I recently competed in my first cross country (XC) mountain bike race & it was a blast!

The event was named The Endless Ride, named after the seemingly endless days associated to the summer solstice. The event started at 7pm, which seems crazy, however in Seattle at this time of year the sun doesn’t set until after 9:00pm.

Lemon Peel, who are the event organisers have a highly inclusive approach to their events. They support classes for different ages alongside supporting mountain bikes, gravel bikes and runners! I guessed and entered myself into Cat 2 Open as I was certain the Cat 1 Open was going to be outrageously fast.

The course used the Grand Ridge trail system, which connects Sammamish to Issaquah. Total distance was 12.5km, with 350m of climbing. While it mightn’t sound too tough, when you combine sections with 15-20% gradients, roots, rocks & ruts – even with the massive gearing on a mountain bike it is definitely challenging!

My race plan was simple, go out really hard in the first 3km to try and get a gap on the pack as that section only had 50m of elevation. Between 3km and 8km, I knew I was going to lose time as there were competitors who were 15-25kg lighter than me. The weight difference doesn’t hurt you on the flat or downhill, but is a huge penalty on gradients over 4%.

Overall this worked out pretty well, by the time I got to 3km mark – I couldn’t hear or see my competitors behind me. As expected, some of the other racers got past me by the 6-7km marker. Fortunately, I was past the steepest sections by that point and the downhill started at 8km mark. I crossed the finish line in 53 minutes and was shocked to hear my name called for 2nd place at the ceremony.

From an effort stand point, it was definitely an all out – Garmin said it was “highly impacting V02 max”. That doesn’t surprise me whatsoever, my max HR is 183bpm (which I hit) and I averaged 170bpm even after accounting for the downhill where it ‘recovered’ to 160bpm.

It was a heap of fun being on a course with other people racing!

At the end of March I started a challenge to reduce my daily sugar intake. I wasn’t setting out to remove sugar entirely from my diet, but to reduce the cakes, lollies, ice-cream and hot chocolates.

When I quit drinking coffee, I didn’t get withdrawal symptoms but missed the habit of having a coffee. When I started reducing my sugar intake, I missed the habit again but I really missed the sugary treats. Thankfully, that initial wave of withdrawal symptoms subsided after a week, not gone but that voice had been quietened substantially.

Across April, I was successful in eating a lot less sweet sugary items. I didn’t have any hot chocolates (they were a recent addition to replace a cafe mocha when I quit coffee) and I have mostly removed the cakes, lollies and ice-cream where I might have had them three or four times over the month.

I started the challenge at 97kg, I finished the month at 95kg.

I’m going to continue with my reduced sugar intake and maybe look to refine some other areas such as having a ‘normal’ sized bowl of cereal and replacing a glass of orange juice with a glass of water in the morning.

I wrote recently about sustainable weight loss, I commented that through removing some really poor diet choices like Coke and moving every day that it had helped me lose 15kg and go from 108kg down to a low of 93kg.

I try to exercise most days of the week by going for a run or ride for 45-60min and on the weekend I’ll do something longer that is normally 2 hours plus. I’m pretty consistent with it, Strava tells me that I averaged 25-35 hours of aerobic exercise per month last year. To lose additional weight, the answer can’t be to add more exercise – I need to adjust my diet.

The recommended intake for an average adult is 2000cal/8000Kj per day.

As I mentioned in the post linked above, my diet is far from ideal and I could definitely clean it up by removing/reducing additional unneeded sugary foods:

• Hot Chocolate – While I’m not drinking coffee at work, I am drinking hot chocolate. I did some quick searches in Google and they contain ~200-250cal. Most days I have one, some days I’ll have two.
• Ice Cream – Most nights after dinner I’ll have a small bowl of ice cream. I weighed it last week and while it isn’t a lot by volume/weight, it is rich and comes in at 150-175cal. The timing on this is also not great, your metabolism slows down in the afternoon, so taking in unnecessary food at night isn’t ideal.
• Cake – I discovered something called a Pound Cake, it is a vanilla sponge type cake. When I’m working from home, I’ll usually have a piece of that at morning tea.
• Lollies / Chocolate – I often have a variety of different lollies or chocolate in the house. Not an every day item, but it is frequent and could be reduced.

My goal is to reduce or remove items like those above from my diet over the next month. I’ll make a point of weighing myself at least once a week to see if it is having an impact or not. As of this morning, I am 97kg and ultimately I want to be under 90kg. I don’t expect to lose 7kg in a month, but I’d be happy if these small changes re-starts my weight loss trend as I look to find a new sustainable normal.

Stay tuned.

A month ago I decided I was going to stop drinking coffee for 30 days and said:

I’m going to stop drinking coffee, which will give me a new baseline for what ‘tired’ feels like. I’ll start going to bed earlier to help my body recover better and maybe my blood pressure will come down. Even if the latter doesn’t happen, getting more sleep is a good thing and maybe I’ll feel more alert, clearer in mind, better able to tackle the day.

I’m happy to report that going without coffee or caffeine was remarkably easy and I didn’t notice any significant withdrawal symptoms despite the high levels of coffee I drink. While I didn’t miss the caffeine especially, I absolutely missed the ritual and habit of having a coffee. Throughout the day, there are so many points where I always have a coffee and suddenly not having one felt weird.

Another good habit of not drinking coffee, I’m naturally drinking a lot more water. While I do drink water across an average day, I’d generally get most of my liquid intake through coffee so this was a heathy improvement.

I had hoped that I could find some objective measure that quitting coffee had an impact. Coincidentally, I have a Garmin Fenix 6 running watch and it measures a lot of different aspects of your health on an ongoing basis.

Heart Rate Variability

According to Garmin, a HRV between 60-80ms is a normal range. While I have periods where it is in the normal/green zone, I am often orange (slightly below) or even red (significantly below). As soon as I stopped drinking coffee, my Heart Rate Variability started to improve and has remained consistently in the normal range.

Sleep

One of the goals of this challenge was to go to bed earlier and get more overall sleep. My total sleep time has increased slightly, but I haven’t been very successful on this goal yet.

However, while I’m not getting a lot more sleep, my sleep quality has improved significantly. In the lefthand side of the chart below, my sleep quality is lower overall and also quite variable. After quitting coffee, it has improved on average and varies a lot less.

While drinking coffee, I could get to sleep easily but I’d often wake up throughout the night – sometimes one or twice and on a restless night maybe up to five times. Over the last month, on average I’m not waking up at all and my Garmin watch is measuring single digits of ‘awake’ time. Caffeine is a diuretic, which causes you to need to urinate more often and during the night I am not getting up for any bathroom breaks either which is great.

Stress

Stress can be caused by a lot of different factors such as physical, emotional and many more. I don’t think caffeine on its own is responsible but it might contribute to it since it is a stimulant. Regardless, my stress levels have trended down and are more stable than beforehand. This might in part be due to getting better quality sleep and being more rested/recovered each day.

Blood Pressure

I haven’t taken my blood pressure many times over the last month, but it has been in the correct range which is good. If I can adjust my schedule and increase my total sleep time, I’ll definitely start checking it more often to see if there is any change or if I feel the low blood pressure by getting dizzy or light headed with certain activities.

I’m going to continue with my no coffee effort & report back if anything changes once I adjust my sleep schedule.