Me.
I was sent a link to this forum from a friend on an email list. I recently just got a new bike after not having one for about 20 years.
Some background.
I started cycling when I was 13 as my main mode of transportation in Winnipeg, MB, Canada. I rode by bike everywhere and would regularly challenge myself to bike farther, or faster, or longer than before. All my friends were also into cycling. I was in pretty good shape when I was at the height of cycling. 6'3" tall, 185 pounds. I have a lot of good stories from those days. Once I got my first car at 22, I stopped cycling for 4 or 5 years. Once I took my car off the road to fix it up, I was back to cycling. At this point, I was 230 pounds, which seemed to be a good weight for me. Cycling 30 or 40 miles a day was not uncommon during the summer as I would cycle to work, home and anywhere else I was going to go.
In 1999 I married my wife in Asheville, NC, USA and moved there. No cycling while living there and my weight ballooned to 280.
In 2002 we moved to Chattanooga, TN, USA, for better employment. No cycling while living there and my weight ballooned to 320 by the time we moved to St. Louis, MO in 2008.
In the last 10 years, my weight had ballooned to a max of 398 pounds. Since January 15th, I've lost 30 pounds just by watching my diet and eliminating drinking alcohol. Knowing I needed to do more to get healthier, I took advantage of my work's Health & Wellness benefit and bought a bicycle. We get $200 towards health and wellness purchases for the year.
A disease I have causes me to purchase and like the most irrational things. So, for most of my life, I've looked for things that were uncommon and unusual. My car is 1976 Mercury Capri II. Our family vehicle is a 2004 Mercury Monterey minivan...this is about as close to mainstream as I have gotten. They were not popular but based on the Ford Freestar minivan. My PC is a low power 25W TDP system from AMD that I built myself using oddball computer components. I am the only person at work with an Android phone. I have used an LED projector for a TV, then I used it for a monitor for PC when we got our 1st generation 4K TV. I've been using Linux for almost a decade now as my operating system of choice.
This brings me to my bicycles. I've always had mountain bikes and in my earlier years I would customize them to be different...road bike curl bars on my mountain bike before other people did it. I would also take the handle bars and flip them left to right and mount them upside down. Instead of coming up to your hands, you would have to lean over even farther and more forward to reach them. Eventually, I got around to painting them myself with my own paint schemes and upgrading their components.
That's why I bought what I bought, as you can see in the attachment.
It's ridiculous, and it was also pretty cheap. There are a few others out there that cost way more than what I paid for mine, but I think that comes down to just the components. The frame is still the same across all the models. Over time I'll upgrade it's components as I get into better shape. Right now, I have difficulty just getting once around the block before I feel like I've run a marathon...but it will get better over time.
I am currently 368 pounds with a goal to make it to under 300 by the end of the year and down to my ideal weight of 220 by the end of 2018. Hiking & Cycling is about the other exercise I can tolerate.
JamesGTRS