[Warning: Long post, stream-of-consciousness (more-so than usual!).]
As I posted two posts ago, my dad was killed two weeks ago while bicycling. He put out his hand to signal a left turn, the 16-year-old driver who had had their license for two weeks thought he was telling her to go around him, and as he was in his turn, she was accelerating in the left lane to pass him. The rest is, well … it is.
I spent the last two weeks at my parents’ house eating and estimating food nutrition from a Meal Train that had been set up. Sleeping a lot due to emotional exhaustion. Barely exercising because it was hard to get out of bed let alone be active in some way. The mosquitos in Ohio certainly helped dissuade me from that, too, given my left ankle was thoroughly covered in bites which hurt whenever I bent it.
I got back to Colorado with the bf last night, Saturday, and now I have to figure out how to move forward knowing that everything will be different, even if it’s just because I no longer have that anchor or person for advice. I have to figure out how to move forward with my own life and not let this tragic event ruin things. That would be one of the last things my dad would have wanted.
One thing that I am going to keep the same, or accelerate, or re-double my efforts in is fitness. I’m going to re-cast it as a tribute to my dad. That’s also something he almost certainly would have wanted: If I was going to do anything to honor him, it would be something that would be beneficial to the living rather than a sole homage to the dead.
The reason that fitness is actually appropriate here is that it’s something my dad, also, struggled with during his career. It’s something we discussed while walking in Hamburg, Germany, back from the botanic gardens while my mom stayed in the hotel. In sum and substance, it’s what I discussed in one of my very first posts on here: When you travel a lot (in both of our cases due to conferences since we’re in academia), it is extremely hard to not only just watch what you eat when you don’t know if that chicken breast has an extra 300 cal of butter on it, but also hard to keep up any habits with respect to exercise. One step forward and two steps back means you’re going to keep getting worse in the long run.
I’ve looked at a lot of photos of my dad in the last few weeks, over the last fifty years of his adult life, and I could see him going from an average teenager to a lanky 20-year-old to an average 30-year-old to then heavier and heavier, with a bit of ups and downs interspersed. Somewhat similar to me, though I think I’m larger than he ever was. In his last few years before retirement, he just severely minimized his eating until he got the weight he wanted and his belts fit at the hole he wanted them to. After retirement, he continued to exercise daily, making sure that he got at least 1000 steps every hour, zig-zagging back-and-forth on the cul de sac on which my parents lived, sometimes with their cat, Fang, following closely behind. He also had a Bowflex Revolution and elliptical in the basement, and he had just gotten a treadmill, and, a month ago now, the bike.
He had seen how both of his parents went into their 80s and just sort of wasted away, being skin and bone by the time they died at 88 and 89. He expected to live that long, and so I told people that I thought he was trying to hit his 80s with as little fat and as much muscle as he could, since he knew beyond that it would be almost impossible to to improve. Now, we’ll never know, since he died 18 years before his parents’ age.
Okay. Pause. Deep breath. Moving on…
Another thing he didn’t do was procrastinate. I’ve tried more and more lately to not procrastinate, but I’m still bad at it. I’m going to try to do better. Soon. In the near future.
In the very immediate future, this slightly adjusts what I have with respect to fitness trackers. My dad had a FitBit Charge 3 and Charge 5. My brother and his wife both have FitBits and don’t want them, nor does my mom nor boyfriend. So, I’m getting both. I have both. FitBit (now owned by Google / Alphabet Inc.) in their infinite wisdumb decided with the Charge 5 that floor-tracking (how much you go uphill) is going to be a premium feature and only available on their larger watches. FitBit Charge 3 and 4 still have it. But Charge 5 is otherwise a superior device to the Charge 3. And, they offer a completely independent tracking from my Watch to which I can compare. Whose elevation tracking I don’t trust (it says I climb 2 flights of stairs while I’m sitting on the toilet), though on the other hand, I’ll be replacing when they come out with the new Watch next week (the digital crown stopped working as a button about 3 months ago, making the watch much harder to use). So … upshot is that I have additional fitness trackers at the moment.
In the next several months, I will also be inheriting my dad’s fitness equipment, which I’ve estimated retail value at about $11k (he didn’t skimp, but he was also proud of getting things at 10–50% their retail value off of Craigslist). So, his Bowflex Revolution, elliptical, and treadmill. Again, my brother and his wife don’t want them because they live in the city and are near to gyms and walk a lot with their dogs anyway, and my mom, who has a prosthetic leg, can’t use the elliptical or treadmill, and while she could use the Bowflex, she said she won’t. So, when emotions are calmer, the house is better inventory’d, and things better figured out, I’ll have a moving truck (or, preferably, movers) transport that equipment across the country.
There’s also The Bike. It has been totaled. It was a ~$5000 eBike. No gears, it used an Enviolo shifting device which allowed for a continuous change in “gear” ratio. Also, no chains, it had a carbon belt drive. And my dad advertised to me that it had hydraulic disk brakes. My brother found out which one it is since he’s still with my mom and has my dad’s computer: Gazelle Ultimate C380+.
The police have the bike still, and it will either be used in evidence for a criminal case, or returned to us (my mom doesn’t want it, for obvious reasons, but it was strongly suggested to me to keep for at least 1 year in case we launch a civil case and that becomes Exhibit A). I’ll have to request that my mom have the insurance company pay for a new one and ship to me to Colorado. That will be a difficult discussion to have.
But it’s a really nice bike … I was just riding it on that very road just 12 hours before he was killed. But it’s a really nice bike … wow, I’m not even sure how this sounds, but I’m trying to convey a few things. Obviously, on the one hand, there is a psychological fear against the bike given that my dad was on it when he was killed. On another hand, materialistically, it’s a nice bike and I really enjoyed riding it but I can’t easily shell out a month’s salary for it. On a third hand, I know the driver was insured, so objectively, they damaged property and their insurance needs to pay for its replacement (in addition to cleaning and fixing the gold Breitling watch he was wearing that I agreed would go to my brother since I’m getting the exercise equipment (and my mom doesn’t want the watch)). On the fourth hand, I certainly don’t want to seem as though I want the bike more than my dad. But I can’t have him back. So it’s not like I can have the cake or the pie, it’s that I can’t have the pie, so does that also mean I shouldn’t get the cake? On the fifth hand, the above stuff on fitness and that bike is far superior to mine, and I felt like I could go farther on it because I knew I had a motor assist if I needed it to get back. I noted that in a Facebook post just 11hrs 15min before he was killed:
- One thing I was concerned about was that I would feel the desire to put on the assist rather than just pedal a bit harder. I was right. However, I still easily got up to 155bpm heart rate. Just a teensy bit of an assist on a steep hill made it not unmanageable but still got the heart rate up.
- If the assist is on, it’s an assist. It only works if you pedal. You can’t just not pedal and ride it like a motorcycle. [edited to note that I now know this is based on the Class this eBike was — Class 3]
- If you have the assist up all the way and you’re coasting, turn it down before starting to pedal again, otherwise you’ll go from zero to lots very quickly and it can be a bit disorienting (unbalancing).
- My dad’s has an Enviolo “gear shift.” There are no gears. It’s a continuous shift that’s actually pretty neat technology that makes use of non-Newtonian fluids (but is fully mechanical and analog; enviolo.com). I’d say I like the shifter almost as much as I like the eBike aspect.
- I also felt more safe/comfortable going farther than I otherwise would because I had that pedal assist. That’s been an issue in Colorado where I’ve stopped a “safe” distance from my start point to make sure I could get back.
Alright … so, that’s another piece of exercise-related equipment that I may be obtaining in the next several months. Moving on!
Looking to more numerical things, i.e., what I track on here with food and macros and calories and exercise and weight and sleep and bodyfat, etc., I did track these as well as I could over the last few weeks. ‘Cause it’s been basically four weeks. I stopped posting in the week of my conference, then the bf’s mom’s house, then, well, the last two weeks. I’m going to work on those infographics, at least for the end-of-week summaries. At some level, it’s interesting to see how I did during those times. At another, I’d like to move past it.
Moving forward, I have not met my goals for the last month. It is stupid to assume that I can get back on track with the original plan, where I’m supposed to be 8 lbs down from where I am right now. So, I’ve modified my goal/plan to say that the previous four weeks have been a maintenance phase, where no weight change was expected, and no bodyfat change was expected. I was close enough to my goal five weeks ago that, unless things have gotten a lot worse over the last month (and they haven’t at least in weight), I should be able to catch up in a week or two. I’ve also lowered my calorie goal for this week, similar to what I did five weeks ago, to what my plan will be when I’m 190±5 lbs and cutting.
Sigh. Okay. That’s where things are now, and I think where they will be moving forward. I’m going to have to travel more, since I’ll be going back to my parents’ – mom’s – house every few weeks to help with things. But I’m hoping that a renewed purpose will help me push through that and, while difficult (for a variety of reasons), stay on-target.
Because, if we don’t move on, what’s the alternative?
My Fitness Blog 