I have a game I play at the grocery store when I go there. The game is called “Who Will I Follow Home”. The game usually begins near the checkout counter as people  are getting ready to checkout. If I was single this is a fantastic way to meet the ladies as they always seem to laugh and I get their attention.

I usually admit out loud to these people or persons that “OK I’ll Follow You Home.” Then I go on to tell them they have good instincts in their choices today and I’d be glad to assist them with the scarfing down of their food. Many times the husbands or boyfriends actually invite me to come with them. I think these guys have been deprived of male bonding and need assurance that they are still a man, poor guys. When the ladies are alone they enjoy my banter and if they are closer to my age group I get these looks like, ok where is this going after a little polite laughter. Kids love me, and I usually ask them if I can ride with them in the shopping cart as I’m tired of walking. They usually reply yes, which shocks their mother and I make a failed attempt to climb in.

I have always admitted my addiction to those specialty culinary foods such as Pizza, CocaCola, Ho Ho’s, and meat in general, all baked goods and pretty much anything sugary. It didn’t help me growing up having my French toast with cinnamon and sugar or drowning my cereal with more sugar. If only they had Oreo Double Stuff when I was a kid, I could eat packages of cookies at one sitting. I wasn’t an overweight young man, in fact I was quite svelte and I was very active in sports.

But as you can imagine, as you get older that kind of diet does catch up with you. Especially as we become more sedentary we do not have as much time for sports and activities as our lives take over. Cutting the lawn on the riding tractor or driving the kids everywhere, or glued to the boob tube (and I’m not talking about breasts unfortunately) has set us back. About 20 years back I use to ride a bicycle every night after work. I usually would ride between 15 – 20 miles each ride. I was in much better shape. I also enjoyed my rides so much as they would usually pass through the Chicago Botanical Gardens.

Ok let’s fast forward back to today. I got a present over the weekend. I am in possession of a new bicycle. It was 40% off on sale at Sports Authority going out of business sale. Now my last bike as you read earlier, I rode a lot and when I bought it over 20 years ago it was an $800.00 investment. My new bike was with tax about $189.00. Almost one forth the price but I couldn’t have been happier. It has a gel seat, and a spring in the seat shaft to absorb the shocks of my overweight ass bouncing up and down. (Please remove that image from your brain immediately!) In actuality there was no bouncing as I bottomed out the spring, and my ass would then receive all the pounding it deserved for me getting into my present state of health.

Life is about balance. If you haven’t been doing yoga for the last few years, I can almost guarantee you have no balance. I believe at one point as a child I had a toy that was like a clown on a bicycle that was on a string. The idea of the toy was to get the clown down the string to the other end without flipping it over. My new name is Topsy Turvy the clown. I also do not have a string going through my butt to balance on. If I’m going down I’m going DOWN! When I was my former svelte self to power up a hill, I would stand up and pedal through the uphill battle. On my first ride small inclines felt like mountains and standing up turned me into Topsy Turvey the clown. Oh god, where are my training wheels? Luckily I wasn’t wearing my Tour De France yellow shirt to bring further attention to myself in front of my neighbors.

Somehow, I got through my first ride and I got home. After recovering my breath, I pulled out my phone to look at my new bicycle app. It would give me my average speed, my distance, a geo map of my route, the elevation I overcame and the calories I had burned. I knew based on my past abilities,  at a minimum I did 5 miles or so for being out of shape. I couldn’t wait to post these results online at Facebook which was an option of the app. I could show everyone how great I am.

1.19 miles is what I rode. It had felt like the 20 I use to do and I was dead. But surprised to me, I wanted to do it again. Not that day, maybe the next day or maybe every other day for the first week or so. In the meantime I have to figure how to get this spring shaft out of my ass and get some padded bicycle shorts to make me look hot.  Not sexy hot I’ll actually be sweating hot, sweating profusely and burning the lbs away to get as far away from Topsy Turvy that I can.