Day 4 Bicycling Commute and Operation Dirty Whore Updates

Day 3 left me with a sunburn. But, 'dems da breaks' of Operation Dirty Whore (aka Get Slutty). For those of you who aren't aware of said operations, they're nothing promiscuous, just a little tongue-in-cheek humor related to exercising to increase one's self-confidence and ability to wear differing types of clothing.

With that said...one protocol of Operation Dirty Whore states: If the sun's out, get the guns out. Besides the 17 miles on the bike in the Arizona July sun, when I got home I had to get on the roof. I did it all in a tank top. Ew, I know...wife beater shirt. They're still okay when working out, though not otherwise.

The result was that today I wore a long sleeve shirt while riding. It's one of my favorite shirts though...an Adidas running shirt. It's solid black, save a bright green back. Wicked cool. I'm a clothes whore (slut) too.

I think I finally have pace figured out for commuting. This isn't race training, it's not about speed. Instead of focusing on maintaining a minimum speed like I usually do, I focused on cadence (rpm of the pedals) and perceived effort. I kept the effort low and the cadence between 75 and 90. The result is that my mind was able to wander quite a bit, like it does when running or driving sometimes. That's cool!!! It's definitely something that normally doesn't happen for me when riding. Usually I'm focused on pushing hard and maintaining a high cadence and speed.

And how much time was lost? About 2 minutes extra to get to work. Not bad at all.

A couple of things to note about commuting on a bike instead of driving.

• You sacrifice a lot more time.
• You can't pick up a bag of ice on the way home.
• When arriving someplace where you must be presentable, like work, you have to take a whore's bath. That's a term from my mother, who is a very proper woman. I've only once heard her swear and that was "damn" and it was a quote from Winston Churchill.
  
  A whore's bath is when you have to wash your stinky parts with a wash cloth, or in my case, a wet paper towel. Then, you wet your hair in the sink. I have no access to a shower at work right now.
• You have to be more organized than when driving. You have to pack more things and unpack them quickly (clothes and food and such).
• Coworkers check out your legs and give you strange looks.
  

In case you don't know, I'm a high school math teacher. Right now my school is hosting a summer math academy for incoming freshmen that struggle with math. It's a very personal and low key environment where students are allowed to develop those weak skills. Today, we (my class), figured out how many calories I had burned losing 90 pounds. Then we figured out how many hours I would have to ride to burn those calories (though that's not exactly how it works). Then, we figured out how far I would've ridden at an average speed of 15 mph. Then I showed them some pictures of me from a year ago. It was a lot of fun.

Regarding Operation Dirty Whore. I got on the scale at the gym today and had an all time low...3 pounds less than a week ago and 6 pounds less than two weeks ago. The scale at the gym is higher than mine at home, but it read 213. That means my scale at home will probably read 207 or so.

Now, regarding the ride. I used imapmyride to track the routes so I could share them with people. Click on the 3d flyover feature, it's pretty cool.

Here's the ride from home to school. This is the easy ride. It starts at 3700 feet above sea level and ends at 3400. It's 5.9 miles, though the software shows something else.

Here is the ride from school to the gym. This is quite a bit tougher. Though the starting and finishing elevations are the same, the first 3 miles are up hill. That of course means the next three are down hill!


Here's the last leg, from the gym to home. The elevation goes from 3400 to 3700 again, most of it in the last two miles of the almost 5 mile ride. So, while there are some undulating hills and some mild elevation changes, none of it is hilly. It's a great route.