I've been meaning to post here more often all summer -- I wanted to say how coaching was going, I wanted to mention how my first races of the summer went, and I wanted to describe my new cross bike and how my very short (1 race) cross season went, but all of that sort of fell by the wayside when I found out I have a large brain tumor last month.

You can read the whole entry if you'd like details, but the long story short is the tumor explains a lot of my frustrations and struggles to be a better cyclist over the last couple years.

Two years ago I rolled off the couch, thought my 20 years of BMX skills would make me a good cyclocrosser and promptly rode myself into exhaustion on a muddy course in Hillsboro, where I placed three up from dead last in the beginner class (the other two DNF'd).

For 2008, I rode all spring and summer and even a bit of the fall, on the order of several thousand miles, and I was mid-pack beginner at best. That's when I decided to get really serious, hire a bike coach, and promptly started doing serious miles beginning in December of 2008.

I rode a lot of hard miles all winter and early spring, going from a measly 225 watt average for 20min of all out sprinting to 300 watts over 20min. I kept riding hard until about April, when real life intervened and by the time I raced in June at PIR's short track mtb series, I knew something had to be up. I came in something like 53rd out of 75 people in June 2009, and a year earlier my results were exactly the same. Internally I thought about this for weeks, why didn't I improve, why was I exhausted soon after the start?

Along with the non-improvement despite training, I was also on a weight loss crusade this year. Ever since I moved to Oregon in 2003, I've steadily gained 5-10lbs a year with no real explanation, and this year, as I lost ten, then twenty more pounds, to say it was a struggle was an understatement. Every night for four months I went to bed starving. I would spend my days eating half of what I normally eat, and then go out and ride 150 miles a week on top of that, and lose about a pound per week.

I couldn't tell if something was wrong with me or if this was just the new reality of being over 35 and getting old.

I've also been going to the gym steadily (2-3 hours per week with a trainer) for over a year and have shown almost no growth in muscle mass despite steadily increasing weights. Ten years ago I went to a gym 1-2 times a week for four months and had noticeably larger arms.

So in a way, the tumor was a blessing in disguise. From my first few rounds of blood testing I saw that my hormone levels were near zero across the board. Typical testosterone levels in men my age range from a low to high of 175-781 ng/dl. My first measurement was 37 ng/dl, or about 20% of the lowest end, and less than 5% of the high end of normal. All my other growth hormones are similarly low, to the point I've been diagnosed with Panhypopituitarism, or a lack of human growth hormones.

Since my diagnosis, I've begun a course of medication and my metabolism and sparked back up again (I lost ten lbs in the hospital as well, but I've gained a few back, still well below 200). I feel like I can control my weight with much less effort than before. I'm still feeling low energy but we haven't started a course of testosterone treatment yet. Another upside is that I'll basically be using every banned performance-enhancing substance in the coming months, though it will be just to take me up to normal, not to make me some superhuman cyclist.

Finally, as I've gotten this diagnosis, I've realized it's not about getting Stronger, Fitter, or Faster anymore, it's really about getting healthy again, spending time with my family, and riding for fun (and hopefully racing next summer). I'm facing more medication and testing over the next few months and possibly some brain surgery, then some recovery.

This week my George Hincapie documentary DVD showed up and I got to watch it yesterday while flying down to San Francisco and back for a quick one-day trip. I've long been a fan of George because like him I'm a tall guy and he's always been my tall-guy-in-the-peleton favorite and he's great at the spring Classics and those are some of my favorite races to watch. I always root for him when he races and I couldn't wait to watch the film.

I'll sum up the entire review by saying I watched the whole thing on the plane ride down to SF and it was so good I re-watched the entire movie again that night on the flight home. Highly recommended if you are a fan of Big George (even if you aren't watch the trailer and you just might like it as much as I did).

(I also liked it so much I cross posted this to the Buy Local blog as well)

It seems that the bet described in the previous post is now officially halfway completed, and I'm happy to say that on July 1st, I weighed in at 209.8lbs, just under where I should be in order to hit 200lbs by September 1st. I also rode about 470 miles last month, the most of any month this year and I even took two trips of several days in length each. If I had stayed home all month, I'm sure I could be doing more than 600 miles per month.

On a similar note, I want to introduce a new bike team I've helped get off the ground: Buy Local Cycling. My friend Jeff came up with an idea to showcase local bike frame builders and bike products by riding custom frames with either Oregon and/or American-made products. I chipped in some seed money and we've assembled a rag-tag bunch of low-key (mostly) cyclocross riders. We're expanding the cyclocross series we launched last year and just added a brand-new Short Track Mountain Bike series around Salem, Oregon including one race in the middle of the Oregon State Fair.

It's fun and not too serious, as half the fun has been selecting bike kit designs and picking paint colors on new DeSalvo frames.

To get through the long gray winters here in Oregon, I've taken to reading every book I can find about cycling to keep me motivated and wanting to ride when the weather is cold, rainy, and windy. The following are all the books I picked up and read since about October and I included a short review of each.

Of course, it goes without saying the best cycling book ever written is The Rider by Tim Krabbe and none of these books can hold a candle to it, but a few have their moments and aren't half-bad.

In no particular order:

Major by Todd Balf -- a pretty straightforward biography of the fastest man on earth at the turn of the 20th century, Major Taylor. There are half a dozen books on him and I just picked a newer title. Pretty eye-opening look at how hard it was for a man to rise to the ranks of world champion and still struggle with racism in America at every turn.

The Race by Dave Shields -- This is a pretty good fiction book about a rider's rise to the Tour de France and reads like the author really loved The Rider and wanted to capture some of that. There is a lot of racing and cycling and team politics in it and it's great, though I kind of wish in the end it felt more realistic. It'd make a good movie script I bet.

Positively False by Floyd Landis -- I finally got around to reading Landis' book and it's a nice autobiography of how he came up and eventually made it to the big show, but in the end his defense of doping comes off as really nitpicky and reminds me of someone trying to tell you every technical reason why they shouldn't be guilty but none of them are big enough to actually make him innocent. I honestly think most everyone in the pro peleton dopes to a degree, and when people get caught is when they mess up their doses or metabolize it at a different rate. Landis never says why his artificial testosterone levels were more than zero, his defense is that they weren't high enough to be considered suspect by most labs. If he was racing clean, you'd think his numbers would be at or near zero but he never talks about what experimental controls look like in the tests or how the tests work specifically.

We Might As Well Win by Johan Bruyneel -- Fairly silly autobiography that annoyed me by the end. It's basically several hundred pages of Johan Bruyneel telling you how great he is, why he's so great, and even when the discussion turns to failures, it's all about the few times he made a mistake but more about how he turned them around because he's so great. There isn't an ounce of humility in this entire thing. Only recommended to Lance Armstrong fan completists that want to know everything possible about Lance's reign at the top.

Momentum is Your Friend by Joe Kurmaskie -- I wanted to love this because I've seen the author pop up in Northwest cycling circles and I love cross-country cycling diaries, but the writing was just too flowery for me. Instead of hearing what a hard grind of 80 miles the stretch between two Wyoming towns was one day, it's more like all the thoughts in his head while he was spinning the pedals. I guess I'm used to more practical cross-country trip stories that will tell me about adventures on the road but this was more like drinking beers with the author and hearing all the crazy stuff he thought about that day, most of which wasn't at all ride-related.

Dog in a Hat by Joe Parkin -- This was a fantastic autobiography about an American racer in Belgium in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Tons of good stories, though I hope I'm not spoiling anything by saying it doesn't have the "and then I won the Tour de France" happy ending. He strives to win but ends up as a pretty good domestique, but you get the feeling from reading it that he wanted to be a team leader for a long time.

Blazing Saddles by Matt Rendell -- a great albeit brief overview of the last 100+ years of the Tour de France. I've only followed the last 15-20 years or so of the race so most of the classic history was new to me. There are just a couple pages written about each year's tour, so it's a fairly quick read that will bring you up to speed on the history of the biggest race on earth.

Heft on Wheels by Mike Magnuson -- This book was close to my heart because it parallels my story a bit. I've never smoked and I'm not an alcoholic, but I am a hefty guy looking to lose weight and get into bike racing in much the same ways the author did. If you can get through a few hundred pages of "I was so drunk that night, I..." stories the riding and racing stories are worth it and I won't be spoiling anything by saying by the end he's totally turned his life around and is kicking much ass. This was probably the best motivational book of the entire lot.

Today was only the third day of sun I've seen on my bike since the new year, but looking at the forecast, it's the first time I've seen multiple sunny days in the forecast so I decided to hang up the rain bike. It's officially spring, as I transferred the 9-speed cluster off my Powertap hub and replaced it with my 10-speed SRAM road cassette. I don't have a chain breaker and freewheel tool, so this was done at my local shop which means I'm not going back to the rain bike until next winter. It's been a long winter to me since I've put so much mileage down over the past few months. I've ridden on snow, I've ridden in sleet, but I prefer sun.

As the great ELO once said, hey there Mr. Blue Sky, welcome back, it's finally Spring.

The first couple months of this year went really well. I started to hit a groove and got a ton of riding in (compared to usual January/February riding in the past). By mid-Feb, I was feeling as strong as I usually feel in the summer during prime riding season, and looking forward to some spring races. I was riding six days a week and working out three times a week and feeling great. Then I hurt my back.

I don't know if it was from overly tight hamstrings, poor sleep, or just generally getting older, but for the first time in my life, near the end of February I experienced severe back pain. I was working for a few hours in a weird hunched over position putting some shelves together, and when I was done I was quite sore. This is all normal, but after a day or two it kept getting worse, which never happens to me. Several days passed and everything worsened, to the point where walking became a painful ordeal. This was all new territory.

On the bright side, some quick checks by Seth revealed it wasn't a disc problem and some physical therapy got me on the mend. I spent the past two weeks traveling to see family and attend a technology conference, with my back feeling close to 100% now. I did an hour long ride on Friday and felt great.

Taking 2 weeks off my bike at this part of the year isn't ideal and I definitely feel like my fitness is back where it was in early January, but I'm glad to be recovered and looking forward to getting back into the swing of things.

Now if only this rain and wind would stop...