Week Twenty-Five - Day Three: The Pale Sickly Grad Student Becomes an Athlete!!

BIKE: Mike
TIME THERE: 27 min.
TIME BACK: 26 min. (woot woot!)
WEATHER: A few clouds, -5C (-11C with windchill), 15km/hr wind there; clear, 2C (-3C with windchill), 19km/hr wind back.
WHAT I WORE: fleece pants, turtleneck, waterproof shell, double gloves, balaclava
NOTES:

I am a pale, unathletic woman who managed to put on 90 lbs between grad school and having a baby. I have never participated in sports, not even as a child, except for my years of fairly uncompetitive horseback riding (which my brothers insisted was not a sport, and certainly not athletic). Since starting my bike-commuting efforts in September, I've managed to lose 36 lbs of that 90 lbs I've put on over the past few years. Despite this, I still consider myself quite out of shape, unfit, and by all means unathletic. Bike-commuting is a mode of transportation to me, not a sport.

Until today.

Today, I began chatting with a couple of my fellow grad students - one even a fellow mother - about a radical idea: why don't we team up and do a triathlon as a team? The other PhD mama would do the running, our Master's student friend would do the swimming, and your beloved obese HealthyBiker - moi - would do the cycling. The more we talked about it, the more excited we got, and we started looking into this more seriously.

We now have our eyes on a specific triathlon - a "sprint" length (about half the distance of a regular triathlon) women's-only race that will be held in the first week of September of this year. The cycling component of the race would require me to bike 20 km. Since I routinely bike 16 km a day (although not all at once!), I'm hoping it won't be too much of a stretch for me to try for 20 km all together, especially without all the start-and-stop work I have to do when biking in traffic.
By then, I'm hoping I'll be a whole lot more svelte and close to - if not already at - my target weight and fitness level after my year-long commuting challenge ends August 31st. And because it's only a half-length triathlon that we're doing as a team, it seems like a great little introduction to cycling as a sport for me. And I even get to do it with friends!

The more I think about it, the more excited I get. ME - an ATHLETE!! How cool!! And best of all, every day that I ride into work is another day of "training" for the big race. Now, all we have to think of is a team name. Sadly, the most fitting one we've come up with so far is The Pale Sickly Grad Students. Maybe we should be The Book Worms instead. Or maybe The Registered Psychos! Because we're all working towards registering as professional psychologists . . . get it?? Eh??

Meh. Our name could use some fine-tuning . . . The important thing is, I'M GOING TO BE AN ATHLETE!!! Woo hoo!!! Maybe this will be a whole new chapter in my life - the chapter that involves me turning from a pale PhD-educated artist (I am, if you don't recall, a filmmaker) into a jock! Ha! Who knew?? My jock brothers will be so proud . . .