A few years back, I made another one of these efforts to get back in shape. We formed a team, in partnership with my old company and Plano Cycling and Fitness. We had a great little team. One of the members was Craig Miller…

So, I ran into Craig the other day and he invited me to a ride that he was going to be doing. This was to be a four hour ride, during the week, in the hot Texas sun. For a guy who has been riding in the morning, riding under the sun in 96 degree weather was something that made me just a little squeemish. In any case, Craig assured me that the pace would be manageable and that everything would be just fine.

We started with a couple of laps around the lake, followed by the Wednesday Night World Championships (a local ride starting from the White Rock area). This is a ride that can be somewhat competitive and is typically 40 or so miles. Adding a couple of laps at the lake (20 miles) was just good measure for a couple of dudes who are looking to burn a little fat and build endurance.

Rather than give a blow by blow of the ride, I will just say that I started out feeling fine, but the heat got to me and I had to manage my speed to keep from overheating as the pace was turned up on the group ride. Craig waited on me down the road and bit, we refueled and then finished the ride.

Instead of focusing on the game of the ride, I will focus on something that blows my mind about what the Texas sun can do to the body…

I started out with three completely full bottles of water. Drank those in the first hour. Then, stopped at a local convenience store and filled my bottles with cold gatorade, spiked with water. Within 90 minutes that was gone. About ten miles from the finish, I filled up again, this time two full bottles of Gatorade, plus a bottle of Gatorade that I slammed at the store.

When I started this ride, i decided to weigh myself, since I am just obsessive about things like this. My weight was 244. When I finished this ride, I weighted 236.

So, in four hours, I consumed 9 bottles in the effort to stay hydrated. All of my bottles are 24 oz. bottles. This is a total of 216 ounces of water/Gatorade mix. Even with that, I lost a total of 8 pounds of water weight in one ride.

Pretty mind boggling. Gotta wonder how good this is for the body…