Some years back I'd resumed cycling in the hilly area around my home in Rensselaer County, NY, on my ancient and honorable 1984 Trek 500 (owned since new). I'd worked my way up to 2 hour, 20 mile rides on nice weekends and late afternoon rides of around 10 miles on nice weekdays.
It was on one of these rides that i had my first noticeable bout with a heart rate & blood pressure spike, I gradually stopped cycling, and the medical diagnosis came in and during a lovely visit to Albany Medical Center I got a quad bypass.
For some time, I went regularly to cardiac rehab at a local hospital, but I became concerned about how much travel time was involved, and convinced myself that i would go back to cycling. Ha ha.
In early-mid summer of this year, mostly holed up for the pandemic, I had a doctor's appointment. She made some pointed comments about my weight. She was right. So I did some quick maintainence and attempted a program of indoor and outdoor riding, indoors using a Trek 7100 city bike that we got for @allison that she never really used, combined with zwift and a CycleOps (Saris) trainer. Outdoors was on the ancient Trek 500.
It went slowly and erratically at first. Regaining and maintaining fitness seemed a lot harder than it used to be. During the fall, I found myself limited by various things polinating, and I don't enjoy cycling with snot pouring out of my nose. So I decided to go fully indoors, using the trainer in the basement.
I also set about educating myself about a lot of details I'd not been concerned with before. I now know things like how to calibrate the trainer to the bike, how to take an FTP test to determine what kind of power i can sustain for an hour, how to create custom interval workouts that match my notions about training, and how to actually map out a schedule and stick to it. I've also taught myself to manage my wattage and hold a steady cadence.
And some where in all of this I made some sort of breakthrough, a combination of mental and physical more than likely. I'm now riding more than 4 hours a week most weeks, including 2 interval workouts and 3 free rides on the various zwift courses, I've completed 31 of the individual zwift courses, I'm now in a mindset where I push through the painful parts of the simulated climbs so i can enjoy the downhill that comes afterwards.
And today i saw 175 pounds on the bathroom scale, down 15+ pounds from June. 174 would represent "normal" instead of "overweight" on the BMI scale.
I look forward to the spring where I'll return to the outdoors on the ancient Trek 500. I plan to hit the ground runn..., er, riding.
I'll take it.