop before they closed it down, you were on your own (SOL).

Can you guess what my constant worry was all week?

Every night we would arrive at our destination and search for our tent among the many, many rows of tents, all placed about two feet apart.  

Did I mention that cyclists snore? Loudly?

Showering was also a unique experience. Sometimes, there was a shower truck (a tractor trailer box fitted with shower stalls) when we weren’t staying at a school or a community center with showering facilities.

It’s amazing how you can take a shower, dry off, and by the time you get back to your tent, be covered in perspiration again. The night we had access to a school’s indoor swimming pool was sublime and I didn’t want to get out. Some people actually chose to sleep on the floor of the community center the night we were there, instead of their tent. They couldn't resist the lure of the air conditioning. Summer heat and humidity was an issue on some nights, and it wasn’t pleasant.

I was told that the ride “wasn’t that bad” and I would have “no problem” with it. I was told this by my husband… who I no longer trust to make these type judgments about me.

I’d learned to ride a recumbent bike in southeast Texas, which is flat. The only hills there are bridges and overpasses. Then we moved to south Florida, where the only hills were bridges and overpasses. Needless to say, I had little to no ‘hill training’ before this ride.  Additionally, this ride, while pretty flat along the Erie canal, also took us to the roadways and into cities, where it was not so flat.  

In fact, there is a hill that is so steep and long, in a town called Canajoharie, that they actually sell t-shirts to commemorate cyclists climbing the hill. And this hill would be the last gasp of your energy after a 61-mile day.

I had to use the “sag” service (being transported to the day’s final destination from a rest stop) when the ride got too much for me. One day I was having ‘stomach issues’ and needed a ride. Another day I’d just had enough.

I struggled with being sagged. I felt like a failure every time I couldn’t finish the day’s itinerary. I had tremendous guilt and was worried everyone was thinking I was whining and lazy. The mental gymnastics I went through on this ride were almost as tough as the physical. I was beating myself up because I couldn’t do it as well as everyone else and couldn’t do it without help. I was upset because I knew I was ‘strong.’ I should be able to do this. It isn’t that hard.

Uh.. yeah, it was…

Instead of giving myself credit for all my successes during that trip, I focused on all my ‘failures.’ It didn’t even register that I was getting my 240-pound body out there and making a go of it. That, in and of itself, was success.

While doing this diet, I think it’s so easy to get distracted by all the things we do that are not helpful for a calorie-deficit diet. I’m not going to use the word ‘failure’ here because if you are trying to eat less calories and making changes to your eating behaviors and habits, then you are making progress, and succeeding.

Failure is not needing help, failure is not eating more than you should, failure is not making one bad choice during the day, failure is not taking a day off from the plan. Failure is not eating more calories than your weight loss buddy.

Failure is giving up trying to lose weight and returning to old eating habits and behaviors. Let me repeat that. Failure. Is. Giving. Up!

I didn’t ‘fail’ on the Erie Canal ride because I got help, or because I didn’t complete all the mileage, or because I got discouraged and cried a few times (yes that happened). I didn’t fail because I never really gave up.

The day the bike tour ended, we were transported back to Buffalo and spent the night in a hotel there. As I was getting ready for the longest shower I would probably ever take in my lifetime, I was inspecting my body in a mirror for the first time in over a week. I had bruises, scrapes, sunburn, achy joints and this horrible huge patch of heat rash all around my torso. I was a physical hot mess!

A few years later, we were having dinner with my husband’s college buddy, who went on the Erie Canal ride with him the first time he did it. I asked him about his experience on the ride. His wife chimed in and told us it took him TWO WEEKS to recover from it…

If only I’d called him before we signed up….