SethAZ 

Guys I apologize in advance if this is a little bit of a boast, but I got some good comments after a group ride that just made my day, and I thought you guys could appreciate it.

I finally rode again this morning with a group from a LBS that I hadn't ridden with in over three years. At first I thought that only the group leader (who works at the LBS) was still there from the old gang I rode with, and everyone else had joined the group since then, and the guys I'd ridden with before weren't there anymore.

But while waiting at one of the last stoplights before we got back from this ride (35 miles with somewhere between 800-1400 feet of climb depending on whose Strava activity report you believe, arg) this older guy rides up to me and says hey, are you that guy who was in the military before and you were leaving on a deployment? I said yeah, that was me, I just hadn't ridden for a couple years after returning and just started up again recently. He said "I knew it had to be you. When I saw you ride today I thought there's only one guy that big that I've ever seen ride so hard, it had to be you!"

When we got back to the store and were all saying good bye another guy came up to me and said when I'd shown up and started the ride going up to ride with the guys in front he said to himself ok, well I doubt this will end well, but I'd stayed with the guys in front for the whole ride, and he couldn't believe it.

I was around 288lbs or so this morning, slightly heavier than the 285lbs I've been, but well within daily variance due to water weight changes from day to day. And that weight is dropping (over 20 lbs since I started riding again in August).

So my takeaways from what those two guys said to me were:
Yes, they are judging me for my weight when I show up as the superclyde to a hard group ride.
I ride a lot faster and harder than they expect for such a big guy.
The 150-200 miles/week really do pay off, particularly paying attention to keeping a heart rate that will maximize my aerobic base building and ability to burn fat during rides.
When I'm down 30-50 lbs over the next year I'll still be a clyde, but, as they say, it won't get any easier, I'll just go faster.

Anyhow, don't let self-consciousness get in the way of showing up, or getting out on your own to lay down the miles, guys. I couldn't care less what they think of me when I show up to a ride. Because I know what they'll think of me when the ride is over.

copperfind

Well done... Keep it up.

bwilli88 

Great

ill.clyde

I'm in virtually the same boat as you ... especially in size and fitness levels ... very cool to read your story.

copperfind

Only problem is now those guys are pissed you hung with them and are now thinking this...

SethAZ 

Rofl. Yeah, in this case though I don't know whether I'm Rocky or the Russian dude. :-) I'm losing weight and simultaneously improving my endurance and speed, so I'm looking forward to it. I'll always be a clyde, but I won't always be a superclyde. I've got a goal to drop another ten pounds by New Years. I've been talking with my wife about what strategy I will use to get through the Christmas holiday season without gaining weight, or derailing the progress I've been making.

I had a strategy for Thanksgiving, which was that I'd go to the feast and eat one reasonable plate of food, then some dessert. It was way more than I typically eat, but it wasn't outlandishly piled up high or anything like that. I did eat more dessert than I should have, but I also knew that as soon as I left my in-laws' house it was over, and strict discipline would be resumed. I also rode 50 miles on Thanksgiving morning before the feast, 32 miles the next morning, took a rest day, then did a 35-mile group ride on Sunday. Yesterday morning I woke up one pound lower than I'd been on Thanksgiving morning, so whatever temporary weight blip I experienced from the Thanksgiving festivities was already gone.

I'm going to try this same strategy during Christmas. I know there will be some big family get-togethers including some feasts. I'll pick probably two occasions and give myself an allowance to enjoy myself on those two occasions, and then enforce discipline the rest of the time. This means no eating the plates of cookies and stuff that the neighbors will inevitably bring over a few days before Christmas, etc. By allowing myself to eat badly during a couple of pre-chosen occasions, it actually helps me to stick to my plan, because even when I'm eating badly during those feasts, I don't feel like I'm straying from my plan, since I'd already planned that out. Also, when I know I've allowed myself to eat badly on an occasion like this, I actually end up eating less badly than I would have if I'd just succumbed to temptation, said "**ck it," and went completely off the rails.

DMC707

Awesome testimony! I have always been a Clyde -- only difference is as a youngClyde, fresh out of the military, i weighed 210 with the physique of a bodybuilder (but still quite large compared to the greyhound types out there)

--- now im a Super Clyde with the physique of a bowling ball!

But as a aspiring cat4, then later cat 3 , who did a lot of criteriums, i took my size as a point of pride,

especially when the skinnies would fight for my wheel due to the wide draft --- id tell myself,
"You guys are using me to punch a hole in the wind and this strategy may eventually get me dropped, but i'm gonna make you hurt for a while "

Fun times -- on rare occasions, going off the front worked too

cj19

Seth, you earned every bit of that ability to boast. It's great to hear how you're getting back into awesome form and showing those skinny guys a thing or two. I like that last line...it's all about how you ride. For those Clydes that continue to fight that battle I'll add another thought: No matter how I feel when I get on the bike, I always feel better when I get off.

breadbin

Great story! Inspirational even reminds me of when I was into athletics and sprinting in particular. This was when I was about 13 or so. I've always been bigger than normal but it never stopped me. Anyway I was taking part in a race. 100m sprint and I won and one of the guys said something like like "you don't look like you were going to be that fast!" Obviously a bit cut up about being beaten by a heavier lad! It's amazing the things we remember. It's probably 30 years ago!

SethAZ 

Thanks for all the comments guys! The funny thing is I'm experiencing a change of mindset that I think is going to help me out. I'm not proud of being a superclyde. That's just the way it is right now, but I'm working on it. The change of mindset is that rather than just myself as an overweight guy using cycling mileage to lose some weight, I'm realizing that deep down I'm just a cyclist who happens to be quite overweight at the moment. Rather than just make weight goals, I'm shifting my mindset to making cycling goals instead. I'd like to do long distances relatively fast. I'd like to continue riding with faster riders on these intermediate-level rides and splitting off with the faster group and be trusted to keep up, pull my fair share, etc. I want to do centuries with some friends and have them feel bad (even if they really don't need to) for being the slowest in the group, rather than me just assume I'm going to be the boat anchor of the group.

What I've realized is that as long as I'm paying careful attention to my food intake so that I'm creating a certain daily calorie deficit that will support weight loss, if I think like a cyclist instead of a clyde trying to lose some weight, ride like a cyclist instead of a clyde trying to lose some weight, and train to improve my cycling, my weight will converge over time towards that of a cyclist who does the kinds of things I want to do. It's unrealistic to think I'll ever fall below the clydesdale limit, but with time I'll definitely drop out of the superclyde realm.

Anyhow, I appreciate the remarks. I'm going out with this same group tomorrow for a 48-mile ride that will have a few gradual climbs but totalling only around 1000 feet or so. Those gradual ascents are what will challenge me in terms of keeping up with the fast guys in the group, but hopefully I can gut it out. My power output is high enough, but that damn power/weight ratio is the killer. Physics: it's not just a good idea, it's the law!

brawlo

Well done @SethAZ! Your story reads a lot like mine. I put my head down and didn't let my size beat me. I worked my way to the mid-top level of club B grade. A grade has some national level riders and some kind of A2 level guys. I was happy with where I was at on the road, but the reality of it is that my size will generally keep me as a B grade rider. When hills become part of the equation I loose out, but on the flatter courses I could hold my own. The last few years I have put the road riding aside to have a solid crack at track sprinting. I have had to put the road aside as I began to find that as I got faster on track, putting hard effort in on the road was cutting my top end and so I just ride road now for the social aspect and fitness. I'm truly loving the journey and the challenge, even though it takes so much effort and time!

Loved reading your story

BigGuy305

Good job!

SethAZ 

Thanks! It does all depend on the groups, too. There's one group local to me that I haven't ridden with yet because of two reasons: A) they insist on keeping their 5:30 AM start time even though now it's winter and the sun doesn't come up for a couple of hours, so the entire ride is in darkness and cold, and B) their A group says in their little info thing that there are places on that ride where they'll attack up to 30mph or so. On my own solo rides I can get as high as 27 to 28mph or so in very short bursts (like maybe 200-300m at most) but I've never cracked 30mph without either descending or else with a raging tailwind. I might be able to hold onto a paceline doing that kind of speed for a short time, but if they sprint out to reach that speed I'll surely get gapped and never be able to close it.

I'll continue my training and improve my FTP, but power/weight ratio will always kill me on attacks and climbs. As much as I improve FTP, it'll be dropping more pounds that most improves that critical ratio. It's going to be interesting to see how things go in coming months as I hopefully push the power I can maintain up a bit, and lose more weight.

I'm on a pretty good roll right now and could crack the 270s again for the first time in almost two years by the end of the week. I'm hoping to crack the 240s by March when I'll meet up with a couple of online friends for the Solvang Century in California. One of them is 200lbs, the other guy is like 160 or so, and I'm determined not to be the limiting factor in how fast we do that century as a group. I'll have to drop a little over two pounds a week to pull that off. I've lost more weight than that more quickly before, but I'm trying to do this a little more gradually and in a sustained way this time around. I think it's eminently doable. I'm currently down around 25 lbs or so since the middle of August, and though I'd love to have lost more than that in that time, I think that's actually been a pretty healthy rate.

When I originally went down from 380 to 245ish or so in 2009/2010 I was in 100% Nazi mode, with incredibly tight control over my food intake, and 3-5 hours a day of exercise, being a combination of riding my bike and hitting the gym with mostly leg-based cardio. I had a really tight deadline to fall within the Army body composition standards by a certain date because I was about to be too old to get back in the way I wanted to. I went straight from doing that to a couple of months of active duty training and I was hurting bad, as in two or three prescription 800mg Ibuprofin per day bad. When that training was over I couldn't go back to the hardcore Nazi scheme I'd been operating under for so many months because it was wrecking my joints. I tried backing off and having a more sensible plan that was more maintainable, and have porpoised up and down in that 265-295lb range (with a couple brief climbs up over 300, including this past year) for most of the last six years. Several months-long Army schools that took me completely out of my routine didn't help, as did the 11 months I was away from home for a deployment.

Coming home from deployment I had a really hard time dealing with the transition back to my normal life (and it wasn't even a combat deployment - real world deployment, but no combat), and that lead to my two-year break from cycling and getting back up to 305-310 or so, being way beyond army body composition limits, and the serious risk of getting kicked out over it. I recently got back barely within the limit so I'm no longer in imminent danger of an administrative discharge over it, but I have to stay under it or I'll be gone.

What I'm trying to do right now is stop focusing on the weight loss aspect of it, and focus more on the cycling/lifestyle aspect of it. I'm definitely eating better, and making sure I create that daily calorie deficit so that my weight will continue to drop, but I'm re-orienting from "I'm losing weight and using cycling to help that happen" to "I'm working to develop my abilities and performance as a cyclist to be the kind of cyclist I want to be."

So this means if I want to be a 225 lb cyclist instead of a 282 lb cyclist like I was this morning, I need to eat the way a 225 lb cyclist would eat, and ride the way a 225 lb cyclist would ride. This means not "going on a diet," but rather figuring out what diet would sustain me at the weight I'd like to be at, and eating that way. My weight will gradually converge down to that weight. And if I'm really eating the way a 225 lb cyclist would eat, once reached that weight would remain stable, by definition.

brawlo

Sounds like you could be a Low Carb High Fat diet candidate. What put me onto it was a friend that basically said "from the amount of work you do, you just shouldn't be that fat". He had been on low carb himself and done a whole stack of research into it which basically meant I didn't have to do a whole lot of reading, just some chats with him. Anyway, as soon as I ditched the carbs, the weight dropped off at a crazy rate. 17kg in 10 weeks crazy, but definitely worth noting that I never went backwards on performance unlike other dietary changes that I've made in the past! My poor mother thought I had serious health issues the next time she saw me! I've put about 10kg back on since then, but that includes hitting the gym hard last winter. I hadn't done weights for about 2 years prior and I think that's where most of the weight came from as my fat pinching doesn't show it any thicker. I haven't been too hard on the diet for a while now, but post Christmas I'll be back on it more strictly.

Cycling at 110kg vs 130kg is a big contrast for me. Things are a whole lot easier, climbing is worlds different. I still couldn't keep up with the 60-70kg skinnies on climbs, but I was there with them when the roads were flat or downhill. For me at 6'5", the biggest issue is that even in a paceline, I'm still up and in the wind so I still have to work extra hard.

SethAZ 

I did a group ride several weeks ago where this one tiny little guy was in the paceline with me, right ahead of me. Once when we pulled up to a stoplight I said to him "you know, you get a lot more benefit from drafting off me than I get from drafting off you." If one thinks of drafting as staying in someone's wind shadow, a person behind me is like in a wind black hole.

As far as the HFLC diet goes, I've read a few things about that on these forums in the past two or three months, and I've done some reading about on other sites as well. I haven't committed to the very, very low carb thing (Atkins-like) yet, but I have definitely greatly decreased the percentage of carbs I've been eating. I've mostly eliminated breads and such. Not fully, but when I do buy some bread it's typically in the form of a sandwich thin to use as a vehicle for some fried eggs or meat or something like that. What carbs I have been eating lately I try to limit to what I eat right after a ride, to ensure that my glycogen stores are topped off and my recovery begins with a good amount of protein and anything else necessary.

I'll look into it some more, and see if it makes sense to me to reduce the carbs even more.

brawlo

At 6'5" I get that a lot! I keep telling the little guys to sit up a bit more and stick their arms out to give my left nut some draft

The Real Meal Revolution by Tim Noakes was the book that I was pointed to. There's not really any fad to his ideas and they've been around and peer reviewed for a long time now. If you try, and once you become fat adapted you can try reintroducing carb foods and watch your blood sugar levels to see what it actually is that triggers you. You might find that there's only a few things that affect you rather than having to drop everything carb related. Unfortunately I'm not so luck and pretty much every carb affects me and so I really have to "go hard or go home" and stop taking the easy route of sitting in on the meals with the rest of the family and do some work for myself again. Another thing that really surprised me was the recovery aspect. I'd been taking pea protein isolate for a number of years. A lot of messing around and experimentation led to me literally needing it to reduce my recovery time. Nothing else worked as well. Since going low carb, I don't take it any more and I now recover better than ever! I can go out and do a fast paced 45-55km ride in the morning with just a cup of milky coffee prior. I have a coffee or 2 at the cafe after the ride and don't touch food until lunch time.

DMC707

Neither am I -- I was proud when I was a 215 lb ball of muscle lining up against 140 lb whirling dervishes, --- but now I have to admit after years of carrying around way too much weight ----- it is fatiguing


I like @brawlo 's input because I have tried the low carb highe rfat approach before -- and it works, but I will invariably ruin it by taking up a round of pints or something after a mountain bike ride, -- and being kind of obsessive compulsive, i'll do it again for days in a row

Just 1 night on the bottle is all it takes to undo 3 or 4 days of diligent low carb high fat eating ---

But regarding your riding --- have you tried some lower heart rate rides? = Specifically zone 2 , long extended rides in that zone? Its tough to do because its boring, but a lot of people seem to tout its benefits

SethAZ 

One thing I've been doing for probably a couple of months now is lots of rides at the target heart rate that Dr. Phil Maffetone talks about. I haven't read all of his stuff yet, but I did read his 180 formula. Using his formula, plugging in my age, looking at his adjustments, and then rounding it to the closest good, round number, I arrived at 130 is my likely best heart rate for aerobic base training. For me that corresponds more or less with the top of zone 2, just 4bpm below zone 3.

I've done most, but not all, of my rides for the last couple of months trying to keep to 130bpm, trying to build up that aerobic base. Group rides I disregard it, of course, and do whatever I have to do. There have been a few rides where I deliberately stepped up to like a threshold level of effort to see if I could push out a PR on some segment or even entire ride (I define most of my usual routes as segments in Strava to make tracking all of this easier).

When I want to test my progress out I'll either do my 12.5-mile route, or else if I have the time and feel the urge I'll diligently hold as close to 130 bpm as I can and do my 32.5-mile ride, and compare it to my previous rides at around that heart rate. I've recently started pushing over that heart rate for certain rides, like today's 20.6 miler where I averaged 136bpm at an avg. 18.6 mph. I recently worked toward and then broke a minor local KOM that is a 2-mile ovalish main road through a housing development a few miles from my house. On my KOM-breaking attempt I spent two whole laps slowly accelerating up through my tempo pace, through threshold, and timed it so that I was just entering my maximum heart rate as the next lap began. I managed to hold over 170bpm throughout the entire 2-mile lap and broke the previous 23.6mph KOM by 2 seconds, averaging 23.7mph. Since it's a circular route nobody's ever managed to lamer that segment with a tailwind, and apparently nobody's drafted a truck or done it as part of a paceline, since it's off the main group ride routes. The big thing for me is that holding over 170bpm for the entire 2 miles was a huge improvement of my maximum effort. At my age 170ish really is max, and I can usually only hold it for relatively short sprints.

I can see that all of this is paying off. On Saturday I did a 41-mile route that is a newly defined extension to my 32.5-mile route. I sustained an average heart rate of 136 bpm, avg. speed of 18.7mph, and ate or drank no calories during the ride, just water while stopped at some intersections. It wasn't a fasted state ride, since I'd had some oatmeal (just about the only common carb I still include in my diet fairly often) two to three hours prior to the ride, but still, riding that far at that speed with no external calorie input during the ride was a noticeable improvement over what I've been able to do in the past.

I've been trying to train my body to become better at burning fat during rides by doing the morning rides I get in if I get up early enough on an empty stomach other than some black coffee, or else some coffee with just milk in it, like brawlo does. I've noticed that doing my morning rides, especially when I have the time to get in the 32.5-miler before work, on an empty stomach and by sticking to the 130bpm Maffetone heart rate target seems to be really improving a lot of things. If I can't get in a morning ride before I have to log in for work, I'll eat my breakfast, then do a lunchtime ride before eating anything for lunch. By doing it this way one of my day's main meals is always consumed right after a ride, so that my body is primarily burning fat during the ride, and then my body has whatever it needs to begin recovery immediately afterwards.

brawlo

Don't you have low carb beers stateside? I've moved to a mid strength beer as my standard drink. The HUGE benefit is it only has 2g of carbs per bottle. The one to keep an eye on is the calories at 107/beer. So even on the strict low carb I was still having up to 6 beers per week. Craft beers are a big no no. They can be pretty high in both carbs and calories

SethAZ 

Yeah I've gone most of the last four months without drinking at all, just because I didn't want to afford the calories. When I have bought some beer I always picked up a light beer. Light beer is something I've always made fun of in the past, and sure it doesn't taste as good as really good beer, but it was a sort of compromise move, so I can have one or two of them on occasion (certainly not every day, or even every week) and feel like I'm not living a totally locked down lifestyle. When I have some light beers on hand I'll sometimes have one right after a ride, both as a celebration of the ride, but also so that whatever carbs are in it can contribute to the recovery and glycogen replacement, rather than just be empty calories that detract from my daily calorie deficit. They're still calories, but if I'm going to have one, I figure that's as good a time as any to do it, and probably a better time than, say, right before bed.