Midnight skate of 28 miles on Katy Trail. Did crunches between laps.
Found out Justin McMurtry is planning to hold the Houston Inline Marathon again this year. Very cool! See you there? I should skate with the Texas Flyers the next few weeks so I could wear one of their skinsuits.
613 miles / 986 km YTD
164.6 lbs / 74.6 kg
didn’t skate all weekend. my feet are angry at me. cycling is nice, but no substitute
In my teens and early 20’s I rode my bicycle everywhere. I was an every-day cycler and it was a big part of my life. More recently, I’ve hardly ridden at all except with my kids on short rides. Honestly, it’s been quite a few years since I’ve ridden more than five miles.
But earlier this week my friend Mark Elam started talking to me about biking and told me about a Saturday morning ride that starts and ends at Rockwall Cycling. It’s 34 miles – out and back – over some nice rolling hills.
So that’s what I did this morning. My bicycle is an absolute antique. A friend gave it to me when I was 20 and it was old then. I do have cycling jerseys because I use them skating sometimes to hold a water bottle, but I didn’t have cycling shorts and I was wearing an old pair of tennis shoes.
I knew I looked out of place when the leader guy looked straight at me before we started and said “Do you guys know the route?” – as in – “You’re going to be so far behind us that you better know where you’re going”.
But, it was a lot of fun. Cycling uses a totally different set of muscles than skating, and it seems to be a different sort of workout. We actually went 32 miles instead of 34 because we got the turn-around point wrong by a mile. The Cotton Patch Challenge is a race in Greenville, Texas next month and my buddy Mark and I are planning to enter if we can get in enough miles between now and then. Or… I could skate it! We’ll see what happens.
23 miles / 37 km YTD
166.8 lbs / 75.6 kg
28 miles, mostly after midnight on Katy Trail. I saw at least one other person on every lap, usually several others. This was between midnight and 2 a.m. Weird.
Also saw one of the the largest rats I’ve seen in Dallas – the size of a small cat! I didn’t have my flashlight on since I could see okay. I thought it was an armadillo, but it ran a little different. When I got close I turned the light on – it was running beside the trail – and was surprised to see a really big rat!
585 miles / 941 km YTD
168.4 lbs / 76.3 kg
My Bont Jet boots have never been easy on my feet. I’ve heat-formed them to death, but they have a couple issues that can’t be fixed. For one thing, they’re way too wide at the front of my foot, causing a lot of rubbing – especially on my left foot. I get a buildup of callus on the outside of my left big toe, which eventually gets too big and rubs off, restarting the cycle. There is also significant ankle slippage – I’m wearing out the skate’s pads on the side of my achilles tendon and my skin corresponding to them. And the cuff is too high on my ankle, so I have to not lace up the top eyelet. I’m sure this doesn’t help with my heal slippage problem
It’s been an extremely tough year financially, but I’m hoping to have the cash soon to buy a new pair of custom-fitted Apache boots (above).
The reason I’m writing this is that I’m sitting on the floor reading and wishing my ankle would ever heal all the way up. I have to give 2 or 3 days between skates or it gets infected. You can’t really see it in the picture, but the area that blisters stays a combination of red, black, and blue.
28 miles. just over 2 hours. Katy Trail, starting after 10 pm. I really appreciate that Dallas has a skate trail that is relatively safe to skate on in the dark. The only half-lap (3 1/2 miles) that there wasn’t anyone else on the trail, btw. At 11 there were a dozen others, probably half were female. I do really wish they kept the lights on until midnight.
557 miles / 896 km YTD
169.0 lbs / 76.6 kg
Sunday we had the Nickel Family Lunch (a monthly event) and I was talking with my brother Walt about [everything in the world, and] skating. He asked about my favorite places to skate and I mentioned Katy Trail, Chisolm Trail – in Plano, and White Rock Creek Trail. He asked if I ever skate White Rock Lake Trail, and I told him “no”, that the asphalt was too rough.
I hadn’t skated White Rock Creek Trail this year and, since we were eating near its north, I decided to give it a go after lunch. I started at Valley View Park (Hillcrest & Valley View) and skated the 7.5 miles (12 km) south to where it joins White Rock Lake Trail.
Now It has been five years since I skated White Rock Lake, and that was a nasty experience including a couple falls. Of the 9.3 miles (15 km), a couple were newly asphalted and part of Lawther Lane was okay. The rest was old and too rough for a sane person to skate on. I had a suspicion it might have improved when I saw my friend Steven Novak had posted a video of him skating the lake which was hard to watch (due to camera wobble), but didn’t look too too bad.
When I got the to merge point between the two trails Sunday I said to myself, “This looks a lot better than I remember it”, so I kept skating. I was glad I did! Kudos to the City of Dallas Parks and Recreation Department! They’ve been rebuilding and repaving like crazy. There is still a little to be done, and some of the way I had to compete with slow traffic on Lawther, but it was a world of difference. I’d estimate the really bad pavement (all on Lawther) at maybe a half a mile total – though these were pretty bone-jaring.
So going and coming on the Creek part of the trail totals 15 miles (24 km) and the lake makes it 24 total (38.6 km). Loads of fun! As soon as the final sections are complete I can easily imagine just doing laps around the lake!
529 miles / 851 km YTD
167.8 lbs / 76 kg
Forty two miles (68 km) this evening! My longest skate so far this year! Felt great!
And my fastest lap was probably lap five, out of six. That was because I was following a couple on bikes, but hey, it counts! My final half-lap was with the Pegasus Flyers on their regular Tuesday Night Skate. Several of them blew by me, but I was already at 40 miles or so, so it didn’t offend me too much.
My weight, since you asked, has been bouncing around in the 165 to 170 lbs (75 to 77 kg) range. 165 was my target for the summer, but I’m not really going to be satisfied until I’m in the 155 to 160 (70 to 72 kg) range – 10 more pounds! I can’t (due to some circumstances beyond my control) keep on my veggie-shake diet, so I’m just watching what I eat and the amount. It’s not as effective as the shakes, but it’s okay.
I passed 500 miles year-to-date this evening. One thousand is going to be a party!
505 miles / 813 km YTD
169.2 lbs / 76.75 kg
Just a little addition to the diet notes I’d posted.
One of the things I decided before starting this thing was to not be too weird about it. I prepare most of my meals at home and most of my meals are focused around blended salads. But when I go out with friends or eat at a friend’s house, I eat reasonable portions of whatever is served.
The problem I found was that eating “normal food” after my blended-salad and brown rice diet gave me a little tummy ache. Not terrible, but after it happened two or three times I knew it was real.
What I did that resolved the problem was to add a little yogurt to my diet most days. Sometimes I have a small bowl-full with some all-fruit jam, or other days I’ll just take a few spoonfuls plain. I’m trying to do this without supplementing (using pills), otherwise I’m sure taking acidophilus would have fixed me right up too.
I skated with the Pegasus Flyers tonight on their regular Tuesday night skate. It was pretty fun and they’re an interesting mix of people. I think several of them have known each other forever. Did their (very circuitous) route, which they tell me is about 11 miles, and then went back to do another lap on the Katy Trail. I intended to do two more laps, but my flashlight was out of batteries and it was dark. Still, it was a good skate.
I’m closer to being “not overweight” (according to the BMI chart) than I’ve ever been in my adult life. I was 169.2 when I got in from skating. If i were 1.2 lbs. less I’d be there! It’s gonna happen!
I can still reach down and grab more than 1.2 lbs. of fat around my middle, so my actual goal now is 160 lbs / 72 kg. I should be able to hit that in another 6 weeks at the rate I’m losing.
295 miles / 475 km YTD
169.2 lbs / 76.75 kg
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