As I sit here Sunday night I realize I have nothing to say! Not a good feeling starting the fourth month of the 52 week challenge. I have the Charlie Brown Easter Special playing in the background and I am trying to decide what to write about. The real problem is not that I have nothing to write about, but that I have too much to write about that isn’t quite ready to be talked about. There are a lot of changes on the horizon and I want to implement them right away but nothing is finalized quite yet. I know that this is a little frustrating to read, but let me take you through it so you understand where I am coming from.

The first change is something that I can talk about. My 40 day fitness challenge is over. I lost 30 pounds in 40 days. This equaled 4 inches from my waist! During the challenge I rode over 400 miles on my bike, mostly on the trainer in my basement. I also added 100 crunches, 35 pushups, and several yoga poses to my daily routine. I watched my intake using Slim Fast shakes for breakfast and lunch, a snack of Greek yogurt, a sensible diner and a few pretzels at night. I cheated once a week by eating at the bowling alley. Sometimes on weekends I would eat lunch with Katie and Bren instead of a shake, but other than that I stuck to the plan. I don’t know if I recommend this plan to anyone else, but it worked for me. I am going to continue on for the next month and the next challenge.

That next challenge would be the 30 Days of Biking. 2642 cyclists are pledging to ride for 30 straight days in April. I will be one of them, and you can go to the website and take the pledge to join us. I managed to secure a bike for the first few days as my normal bike is in the shop getting a tune up and my new bike is still being paid off. I hope to be out on it before the end of the challenge. This will be a bit of a challenge for me because I try to ride every weekday and normally manage to miss at least one a week. I will also have to add weekends to my schedule. I think I will be able to achieve this goal because of the next challenge on the horizon, the 5 Boro Tour of New York.

On May 5th I will be joining 35000 other cyclists in a 40 mile tour of all 5 boroughs of New York City. I will be joining a good friend that I haven’t seen in a long time for the ride. This is also where I will be striking out as a free-lance writer. One of the changes that are coming is that I am going to start to concentrate on my writing on a new level. I am going to document some of my epic rides as a writer. I am going to start sending these articles out to see if I can get published. It’s a bucket list item for me, and some of these rides will be great topics for the articles.

That also leads into one of the next changes that will happen, though again it is something for the future. I have been asked to guest write for one web site and I am hoping to be chosen for another. Both of these sites are focused on cycling and fitness. If I do end up as a blogger on these sites I am going to write about cycling on those sites and spend less time on it here. I will still talk about cycling here, but I want to focus more on perspective pieces and blogging about some of my fitness challenges, like my long term challenge, running the Rugged Maniac.

In September a group of friends and I will be running the Rugged Maniac New England mud run. If you don’t know what it is, check out their website. I just ran my first training 5K this weekend. It didn’t go well, but I didn’t expect it to. I haven’t run, well, ever. Cycling is my cardio and before that I didn’t do cardio. Or any fitness routine, at least since high school. I survived and I will get better. One of the ways I am staying motivated is asking everyone to join me at the race. I have created at team, Big Joe’s Soap Box. We are running at 10:15 Sunday. Anyone who wants to run is welcome and if a few people join up we will even get shirts!

So, changes are coming to the blog and hopefully I will be able to announce things soon, but until then there will be plenty to keep my busy! I need to keep training this month for the Rugged Maniac as well as ride my bike every day. I don’t know how much running I will get in this month, but I would like to do a training 5K every weekend. If everything goes well I might even get closer to my goal weight of 275, only 30 pounds to go.