My Story

What I needed was a lifestyle change. I met with a nutritionist and found out that when I ate good, I wasn’t really eating that good and when I ate bad, I was really eating bad! I was eating way too many carbs, eating too late at night , and starving myself at the wrong times during the day. To keep it short, we cut out 95% of my carbs, cut back on portions, increased my intake of proteins. I also quit eating at least 3 hours before bed and ate something the first thing when I got out of bed.

Angie, my wife has always been in a large part a big support to me in everything I do. Every new weight loss scheme, she has stood behind me and supported me. It was no surprise that she was there again for this endeavor. Angie never complained about the foods I insisted on eating and she was always there to encourage and go to the gym with me and be a consistent work out partner. I would not have been successful without her unwavering support.

To me the diet part is usually easy. When I want, I can have iron clad will power. Like I said this was going to be a life style change. Exercise had to fit in there somewhere in order for this to work correctly. I’ve always enjoyed cycling, even when I was stressing out the springs on the scale, I like to ride. So, I decided to make this my main form of exercise because it is social, enjoyable and a great workout.

I was a slow rider, especially going up hills. I hated hills, it takes a lot of energy to haul 300 pounds up an incline! In retrospect I now love hills, I live to climb. If you want to be a better hill climber, learn to love it and you will excel at it.

It is now, December 2001 and I have thought about my plight and needed to make a reasonable resolution. New Year’s resolutions often get tossed out with trash after Superbowl Sunday. I feel that making a resolution to lose 25, 50, 75 pounds or to be able to fit into a 38, 36, 34 inch pair of pants isn’t specific enough. Too much leeway.

In 1999, I rode the toughest and the most gratifying century ride ever. I did the Six-Gap Century Challenge. It is a 100 mile bike ride over six of the highest gaps\passes in Georgia. The ride consists of 10,400 feet of climbing.

As my New Year’s resolution for 2002, I said, I wanted to be able to complete the Six-Gap Century Challenge again. I knew that several things would have to come together in order for this lofty goal to be achieved.

I would need to lose 80 plus pounds to get to a good cycling/climbing weight. I would also need to log many hours on the bike to get my fitness/endurance level up.

My wife told me about Spin Classes at Gold’s Gym in Peachtree City. I was a little apprehensive. I had been to other indoor cycling classes and it was a good workout, but it was really nothing more than aerobics on a bike. No offence to all the Aerobic instructors out there. I believe that cycling on an indoor cycling should mimic as much as possible a road or mountain bike. She told me that there was this guy there named Joe Domaleski that was a great cycling instructor. She said his classes were awesome and after fifteen minutes, she said you would feel like you were going to throw up! I’m sorry, but the words awesome and throw up haven’t appeared together in a sentence of mine since my last Frat party! Now I was really unsure. She also told me he was an Ironman, and a great motivator. That sealed the deal. I would go see this Ironman they called JoeDom!

Little did I know, Joe was in the process of indoctrinating himself to the Heart Zones Training System. A training program that targets all your fitness heart rate zones using a heart rate monitor and specific indoor cycling training programs. A system that not only helped with my weight loss goals, but put me on the fast track with my cycling fitness.

On January 16, 2002 I meagerly walked into Joe’s Wednesday 6:35 spin class. Joe wasn’t at all what I had imagined. He wasn’t this huge, towering drill instructor type. So how was he going to ‘make me’ suffer? Well after fifteen minutes, I didn’t feel like throwing up, I thought I was going to die! I kept asking myself ‘why was I still doing this, if it hurt so bad?’ It was because my wife was right. Joe didn’t have to tower above you to make you want to ‘give it your all’; he tossed out motivation and pride. All you had to do was reach out and grab it if you wanted it. Well I made it through the class, and it was a great class! I was hooked on indoor cycling thanks to Joe.

My diet was coming along great. I was eating between six and seven times a day! Every two hours I was eating something. This was turning my metabolism into a furnace. The rules were simple, but rock solid. I wasn’t to deviate at all. I was consuming mass amounts of protein and the majority of carbs I was getting was coming from Fruits and Vegetables. Very little grains, rice, and pasta. No eating two to three hours before bed. No fruit up to four hours before bed. Keep a detailed log on what I ate and when. Drink at least one gallon of water a day.

I am a prophet of maintaining good logs and diaries. You won’t remember how you got there unless you can look back to see where you came from. You need to be able track and highlight achievements and notate downfalls. A training log is a very important training tool.

I am a gadget geek. I love new electronic technology gadgets. I have a PocketPC. I used and couple of very useful and very user friendly programs to keep track of my diet and exercise. For my fitness I utilized MySportTraining version 3.11 and for my diet I used Pocket Diet Tracker Version 2.41. They are interlinked, meaning the calories expended from exercise in MySportTraining, will subtract from calories consumed in Pocket Diet Tracker and vice versa. The best thing about these programs are they are downloadable and are available as trial versions. This lets you try before you buy. Being able to look at your workouts on a calendar and compare calories in against calories expended is a GREAT motivator! I have since update my PDA to the latest versions of these programs as well as the MySportTraining for windows. It is a excellent extension of an already powerful training tool. It operates with or without a PDA and I am able to upload my heart rate file directly from my Polar s710i Heart Rate Monitor. This is all top shelf training equipment for all levels of athletes.

It is now around the beginning of July. My diet and exercise regimen was coming along nicely. I have a weight loss average of around 10 pounds a month. I have moved the majority of my training outdoors on the road. Joe has been really preaching the Heart Zones Heart Rate Training and I am really starting to see the effects in my performance when I cycle. Joe tells me that some representatives from Heart Zones will be coming to our Gym to certify the instructors and he recommends I attend. I’m really getting into heart rate training, so I am all over it.

Saturday July 27, 2002 will go down in my memoirs as the day my eyes were opened wide in the area for fitness training! That is the day Kathy Kent and Alinda spent the day indoctrinating my wife, myself and about 20 others in the Heart Zones Training Systems. We learned so much more about really using your heart rate monitor to target your training. I was able to take my training to the next level!

One of the things I learned was a drill to help increase your V02max. This is the point at which your body becomes anaerobic. Your muscles quit using oxygen as fuel. By training to increase this threshold, you can teach your body to work at a higher level of exertion for a longer period of time. That is something that would be beneficial when I attempt to ride the Six-Gap Century.

Fast forward to September, the month of Six Gap. My weight is still dropping like a rock and my training is going awesome. My weight is hovering around 200 pound, yet I can climb with riders weighing 30 plus pound lighter than me. I have become a force to be reckoned with. On my Group training rides, I am leading the pack up the hills and feel great doing it. I am no longer a ‘B’ group rider trying to hang with the ‘A’ group. I have been accepted as an equal. I have raised my V02max by 11 points, my anaerobic threshold is up to 85% of my maximum heart rate, my resting heart rate is down to 54 BPM since June.

Everything is coming together except the logistics of going to Six Gap. All the usual cycling suspects weren’t going to do that ride this year. The ride starts in Dahlonega, GA. I did not want to have to leave my house around 4:00 am in order to make the start time. I also didn’t want to get a hotel room by myself. I was being to think it wasn’t going to happen this year. I began to tell myself that the results of the journey I had been on all year far out weighed the final destination. If I knew I could do Six Gap then it would still be a victory. A hollow victory though.

Two day before the ride, I decided that I needed to make the trip to Dahlonega. I talked my wife into signing up to do the ride with me. I assured her it would be the hardest thing she ever enjoyed! I was able to find us a cabin so we wouldn’t have to make an early drive. I was so excited! Not only was I going to be riding Six Gap, my favorite and most loyal training partner was joining me!

We did it! Angie had fun, she hated riding up Hogpen Gap, (a 7 mile climb with portions of the ride having a grade of over 15%), but no one likes Hogpen. I must say I did great. I rode with Angie and we finished in 7 hours and 20 minutes. Faster than I had done it in the past. I was pretty impressed with my statistics. Considering the climbs, I spent only six minutes in the 80+ % of maximum heart rate (going up Hogpen, of course). It was an easy ride with the majority of my time (57%) spent in the 50% - 60% of max. heart rate range. Which means I wasn’t working very hard most of the time. No one passed me on a climb and I did all but Hogpen seated. All in all a great performance. I could have pushed the limits if I needed to.

In October Joe approached me about becoming a Spin instructor. What??? What on earth was he talking about?! Why would he want me to teach indoor cycling? Joe assured me that with the certification that I had from Heart Zones and the accomplishments I have made this year, I would be a great instructor. I meet with the fitness coordinator at Gold’s Gym and guess what, now I am a certified Cycling instructor! Wow, who would have thought. It is now December and I am coming up on my one year anniversary.

As I get ready to set up goals for the New Year, I am forced to look back from where I have come. I am often asked , ‘How did you do this? How were you able to stay focused and lose all that weight?’ For me, the answer is somewhat simple. I related it to the first 100-mile bike ride I ever did. I didn’t think of it as trying to ride 100 miles, but as four 25 mile rides. I could do that. This was the same. Small steps and micro goals all pointing to the big goal at the end, with small rewards along the way.