I suppose I could say that I’m three years older and none the wiser… That’s not 100% true, but it closer to the truth than not.

I started trying to lose weight sometime in 2017 and began documenting my fitness quest at the start of 2018. I can honestly say that I had a great first year. By the time October of 2018 had rolled around, I had gone from over 350 pounds to 270 something. When I started, I had not ridden my bike in years, but in October 2018 I completed a 57-mile ride in Scotland. I was feeling better than I had in over a decade, but then, my momentum fizzled for various reasons and it stopped.

Why Did I Stop?

I might slip a bit here, but I’m not trying to make excuses – I’m just trying to document in hindsight why I didn’t exercise as much going forward after the Scotland trip.

Before I left for Scotland, I had been cycling at least 20 miles per day for several months and had been riding 50 miles at least one day each week for the 6 weeks before I left. After the ride, I spent another 2 weeks in Scotland but did not have access to a bike for the rest of that trip. So once I got home, not only was I out of the habit of daily cycling, I was sore from a lot of hiking. Then I got busy on a major editorial project that I prioritized over getting back into my fitness routine.

As 2019 started, I found it more difficult to ride in the cold mornings of January and February. By May I was riding fairly regularly again, logging 20 days in the saddle and then 25 days riding in June although they were shorter rides than 20 miles per day. In July I was just getting back to 20 mile daily rides when disaster struck in the form of a Pit Bull which gave me a nice leg injury, a lot of medical hassle because it was not vaccinated for rabies, and forced a long break from the bike.

Then 2020 began with a lot of hope and promise. After the January and February cold began to subside, I was ready to tackle the bike again with morning rides in March. Except then in March, the schools were cancelled and despite having school switch to online classes for the Kilted Kid, the quality of the instruction basically turned me into a home school teacher. (I had to supplement lessons, explain what the teachers weren’t explaining well, track down missing assignments, or at times just get his butt back in front of the computer when the lessons were too boring.) I was getting out some mornings, but not with any regularity or any great distance.

When school came back in the fall, the schools were a little better organized for the online instruction, but the Kilted Wife had just moved to start a new job in Georgia and I was busy prepping, packing and listing the house while still pulling home school duties. The third time I made it out in September, I got a flat tire. Then two rides later the replacement tube blew and I never made it to the bike shop. Once the family was finally reunited in Georgia, the search began for a new bike shop. When I finally made it to the shop (which is about 30 minutes away) and got a new tube installed, it blew in the car on the way home. Two weeks later I made it back to the bike shop, and that tube didn’t even make it into the car and blew on the sidewalk. That incident finally had them find the issue in my wheel and that tube is still good a couple weeks later.

Now the problem is finding a new place to ride around the new home. I don’t have any interest in tackling a ride on the main road since it too busy given that there are no sidewalks and no shoulder, and the hills and curves don’t allow passing safely. Since I still don’t have a hitch or a bike rack for my car, I will have to stay close to home. The new neighborhood only has a little more than a mile of streets, so it’ll be good for starters but isn’t a long-term solution. Fortunately the area is much hillier than I’m used to riding in so I may be able to get a better workout over the given distance once I start rolling again.

And that pretty much brings me up to the present, waiting to see how long it takes for the North Georgia mornings to get temperatures above the 30’s and low 40’s so I can start riding again.

A Fresh Start

So where do we go from here? The bike is ready, just waiting on the temperatures to improve a bit. The new Kilted Gym is shaping up and will need to get some use soon – I suppose I need to design a new weight routine for both me and the Kilted Kid so we can both get started. And while we’re at it, the diet has slipped a bit as well, so that’ll need a re-evaluation. I suppose the best way to start the New Year and to reignite the fitness routine is to revisit the KILTED! Principle.

So before we get into this year’s fitness activities and start getting KILTED!, let’s examine these revised versions of the original posts which introduced the KILTED! Principle.