My eyes are bigger than my athletic abilities

“Your eyes are bigger than your belly!” I heard my mother’s words every Thanksgiving, Christmas, birthday; any occasion that merited a table laden with holiday food.

She was right, of course. I would see her miraculous, succulent repast and fall instantly beneath its gastronomical spell. A fork lift was usually employed to move my plate around, even after I’d finished eating. I never came close to ingesting all the food I piled there.

My eyes were, indeed, bigger than my belly. This is no longer the case. My eyes have become squintier in recent years and my belly…well…let’s just say it is rarely described as smaller than anything any more.

The point is, to steal another aphorism from my mother’s—and most mothers’—lexicon, I had a habit of biting off more than I could chew.

As I write this, I’m about to begin day three of the cross-state bicycle ride I’ve dubbed GeezerThon 2010. So far, I’ve pedaled about 112 miles, all of it uphill (so it seems at this moment). Another 113 miles remain before me, for a total of 225 miles.

Should I decide to pedal the distance back home again (not gonna happen) the total distance of the trip would be 500 miles. But like I said, the odds of me deciding to pedal home are about equal to those of Paris Hilton deciding to become a nun.

When it comes to this bicycle tour, I’ve decided, my eyes were definitely bigger than my belly. I bit off more than I could chew.

This realization came to me yesterday afternoon, after spending eight straight hours peddling against a headwind the likes of which has not been seen since Dorothy made her ill-fated trip to Oz. I was pedaling, hard, just to get downhill! Level road was all but impossible for me. As far as pedaling uphill? Fuggidaboutit! I dismounted and walked.

That’s one of the reasons it took me over eight hours to travel just 57 miles. The other, like I mentioned earlier, was the wind.

For 57 miles I was buffeted with a gale like the hand of God admonishing me to give it up already, turn back toward home, find a nice pub and order a good cheeseburger instead of the dollar store trail mix and banana chips I’ve been living on since setting out from home three days ago. By the seventh hour, I was starting to listen.

Shortly after that, my legs gave out. I ran cross country back in school and thought I had experienced every sort of leg pain known to man, but this was something new. Both my calves seized up with Charlie Horses the size of baseballs.

I sat by the roadside, pounding and massaging the lumps of over-flexed muscle, but it still took a half-hour to assuage the pain. After that, every time I attempted to pedal, the pain returned.

So I walked the last five miles, pushing my bike which, fully loaded with all my stuff, weighs ten pounds more than a 1965 Volkswagen Beetle.

After hobbling into my campsite as black dots swam before my eyes, I erected my tent, unrolled my sleeping bag and just lay there, unmoving.

As the clouds whipped past overhead, I thought about giving it up, about calling one of the many nice folks who offered to “rescue me” should it come to that. I thought about throwing my bike into the lake. So thinking, I fell asleep.

But when I woke this morning my legs felt fine; a little wobbly, but otherwise OK. And the wind has died down a bit. It’s cold, and it looks like rain, but I can handle that.

Besides, all this riding is making my belly smaller. Maybe I can chew more than I think.

More “Reality Check” online at http://mtrealitycheck.blogspot.com or www.milive.com. E-mail Mike Taylor at mtaylor325@gmail.com.