The Weight

No, not the great track by The Band, that stuff that clings to our middles and slows us down on the bike.  I guess to say I struggle with my weight is a bit disingenuous, I've always been on the skinnier side compared to the general population. That said, for a cyclist, especially these days, i'm pretty big. 190cm and touching on 90kg it's not exactly a svelte climber's frame. Part of the reason is just age, when I was 17 I was about the same height I am now, but weighed in the low 70's. That was really rake like and at that time I'd have craved some of the muscle mass I have now..... It's just crept up pretty gradually since then, with a few fluctuations on the way.

Since getting more serious about my riding again, and I suppose also with the insidious creeping onset of middle age, I've been a bit more concerned about trying to keep a lid on the kg's. So I went through of a period of fad diets and other 'cheats' to get some weight off. To an extent these worked. I got down to the low 80's and looked pretty trim. Trouble was, I felt rubbish on the bike and off it. No energy and I wasn't really riding as much as I should have been. So it was back to the old ways of eating and it quickly came back - a not uncommon story... Now I'm back to where I was weight wise - just shy of 90kg at present. Still, I've got more miles in the legs over this winter than I've had for some years, and a decent amount of racing too - despite it being a bit haphazard.... Nevertheless, the middle-age spread remains a reality.

I recently read an interesting piece saying that you can't really focus on losing weight and getting faster at the same time. That kinda makes sense to me that you can't train effectively if you are always hungry and your body won't recover effectively if fuel to repair cells is limited. But I think we're talking about the elite level here - when Wiggo wanted to lose a large amount of weight (as it looks like TJVG has done over winter as well) it was on massive calorie restriction while still training. He won't have got faster in that period, but will have lost real muscle mass as well as fat. For me I just want to get the BF% down a bit lose the wheat/beer belly - I have to accept 17 year old Sam is long gone... Somewhere around 83-85kg I think is a good race weight.

So my approach now is to just cut out/down the refined and starchy carbs as well as refined sugar, and just get stuck into a solid training plan. I think that just some good solid consistent riding will get me to an acceptable weight for what I want to do - I don't need to get obsessive about counting calories or following silly restrictive diets.

So here we start - week 1, 89.8kg on the scales this morning!