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Old 02-26-20, 06:33 AM
  #54  
RH Clark
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Join Date: Jun 2019
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Congrats on a new lease on life my friend! I've got a story very similar to yours. When I turned 50 I had a real awakening to my life and health up till that point. I had to come to terms with how much I had let things slip and I decided to do something about it. I weighed 330 lbs and was on 3 blood pressure meds and 4 pain pills a day from my ortho doctor. The plan was to manage the pain until I was old enough to get both knees replaced. Not a very promising future at all.

I placed all my attention on getting healthy and trying to learn how exactly to do just that. I changed my diet radically and started all kinds of exercise. I tried to walk but my knees couldn't take more than a mile every few days.

It was just a few months later that my son turned 10 and I realized I had never even taught him to ride a bike. I dug out an old girls cruiser and taught him how to ride it across the yard. Then I decided we both needed mountain bikes. I traded some hunting stuff for two Trek MTB's and we started riding.

On my first ride, I didn't even make it 3/10ths of a mile to the top of my driveway, but I kept at it day after day. The bike gave me a new sense of freedom and movement that had been missing for over 30 years.

Just 15 months after starting, I had lost 160 lbs and progressed to 30 mile days and 100 mile weeks. I'm coming up on age 52 now and I weigh 170lbs and feel better than I did at 20. The bike was a major part of all that. I just bought a Surly LHT and am about to do a 440 mile tour in the spring. Later this summer, I plan to ride it from Alabama to Colorado.
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