The Rebuild

Yes, it is possible to rebuild an aging body just like rebuilding a bike!

In 2019, while attending the United Bicycle Institute classes on Bicycle Maintenance, we each got to work on our own bikes, replacing all the cables and brake pads, overhauling the headset and hub, and rebuilding our rides. How satisfying to break down the bike, putting it back together piece by piece.

But rebuilding your own body? Now, that would be a cool objective during the Quarantine. Today, as I write this on 4 March 2021, I’ve been indoors for 356 days, except for several trips into Manhattan to give blood, a few doctor appointments, and my two visits to the Javits Center for both doses of the Phizer vaccine. I’ll be leaving this apartment in the Bronx, New York, in the best shape of my life. Seriously!!!

Here’s how it happened.

Forced Indoors

After abandoning my last long-distance ride in Tupelo, Mississippi in mid-March 2020 and renting a car to hightail it home to New York City due to COVID, it soon became evident that the touring season was lost or at least postponed until late in 2020. With transmission and death rates climbing in our borough and spreading throughout the country, there was also a good chance that we might be stuck indoors for months. So, I resigned myself to an indeterminate internment at home.

During the first weeks, my only trips outside our home were to donate blood in Manhattan, cycling through the empty streets, which were surprisingly dangerous. With no traffic, drivers went crazy and the number of accidents, particularly involving cyclists, soared.  We didn’t know in those early months of the Pandemic exactly how the virus spread and if cycling past pedestrians or other riders could spread the disease. Also, the last thing I figured an ER doc wanted to see back in April or May 2020 was an old GOMER (ER slang for “Get Out Of My Emergency Room”) with a busted collarbone or something worse, if I could find an ambulance that would scrape me off the road. However, my favorite neighborhood yoga studio was offering online classes and I signed up for a package, thinking that it couldn’t hurt to spend some time on the mat, keeping limber. My new job as a bicycle tour leader wouldn’t start for a month or so and, if I couldn’t ride and since running had gotten too painful over the last few years, I could at least work on my flexibility.

Throughout history, there are stories of individuals who have been forced indoors by contagion, insurrection or imprisonment, and who have not only survived but thrived. Your prison cell or the four walls of your refuge can either confine you or present an opportunity to excel at something despite your situation. Deprived of my liberty, I chose to prepare for my liberation by training until the day of my release.

100 Yoga Classes in 100 days

After more than five decades of training non-stop season-after-season for one sort of endurance event or another, maybe it was time to take a break. Why not use the time to do a different kind of “rebuild”?

In yoga, there is a word for the moment when you inhale deeply and the breath changes direction, stopping for a moment: Kumbhaka. Practitioners of the yoga technique of pranayama often incorporate the holding of the breath at this moment. But however long the pause, at the end of the pause and the beginning of the exhale is often a moment for a change in direction. In my case, the metaphorical “kumbhaka” was a longer moment to reflect, reach stillness, repair, refresh, and change direction before heading off down a different path.

Each year, since I was in my teens, there was always a track meet, marathon, 10k, triathlon, century ride, road race, or bicycle tour to prepare for. Yes, I’ve been a serial masochist since running track at Berkeley High back in the 60s. Season rolled into off-season and back into a new season, broken only by the occasional unplanned injury, hernia repair, or cycling accident, which kept me off the bike or running path only long enough to recover but no longer. That damn lower back thing, and that damn shoulder thing, and those ever-tightening damn hip flexors just turned into lingering aches and pains that we have all lived with as a consequence of leading a wonderfully active life.

After arranging the furniture, and setting up the camera and monitor, my den was transformed into an online yoga studio. Don’t worry.. no scented candles or eye pillows… just yoga blocks and a strap to help me reach my feet while bending. Day after day, as bodies were being stored in refrigerated trucks and waves of horrible news oozed from the TV, I retreated into one and often two daily yoga, stretch, or strength classes online. Maybe it was the mindfulness, maybe it was the lithe bendy bodies on the screen, but I kept at it for one hundred days from mid-March through the last week in June.

An amazing thing happened. Week after week, my nose kept getting closer to my knees. That assortment of knots at various places along my spine (rhomboids and lats mostly) melted away. Spending time in twists, I could feel those extensors, obliques, flexors, and connecting tissues that had been in some form of spasm for years starting to relax and lengthen. Off the mat, ambling around the house trying to stay out of my wife’s way while she was finishing her most recent book, those nagging lower back pains were gone. Little things, like emptying the dishwasher or even rolling over in bed were no longer an opportunity for agony. I’m not sure of the anatomical parts, but the visible step-down on the top of my shoulder, the result of a shoulder separation, went away as the acromion (I’m guessing) found its way home in my AC joint.

The aging body is still very plastic, it seems. We don’t own our injuries but have only been renting them. With time, patience and persistence, it is possible to home PT yourself back to a much younger body. Now, I’m not saying that all parts work as they used it. (We can wish!) I won’t ever be able to hold 300 watts on a long hill or convince my mitochondria that they should be Krebs cycling like they did in my prime, but I am sure that the lingering aches and pains that I thought I would live with for the rest of my days could be given an eviction notice.

Enter the Human Hamster Wheel: Tacx Neo 2 and Online Spinning

But yoga wasn’t enough as my aerobic fitness began slipping away. However, I remembered reading about someone in the late 19th century who was forced to train for distance running while confined to his flat in London. He spent hours running in place, doing high knee lifts. If he could train doing that, I could ride indoors… if I could find a trainer, which were in as short supply as regular bicycles back in May. With incredible luck, a used Tacx Neo 2 showed up on Ebay. Sold!

On May 10 2020 I set up the trainer with my Pinarello Dogma 60.1 racing bike and began growing mitochondria at home. In the intervening nine months, I’ve spent an average of about an hour a day riding hard (except for two mid-season breaks in July and January.) And, in the several months since discovering Zwift, and the gamification of my exercise in that immersive virtual reality, my hours on the bike have increased significantly.

Motivation while working out alone at home is always a challenge, particularly when the weeks of training started dragging on through the summer and into fall. Luckily, I’d faced this problem years before during snowbound winters in New York City and had incorporated spinning at the Flywheel studios into my training from November through March. While not a fan of personal power dynamics in other aspects of my life, I’d found that I respond well to an instructor encouraging me to turn myself inside out while listening to a booming mix of high-energy tunes. For nine years, mostly during cold and snowy NYC winters, I’d been attending classes at the Flywheel studios in Manhattan, all of which were now shuttered due to COVID. Luckily, at that moment one of my favorite spin instructors, Danielle Devine-Baum @ddb_fitness , expanded her fitness training business online, offering spin classes via Zoom with her business partner, Wendy Wolfson @spinmama. With splendid tunes, authentic encouragement, and a slick booking system, I began combining workouts on TrainerRoad with one or two Zoom spin classes, some with as many as seventy students at a time.

Going Sideways And Not Always Forward

Spinning and yoga were a great combination, but something was missing. Yoga was excellent for stretching and balance, and spinning was perfect to build aerobic capacity, but my upcoming tour would include a lot of bending, lifting, and lots of physical movement that moved sideways rather than just forward, pedaling down the road. I needed more well-rounded physical training. For about six months, from June through December, I experimented with a range of classes online including High-Intensity Interval Training (HIIT), dance aerobics, barre, power yoga, and Tabata. However, following several pesky and painful knee, ankle, and tendon issues, I concluded that at sixty-seven years of age, the sudden movements and jumping around were a bit too much impact for an aging frame.

Zwift: The Gamification of Indoor Cycling As a Positive Addiction

From May through November of 2020 I used TrainerRoad, riding interval workouts in ERG mode, short for “ergometer”, when the smart trainer automatically sets the resistance and you stay in one gear, never having to shift. I’d tried some other programs like the Tacx app with cool streaming real-life videos of cycling in the outdoors, and Zwift with cool graphics reminiscent of when I used to cycle indoors ten years ago, but my trainer kept skipping gears when I shifted, so I stuck with TrainerRoad.

An online cycling friend suggested that I try Zwift again so I took a closer look at the shifting problem, specifically at the number of sprockets in my rear cluster, which had come with the trainer. Running my finger across the cogs, I counted eleven sprockets, exactly one more than the cassette on the rear wheel of my Pinarello and not at all compatible with my derailleur… hence the skipping. Amazon to the rescue with a proper ten-speed cassette, a lock-ring removal tool, a new chain, and a chain whip tool. With a little home “wrenching” the poor drive train was finally shifting into all twenty gears and, suddenly, Zwift worked perfectly, as I could finally shift gears rather than play “grind it until you find it” on the virtual hills.

Why in the hell hadn’t I figured this out before and why had I lost months doing intervals on TrainerRoad when I could have been getting badges, completing levels, using imaginary “drops” to purchase imaginary bikes and wheels. Suddenly my time on the bike increased dramatically as it became a whole lot more fun and, admittedly, addictive in all the right ways.

HTFU: The One Rule that Rules all the Rules

The Rebuild has had one single purpose: Harden the Fuck Up (see https://www.velominati.com/)

Losing Those Last 10 Kilos

First of all, to lose some weight at the beginning of winter in November 2019, I put alcohol aside, thinking that it was a good first step to eliminating useless calories. What started as a challenge to drop five kilos with my friend Shell turned into a good decision when the Pandemic hit. From a high of 91.4 kg (201 lbs) at the beginning of 2020, I’m now down to 81.2 (179 lbs), a reasonable drop of 10.2 kg (22 lbs) during fourteen months. Losing ten kilos while quarantined with a refrigerator full of food has been a huge focus of The Rebuild and a triumph of will over temptation. And, no booze for the last year while dealing with the weird psychological effects of isolation and day-to-day sameness was really a great decision.

Ending Quarantine at Peak Fitness

I’m almost ready to roll out the door after more than one year indoors due to the virus, but definitely in the best shape of my life.

Training Peaks https://www.trainingpeaks.com , the online fitness tracking app, has helped me measure my progress this year, as it has since 2010. It keeps track of my “Acute Training Load (ATL), measuring the rolling average of all my workouts, providing an indicator of my true fitness level. With another month of indoor riding, my goal will be to bring my fitness to 100 ATL, which is the highest it has been since the end of my 59-day ride across the United States from San Diego to St. Augustine in 2019.

Before leaving in April, I’ll come back to finish this piece on “The Rebuild”…. Still a work in progress with only seven weeks to go.

(All workout data can be found at https://www.strava.com/athletes/kimogoree )

Kimo – 4 March 2021, Bronx, NY