Hey there….my name is Bill and I am the Cycle Pig.

Do you remember when you were a little kid and all you wanted to do was grow up faster so you could make your own decisions and do the things you wanted to do?  It started with your first bike, then your first car, first girl, first apartment and before you know it….boom…..you’re 30 something years old.

The kick in the groin kind of irony is that once you ARE grown up, all you want is to be the kid again.  Free with not a care in the world other than what time the wiffle ball game is going to start.  You have no responsibility, no mortgage, no job, no bills, no stress.  If your parents are like mine, then they probably told you that you would grow up fast enough and then once you did, you would wish you were a kid again.  Of course, we thought they were crazy.

Isn’t it funny how your parents get smarter, the older you get….?

Where I Am

I am that thirty something guy…in fact, I am the thirty something guy that is a year away from being a FORTY something guy!!  It’s amazing how introspective you can get when you are facing that mid life crisis that always seemed so far away.

When you’re 20….forty is practically dead.

As I approach forty and have found myself facing my own mortality, I have found myself looking back on my life with some very mixed feelings.  What I have realized is that I have lived a very “ordinary” life.  Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had some decent success and very little adversity but it’s simply “ordinary.”  I graduated high school, went to college, got a job, got married and now feverishly slave away at the corporate grindstone trying not to get laid off, downsized, mowed over, passed by or simply ejected.

Don’t get me wrong, I have a good job and after years of breaking my balls, I make a decent living.  I am by absolutely no means rich, but comfortably Middle Class.   It was what I always wanted when I was 20….grow up, get a good job, make good money, go into debt…..ummm…..but then what?  What do you do now?  The American dream usually stops right there until you someday acquire enough wealth to hopefully retire and play golf for a few years before you die.

Using my newly acquired wisdom, I have realized that this isn’t good enough for me.  Working to earn enough money to keep me going until I die is not my idea of the American dream.  Money buys a lot of things, but what it can’t do is change history.

• Money can’t replace never having been to Europe.

• Money can’t replace never having traveled across the US.

• Money can’t replace never having bicycled the California Coast.

I think you get the idea…..money can buy a lot of things but it can’t take you back in time to do those things you didn’t make the time to do while you were trying so hard to make that money.

Money cannot replace an Ordinary life with an Amazing life.

Where I Am Going

So now that I have my whine fest out of the way, the point of this blog is to be a journal of sorts documenting my journey to simply live a better life.  A large part of the catalyst that brought me to this place stemmed from the cold, hard fact that my mother was recently diagnosed with Stage 4 Lung Cancer.  She has cancer in both lungs, her lymph nodes, esophagus and has been diagnosed as terminally ill.  She has no chance of survival and the cancer is so advanced that they won’t even attempt to operate.

Her time on earth is measured in months now rather than years.

Nothing can get your attention to what kind of life you are living like being faced with death.  It’s an attention getter for sure.  My Mom likely won’t be around to see me turn 40, she won’t be there next Christmas, she won’t see the new person that I am becoming.

She unfortunately, doesn’t have the chance to change her life like I am doing as the rest of her life is going to be an endless series of chemo treatments, shots, pills, hospital visits and misery.  All in the name of trying to live a few months longer….which somehow I have strangely drawn as a correlation to slaving away for someone else while trying to acquire enough wealth until you die.

I owe it to my Mother to show more respect for my own life by living a better one.  I owe it to her, I owe it to my wife and most of all I owe it to myself to show more respect for living.  I want to be a better person, a better husband and a better human being.  I consider myself a good person now, probably no different than many of you reading this, but good isn’t good enough anymore.  I want to live a great life.

I have pledged from this point forward, to live an extraordinary life.

Getting Started

Where my journey starts is right here…..inside of me.  In order to live an extraordinary life then first I have to take care of myself on the inside.  I don’t have much respect for myself these days as the years of traveling for work and living on the road have taken their toll on me.  My weight has ballooned up from years of fast food combined with little to no exercise and I found myself weighing in at a Clydesdale like 326 pounds!!

Oooph!  That’s a Kick in the groin….how in the hell did that happen?

It’s hard to be extraordinary when walking up stairs is a religious experience.  It’s ok though, because I am in the process of killing the old me…I am slowly starving the old me to death with clean food, grilled chicken, steamed vegetables, grilled fish and lots of water.  The old me is not going to go away easily but the new me is a stone cold killer.

The “new” me seems to be far more motivated to change than the “old” me is to stay the same.

Along with healthy eating, I am restoring an old flame in my life.  I had forgotten how exhilarating and exciting it could be to rekindle a love affair and that would be exercise.  I hope my wife doesn’t mind, I don’t think she will….as I think she’s already thinking about having her own affair with the new me.  She’s just trying to keep it a secret from the old me.

My drug of choice when it comes to exercise is the bicycle.  I am an avid cyclist from years past and routinely “used to” ride 100 miles a week on the saddle of a mountain bike.  Something I have learned over the years is that you are much more apt to exercise if you have fun doing it….and I LOVE to ride my bike.  It’s not hard to see the message when you realize that the very same instrument that brought you your first taste of freedom as a child, could bring that same sense of freedom as an adult.

My Progress

I have been riding my bike and eating right for about 55 days as I write this About Me page and I have dropped from 326 lbs of fat man to 289 lbs of “slightly less fat” man.  I still have a long way to go but I have already dropped 37 lbs in slightly less than 2 months.  I can feel it in my body and see it in my clothes, a great start but it’s only the beginning.

Losing the weight and regaining my self esteem is only the first part of my journey.  I look at it like this, let’s compare it to building a skyscraper.  If you build a 100 story skyscraper on top of a bad foundation then you are setting yourself up to fail.  That building is coming down, sooner or later.  The same can be said of my transformation, if I expect to be successful then I need a solid foundation with which to go forth and conquer.

I can’t expect to be able to step out of my comfort zone, meet new people, try new things etc without having a solid foundation of a happy and healthy body combined with a healthy self esteem.  Body, Mind and Spirit….sounds like I might be turning into a hippie.  Hmm…maybe that’s not so bad…have you ever seen an unhappy hippie?

The Wrap Up

A sound body is only half of the battle and I have a LOT of other plans and goals that I will share as this blog unfolds.  One thing I am working on now but am not ready to share  yet is the ability to build a sustainable and “passive” income that will allow me the freedom to live that extraordinary life that I keep talking about.

You can’t live extraordinarily on 3 weeks of vacation a year.

I have monopolized enough of your time and I’ve probably put you to sleep by now so I will close by saying that part of changing myself is to become more of an extrovert.  I want the ability to surround myself with strangers who might become some of my best friends.   I am student of “people” and I enjoy the different aspects that different people with different backgrounds and experiences than myself can bring to the table.

I hope that you will subscribe to my blog, leave comments, tell me I am ridiculous or whatever, but mostly I hope that maybe someday we could consider each other a friend…maybe we will meet at a Century ride somewhere or backpacking across Thailand.

Who knows where this can go…..but if nothing else it should be fun.

Best Regards,

Bill…aka….”Cycle Pig”