I just can’t ignore it any longer.
Thursday morning, I woke in my home for the first time in eleven weeks. My flat pedals were still on the bike from our trip. I didn’t feel like switching them out nor fishing my cycling shoes from the truck. Instead, I opted for a chill eighteen mile loop that I knew I’d finish in under ninety minutes before getting to work for the day.
No kit. Just a regular tee shirt.
Fresh off a full day of driving home to Raleigh from Western Maryland, I expected my body stiff. This was a shakeout ride.
I didn’t expect to PR nearly every segment. I wasn’t setting out on a mission to crush my fastest pace.
It’s a loop I’ve cycled for years. I have to cross Garner Road, Rock Quarry Road, Raleigh Boulevard, and MLK Boulevard along the way. There are multiple wooden bridges and hairpin turns.
I’ve never sniffed sixteen miles per hour average. Not at the peak of my training for race season. Not while wearing SPD clips and a kit.
Going full bore during peak performance, I’ve hit 15 miles per hour a handful of times.
I’ve been riding these trails for decades. I’m 53 years old and not getting any younger. Cranking out 16 miles per hour in sneakers and a tee shirt is nothing short of a miracle.
A miracle is worth paying attention to.
This morning I went to hot yoga. It was my first yoga class in eleven weeks. I was expecting to be sore, stiff, weak, and off balance. Flexibility? Without stretching for nearly three months? Hah!
You’re joking. Right?
During the trip, eleven weeks in an Airstream, I remarked to my wife, “I don’t feel like I’m losing flexibility the way I might have expected.”
I didn’t expect to be more flexible!
Coming back home has been some kind of time warp. Everything is the same, like time stood still while we were gone.
Yoga was no different. Same instructor. Familiar faces in the class. The same poses.
I know just how flexible I am on that mat in that studio.
I gained flexibility?
Impossible!
Two days home. Two miracles.
When we’re in Raleigh, I work out like a madman. Yoga three times a week. Strength, flexibility, and mobility training. Cycling nearly daily both in the wild and on the Peloton.
I invest about fifteen hours a week, sometimes more, on exercise, check my weight daily, and intermittently fast.
This trip has been an active one. Abby, the two dogs, and I spent a month at the New York Finger Lakes, a month in Vermont, and then a week each in Maine, New Hampshire, and Western Maryland. We cycled on gravel, went single-track mountain biking, hiked, and walked the dogs around camp three times a day.
But I never “worked out.”
In three months, I didn’t pick up a free weight. I didn’t go to a gym or a yoga studio. There were no stretching routines, and certainly no diets.
I do wear a Garmin whenever I exercise, so I have a pretty good idea of how active I’ve been.
The association of home life compared to camper life may be like “working out” versus “active lifestyle.” But at the end of the day, my total volume of exercise was about the same.
Also worth noting, this wasn’t a vacation. We weren’t just stress free chilling for eleven weeks. We were on Zoom with clients, doing admin work, marketing, and all the usual work we do from home.
There are added stresses, too. We can’t just let the dogs off leash in the backyard. Laundry is a huge chore. Living in a camper has a whole set of challenges that make home life feel like luxury.
The bottom line is the camper and our home have huge advantages and disadvantages, of which I could ramble for days.
At the end of the day, it’s pretty cool to think that living, working, playing, and enjoying life could be just as healthy as spending extra time at a gym and forced exercise.
I’m just having a hard time attributing the cycling speed and flexibility gains I just experienced to exercise and stress. These things kinda balanced out.
There is one major difference, though.
Food.
Over the past three months, Abby and I have been eating nearly all farm fresh foods and craft everything. The combination of not having enough space in the Airstream to shop at a big box store, plus our enjoyment of visiting local places, and our love of good food, resulted in journeys, often by foot and bike, to farm stands and co-ops all over New England.
Especially in the New York Finger Lakes and in Vermont, there was a focus on craft. The wine we drank on the shores of Seneca Lake, the beers from Hill Farmstead in Vermont, the Ice Cream from … everywhere. All of the foods that would trigger my daily bouts of IBS were safe to eat. No issues.
I usually avoid milk products for fear of a lactose intolerance attack. I’m susceptible to fructose as well. Wine usually gives me a killer headache. Beer makes me feel like shit. Bread causes bloating.
But not when it’s real milk, real veggies, real wine, real beer, and real bread.
Take, for example, Hill Farmstead. The brewery in Vermont.
Their beer is not pasteurized. It’s naturally carbonated. Many of their beers are only available at the farm. Those they do distribute, they only do locally. My favorite of their beers, Edward, doesn’t come in cans. It’s unfiltered and dry-hopped.
What they do put in a can, the shelf life is only three to four weeks.
All of their beer is packaged cold, stored cold, delivered cold, and kept cold by only accounts they trust. They brew with Vermont-grown barley and source organic hops.
Compare that to big box beer that’s engineered to sit on a shelf for six months or more.
I feel like it’s pretty commonly pumped into my brain that pasteurization is for my protection? Nobody bothered to teach me that it’s for maximizing shelf life.
They teach me the benefits. Like, “thanks to pasteurization, we can ship food to the hungry.” No one informed me about all the good stuff that gets killed in the process.
Local beer doesn’t need to be pasteurized when you’re drinking an Edward on tap at Mike’s Tiki Bar in East Burke.
Local fish doesn’t need to be flash-frozen, treated with sodium tripolyphosphate to retain water, gassed with carbon monoxide to keep it looking red, and shipped 3,000 miles to your supermarket.
Local bread doesn’t need calcium propionate, sodium stearoyl lactylate, and dough conditioners to stay soft on a shelf for three weeks.
Local wine doesn’t need Mega Purple for color, added sulfites to survive a year on the shelf, or industrial yeasts engineered for predictability over character.
Local vegetables don’t need to be bred for shipping durability over flavor, harvested weeks early, or irradiated to survive a two-thousand-mile journey while their nutrients quietly disappear.
Apparently, though, eating real local foods minimizes the kind of inflammation that gives me IBS, bloats my gut, and keeps my body stiff.
I came home to Raleigh like the Tin Man got oiled up. My joints were running smoother than the old locomotive we enjoyed between Cumberland and Frostburg on the Western Maryland Scenic Railroad.
With the 16 mile per hour bike ride and flexibility improvement miracles under my nose, I just can’t help but ask myself a few questions.
Are the safety requirements for foods to protect me? Or are they to protect the asses of the big box suppliers, mass manufacturers, and industrial agriculture?
Is any of this actually solving global hunger?
I don’t think so.
What’s in my head sounds like a rant!
Big box food culture is bankrupting local farms, killing small businesses, and destroying communities. Mass manufactured everything is a major source of pollution, traffic, obesity, illness, and pain.
There’s got to be a way to keep local businesses thriving, minimize food deserts, and nourish the masses with healthy meals!
I can’t do it any more!!!
I know it’s more complicated. There are pros and cons to everything.
Where I’m grateful is to be in a position to stand on that last line.
I’m saying “No,” to mass manufactured foods.
DiMeo Unfiltered is my back of the napkin publication featuring half-baked concepts, works in progress, blog-like posts, and personal opinions. This space is raw, authentic, and self-published.
Thank you for reading.
Health, happiness, kindness, respect
for every being and all things.
— Andrew
My friend, you had an extended rest and you really needed it! The nervous system, joints, all that repetitive movement wears us down - Systemic Fatigue - that needs to be cleared from time to time by just taking time off. I never knew weightlifters had off seasons and periodization until recently. Time to to ramp up to more PRs!