Progress Report for February 2022 Working Out... Did Better on Quantity but Dipped on Length

Another month down in 2022 and here is my status update for working out or more specifically riding my bike. February 2022 was really good for me with consistency of working out. I worked out twelve times throughout the month. I am still targeting Ally Love for my live events on Sunday mornings at 11 am CDT. I met every single Sunday with Love event for February with at least one going as long as one hour. It felt great and I love the energy Ally brings to the rides, so that helps to keep the process fun and new each week. Plus, she likes to change up the music and what we are doing each week, so that makes the rides fun and something I look forward to each week. Each time I have done one of her live classes that is an hour, I never look forward to the ride as it starts the hour long ride, but so grateful once I am finished. She helps to motivate and keep us focused on what we need to do during the ride.

During one such ride I hit a high of 337 for my for best output. This happened to be the 60 minute ride, so no wonder it beat all of my other outputs for February. Still, I had a good time and look forward to continuing the live rides in March too.

As I mentioned, I worked out consistently for 12 days through the month of February. I kept on my target days as planned except for the last week of the month, but sometimes it is needed to modify workout days if something else is happening on that particular day. I have had prior months where I had to change my target date for working out every day, so it was good to get my target dates in for workouts and not have to modify.

I still have plans that once the weather improves (i.e. no snow) that I will start running at least once a week to increase the workouts per week to four. I have not run in over a year, so I am looking forward to including that into my routine. The current plan is to introduce running on Saturday mornings which would mean I would be working out back-to-back days, but I think it will be good to do and help with my overall workout process.

One thing I did during February was to cut out all alcohol. I did not post about this previously or hint that I was going to do this during the month. It was primarily to see how much weight I would lose by not drinking beer or any liquor. Granted, I did without any beer through February, but I did not necessarily change what I ate. Which is to say that I was not eating great for most of February.  I went from 264 on February 1 to 258.2 on February 28. Not bad for only giving up beer, but I was hoping to be more. Carrie and I plan to further target our eating habits in the next week or so where I will once again limit what I drink, but more importantly what I put in my belly each week. I could tell I had lost a few pounds as clothes started fitting a little better, but still a long way to go for my health.

Reviewing my monthly stats are not too bad. I was hoping my average ride time was going to be higher for February, but it is right around 17 minutes per ride. I was hoping to be up around 30 minutes per ride, but while I got workouts in each time, I had some that were shorter than I had hoped as we were heading to places, other plans, etc., where I had to notify my planned ride. As I mentioned last month, I also usually do a cool down after each ride, so that helps to skew the numbers. 

I like that Peloton sends out these notices after the month is over to give a break down of how I did the prior month. To think that I biked 106.7 miles during February is a good feeling, but I think I can continue to increase these numbers as I continue my biking experience. Calories burned is interesting too int his monthly stats report. Of course that is offset by what I eat outside of cycling. During February, I did not do beer, or alcohol, but as I mentioned, I continued to not eat very well, so while I had 5,737 calories burned from bike riding calorie intake was not great during the month.

Something I keep saying I am going to try is to do portion control. I have a bad habit of eating everything on my plate when we go out to eat. I remember my parents when they would go out to eat, they would always split their plate or immediately do half and take the other half home. Good examples for me moving forward on my path to getting older and not able to lose weight as fast I did when I was younger.

Until next time, enjoy your bike rides and workouts…