I’m writing this entry as I cool down from another hour of bike training. I’ve been really applying myself to my bike training – yesterday I rode about 35 miles. I’m trying to do a little more each day, though today I focused on going up as many hills as possible instead of sticking the flat lands along the Mohawk River as I did yesterday. My legs are killing me, but it’s a good hurt. My goal this summer is to be able to ride to Philadelphia for one of Earl’s family’s get-togethers Labor Day weekend. I’m going to take an extra two days off from work and take Thursday and Friday getting down there.
I also hope to ride to my father’s by July 4th. His place is about 85 miles away, that should be a good solid day of riding. I’m finding myself tiring faster as the weather gets warmer. I think I’m going to start riding early in the morning. Ultimately, I would like to be able to do a cross-country (as in across the entire U.S.) by my 36th birthday, which is a little over two years away. I’m going to keep plugging away at it, because it’s something that I am building discipline, peace of mind and a better body with. I’ve been weighing in once a week, I’ve solidly lost 11 pounds in three weeks. I say “solidly”, because when I first started training at the gym I lost a bunch of weight, but it all came back when I took a couple of days off from working out. Admittedly, I was starting to get bored with them gym as well. When I’m biking I can enjoy the countryside and such and that’s one of the reasons I’ve been concentrating on that more. I’m going to start keeping a biking journal separate from this, partly because I’m a big exhibitionist, but also because I’d like to share my progress with anyone that’s interested.
Part of my whole exercise thing has been Slim-Fast – I’ve been doing it since I began my weigh-ins. I don’t stick to the lose weight regime as closely as I probably should, but I’m losing a little bit at a steady pace and I’m satisfied with that. 🙂
I’m still geeking around with Linux. I have Linux-Mandrake 8.2 running on my workstation at work, and RedHat 7.3 running on my system here at home. Both are running with Ximian Gnome for the desktop. I really like that desktop the best. It’s the one I feel most comfortable with when I’m working on Linux. I wish they made something similar for Windows, because I really like the feel of that better.
Speaking of desktops, I think my eyes are getting old or something. 🙂 I can’t handle the big resolutions on my 17-inch monitor anymore without getting a headache! That’s kind of weird. I can’t be getting old … maybe just too much computer use.
The bathroom sink finally arrived. And it had a flaw from the manufacturer so we got 50% off. Now if we could just find our contractor to install it! Haven’t heard from him in a couple of weeks. If worse comes to worse, we can install it ourselves, I suppose.
Well my body is feeling like it’s cooled down, finally. So I’m going to go take a shower and get ready for a picnic. We’re meeting our friends Dennis and Vic and heading somewhere for a picnic this afternoon. Our deck is being stained as I type, so we need to go out to enjoy the sunshine without too many fumes!
Tomorrow night I set up the bike log.
