That Rug Really Tied the Room Together

Tough Week

We all have a list of folks that have influenced our lives, made a difference in how we face each day, you could call it your very own Hall of Fame. For me, they would name the thing after Linda, she is my rock, she keeps me on course, she believes in me and i know she loves me in spite of me, unconditionally. Obviously my parents were huge in my life, they did such an incredible job given the environment they were raised in. I am blessed by them. 

Beyond that my Hall of Fame would look like this, my friend and pastor Pete Briscoe, a former pastor Wayne Braudrick, my old headmaster Mike Beidel, a father of a friend of mine named Don Hodges, two old bosses Tom Gilbert and John Saville, old friends I rarely see any more like Joe Wickline, Chris Millet and Rick Davis, long time friends Doug Walker, Buddy Gregory, Paul Carter and Craig Hodges and a couple of women, my high school English teacher Pam Pack and my mother-in-law, Daisy Francis. 

Each of those folks saw something in me and expressed a belief in me and they gave me confidence. For me, those words of encouragement meant more to me than you can imagine. I can remember the positive things they said to me about me like they happened yesterday. It was a statement or an action, sometimes short and sometimes long term that expressed a belief or faith in me that I needed at that time. 

There is one guy on that list of mine I haven't mentioned yet, his name is Ken Good and he has done more things for more people than anyone I know, including me. From encouraging words about me and my business to incredible acts of kindness and sympathy when I needed it most. What's crazy about that is Ken is my landlord, he rents that really cool office to me. He is also a client. Not the normal relationship that generates that kind of regard, it's rare your landlord does the kind of things that impacts you and your family the way Ken has. There is a list a mile long of other folks that hold Ken in that same regard. 

The reason this week has been tough is that today I attended the funeral of Ken's wife, Traci Good. She passed last week in a sledding accident at their cabin in Colorado. My wife told me last week and it was like a punch in the gut. They have three kids and they all were riding on the sled with their mom when they got off and she didn't. They have twin girls in elementary school. My heart ached for Ken, he lost his wife, he was on his own. Why him? Why take something so dear from a guy that gives so much? 

I was bitter and angry all week, I felt like I did when I went through a really tough spot in my life. My daughter was diagnosed with diabetes, the house was flooding, my dog got ran over all while my business "partner" showed up at work each day with a goal of stealing the business I purchased from him and driving the new practice out of business. During that ordeal and the lawsuit that followed I stated over and over again, God is not going to deliver us this case against him and then drop us at the curb, He will see us through. However, the events that unfolded felt a lot like the curb, we were supposed to win. I shook my fist at God and asked why? I remember asking Pete "why did the dog have to die?" I know it sounds petty but it was just another thing that was getting dumped on me and my family, we couldn't even have a dog. 

The death of Traci felt a lot like that because during my toughest time, Ken extended his hand to us and said "I was thinking about you last night and I've got an idea let me show you what I think we can do" and he pulled out a piece of paper with some office space he had drawn up for me. He laid out a plan and said let's get you back on your feet again, I will refer you more business than you can handle. You will be fine.

So why does that guy lose his wife? Why do his kids lose their mother? I just could not get my head around it and I was miserable. I didn't know what to say or what to do. I was anything but a good friend. 

Words of Wisdom

I know of a man that said "that rug really tied the room together" and until today, I really didn't understand how much wisdom was in those words. The pastor that spoke during Traci's celebration of life had all the little kids come up front and sit down so he could talk about what happened and he addressed that why did this happen thing. Go figure, I related to the portion of the service that was intended for 2nd and 3rd graders. He asked if they had ever seen a fancy Persian rug. They were beautiful, organized, they had a plan, it made sense but if you turned it over and looked at the other side it looked chaotic with knots and long strings criss crossing randomly all over the back. It looks nothing like what is on the other side or what the rug maker wanted everyone to see.

After the graveside memorial, I returned to the church, changed clothes and went for a ride. It's kind of my quiet time and I meditated on that rug thing and thought back on that same time in my life, where Ken extended his hand to me and what a mess the back side of my Persian rug was. How I thought nothing good could have come from that. However, when my family looks back on it, that time was the central part of our life experience that formed who we were. 

My kids are both gifted artists, my daughter is a visual artist and my son is a performing artist. Their best work is always based on what they are most passionate about and it always contains a hook, an element that draws you in to experience what they are passionate about and let you make a decision. That really chaotic part of our life was the central element of my family's Persian rug, once you get a chance to see the other side. It helped form my kids into who they are. It felt a lot like I was free falling and spiraling down after that but in hindsight, it took that to get my attention, for me to pay attention to those signs. It brought leadership characteristics my wife had no idea she had, she was our lion through that and anyone that knows us, knows that. She's a Francis and Francis women know how to circle the wagons and protect their own. 

The backside of that really central colorful element of any rug has the most chaos as different colors run this way and that. From that side, you could never see what the rug maker had in mind or how it would turn into that element that demonstrated through our lives that thing that He is most passionate about ... us. We probably screwed some of it up but we are learning. As we look back on that time now, we see some of what the other side looks like and I still don't get all of it, but some day I might. I do think this, how we react to that chaotic time has everything to do with what it looks like. There was a time where I kicked and fought and shook my fist at God and the chaos continued to look like chaos, it wasn't until I gave in that I could see that He never dropped me at the curb, it wasn't where I wanted to be but it was anything but the curb and it is a beautiful part of our rug that I never ever ever want to experience again. 

So I would like to dedicate this post to my friend Ken, who is going through the absolute worst kind of a back side of a rug. In spite of my own back side of the rug experience, I cannot fathom his pain or how much he hurts. Mine eventually went away but Ken lost something that cannot be found. His precious girls lost their mommy and as much as I love Katie, I would be a horrible mommy. When things happen with my son, he calls mom first. Ken's son Jacob won't have that option. I look at this tangled mess and think what good can come of it? I am glad it's not up to me to decide because this is a train I want no part of. I have to find the faith in Him to know He will see them through this and that there will be an other side to this rug that will allow God to demonstrate his passion for us and how that rug really will tie their room together. I have no idea how but thankfully that isn't my job.

Riding with life's experiences

Adversity comes in different forms

Just like life, riding a bicycle comes with it's share of adversity. Most of it revolves around the elements, heat, cold, rain, wind and gravity (aka hills). Well, the toughest adversary we actually face is the angry white guy being denied his constitutional right to drive 45 in a 35 MPH Zone on Ohio Drive in Plano ... but that's a thread for another day.

In Dallas we don't deal with gravity a lot, we are blessed with a pretty flat terrain. It's an incredible place to live if you like to ride because other than a couple of months we can always ride. Each spring, after the couple of months of "winter" we get here a new cycling season starts and we are greeted with one of our toughest adversaries, the wind. I guess since we don't have a lot of hills, we don't have a lot of things to slow the wind down. It seems as if it starts picking up speed once it clears the hill country south of Waco and doesn't slow down until it's halfway through Oklahoma. If the wind is from the North, I just assume the reverse is true.

Deal with it

Still like our life, the wind is an adversity you just have to deal with. It's inevitable, it's part of the game and you deal with it or it deals with you. When I encounter adversity, I turn to two ex's, my experience and the examples set by others. Both of those are used a lot on the bike but this week my experience came to mind, so that is where I am going to focus on. 

On my rides this week I had to deal with the wind, a lot of it. At points by the lake it was blowing at least 25 MPH, when that happens I draw upon an experience that helps me deal with the wind. It goes all the way back to the early 80s, when I played football and all of the linemen (of which I was one) would drive those blocking dummies and sleds all over the field. There was one set of commands I will never forget because it was said over and over again, "C'mon Baker! Drive your legs! Stay low!" It was a concept I apparently never grasped because every time the ball was snapped, I'd pop up like a jack in the box and if I ever chased down the man I was assigned to block, my legs would quit driving and I'd attempt to lean my opponent into submission. A jack in the box might be an effective spokesperson for cheeseburgers but there aren't many of them in Canton Ohio because of their effective play along the line of scrimmage. During my senior year, there was a sophomore lineman, let's call him Clark, who earned the designation "Sophomore Varsity Star" using the confidence that I instilled in him by trying to use my jack in the box technique on him.

It wasn't because I couldn't stay low and drive my feet, it just was when the chips were down and the ball was snapped, I did what I instinctively thought was best, I never disciplined myself enough to change my actions. It made staying on the field a difficult thing for me to do, a coach couldn't leave a guy in the game for long if he consistently did not do what was best for the team to keep moving the ball. 

Lesson Learned

Riding into the wind is really what being a lineman is all about, it's the job that has to be done, so the climbers and sprinters can stay fresh. There are guys on a team that do nothing but knock a hole through the wind and their opponents so the superstars can ride off in a yellow jersey. Stay low, keep your legs moving and create a hole for others to move through sounds a lot like a lineman's job. When the ride's been long and the wind is relentless, you naturally want to sit up tall and open up your lungs, your legs are heavy and you really want to coast and give them a rest. When you sit up tall though the wind grabs hold of you like it does with a sail and pushes you, but not in the direction you are heading. If you don't keep spinning, the wind makes it impossible to coast and you slow down. If you are doing both, you start grinding just to keep from falling over. After that you discover that it takes considerably more effort to speed up than it would have to have maintained your speed. The very thing you thought you were doing to rest is actually making you work harder. Inevitably, the same thing happens with the jack in the box technique in cycling that it did for me in football, you stop moving and your opponents pass you by. 

At those moments, for whatever reason, I think back to those points, where I learned that doing what I wanted, against the instructions of those who knew better and only wanted to see me succeed, didn't work out very well. The wind will blow so hard I can't hear myself think but that's when I can hear Coach Beane, Coach Nail, Coach Aaronson, Coach Harris and Coach Peterson repeating that same phrase they did from Junior High to High School, "C'mon Baker! Stay Low! Keep your legs moving!" with one big difference, I've learned it's easier for me if I follow those instructions.

Earlier this week I was riding my second lap around the lake (there is a reason they "issue wind advisories by area lakes") and I was in the into the wind part of that lap. I was staying low, my legs were spinning and I was punching open a hole into the wind. I wasn't really thinking about the wind because it's not as hard if you do it right. I may not have been moving as fast as I would like but I was getting there and in so doing, I passed a guy quite a bit younger and certainly more athletic than me. He, unfortunately, was using the jack in the box technique and his legs were barely moving. He looked miserable and it didn't help that a 50 year old grey bearded dude with a belly passed him with a cheery good morning. 

He looked a lot like what I remember Friday nights feeling like back in 1981, watching that sophomore take my spot on the field. As we get older, the roles reverse, freshmen aren't supposed to win the Heisman and run over and around the SEC like Johnny Manziel did when he was a freshman. Years later we discover that old pitchers aren't supposed to be strikeout kings and whip up on Robin Ventura like Nolan Ryan. I will probably never know what Clark or Johnny felt on the gridiron but my new favorite experience is getting to feel just a tiny bit like Nolan Ryan did by whipping up on a younger guy. It's an experience I am looking forward to having again.

Feeling good vs feeling good

My gut feeling

When I was a kid and I was running fever and had a headache, my mom would make me a cold compress, give me some aspirin and let me know it would make me feel better. If I had a belly ache, I'd tell my mom and out would come the Pepto-Bismol that crazy big silver spoon and a reassurance that this would make me feel better. If I came home from school after I had a rough day, my mom would feel bad for me and she would fix me a snack and set it in front of me, turn on Gilligan's Island and I'd feel better. I don't know that she was doing anything but trying to make her little boy happy but the thought was there for me, this made me feel better.  So I had it all figured it out, got a headache? Take an aspirin.  Got a tummy ache? Take PeptoBismol. Got a heart ache? Eat some Cheetos. She's not a bad mom, it's not her fault, she just didn't know that's what I was thinking, but it was and it got worse. 

Eventually food became this thing I used to change how I felt, now. If I was sad, mad, tired, beat, bored, anything I would get something to eat. If I felt really bad, I'd eat more because if a little food made me feel a little better, a lot of food would make me feel a lot better and it did it, right now, or at least I thought it did. Cheetos eventually became anything I could hold still long enough to deep fry and cover with gravy. It was my Xanax. 

Eventually, I managed to eat and drink my way into a bunch of XXXL shirts, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, high blood sugar and a fatty liver and it started to make me feel like crap. I was ashamed of who I had become. My doctor said to quit drinking, eat raw veggies, exercise and do a bunch of really awful things for a long time and I would "start" to feel better. 

I would do that for a week, maybe two and I still was in XXXL shirts and I still felt bad, except now I was always hungry. So I'd get depressed, think I could never do this and head to McDonalds for a Sausage Egg and Cheese Biscuit with two hash browns and a diet Coke (I know, never could explain it either) and then I would feel even worse, so I'd go get an Angry Dog Cheeseburger with fries for lunch and I'd love the way it tasted but I'd be ashamed of the failure. I was convinced I had to do it so I'd eat a salad in front of a client and a cheeseburger on the way back to the office and the cycle continued. 

The problem was my perspective, nobody ever told me after a bad day that if I sat down and ate Cheetos every day after school for 3 years in a row, didn't cheat or anything then I would "start" to feel better, I felt better right then, right now. Then I just did it over and over again until I ballooned up to 350 pounds, in a crazy sort of way, I proved I could follow a strict diet over the long term by focusing on feeling better now, today.  

So what's the point?

Before I figured out what to do about food, I started to ride and on an early longer ride I bonked. Bonking is a biking term for running out of energy and it's exactly like running out of gas, one minute you are moving and the next you are spitting and sputtering and you're done. You can't make it up the next hill, you just need to stop and call someone to come get you and to bring some carbs and some water and a long nap with them. 

I got home and called my fitness guru, Doug Walker, and he said let's figure out what went wrong, to start with ... and then he said four words I'd heard a million times but this time would completely change how I felt about food ... what did you eat? I told him I got a banana and some peanut butter crackers and he stopped me and said "no, before the ride, what you eat in the 24 hours before you ride will impact your ride more than anything you do."

I really don't remember what I ate but I do remember thinking that I'd have to check that out and I started looking carefully at what I ate and how my body used it. I focused on my proteins and limited my carbs and over the next week my rides got better faster than they had in a long time. I started to realize that veggies and fruits and lean proteins made me ride better and I would feel better right now, today. So I became more focused on it, I learned when to eat fats and how my body was meant to absorb them and I felt better, on that ride, today. 

My regimen essentially boiled down to a couple of things, get up early, ask God to help me be safe on my ride and make good choices in what I ate and drank, ride my bike and eat to recover or prep for the next ride. If I ate right, I'd ride better and feel better. I also learned when things I didn't think I'd eat again actually helped my rides, peanut butter delivered the right fat with a protein to really stretch out my ride, a sugar cookie was an easy carb on a long ride, especially if I had been pushing hard. The interesting thing is the food I liked before because it tasted good was reintroduced because of other real benefits. However the things I used to love, cheeseburgers, fried anything, gravy, none of those make me feel better anymore and I really have no real desire for them. I was in Eatzi's tonight and they had fried catfish, I looked for a second, remembered how great I thought it was and remembered I want to ride with the Greater Dallas Bike Club tomorrow and thought that won't do anything for me. I can pass on cheeseburgers at the Angry Dog and pull thru Wendy's and order a dry baked potato.  I honestly do not crave or think about ordering the other choices any more, simply because I know they no longer make me feel better. 

Therefore I did the exact same thing to lose weight as I did to gain weight, I used food as a tool to change the way I felt with one big difference, I learned what feeling better feels like and I learned what parts of me that food makes feel better. If I'm depressed or sad or whatever, food won't change that emotion, I can pray about it, meditate on it, talk about it or ride it out and be okay but a cheeseburger doesn't offset the hurtful words or actions of others. The right food gives me energy and stamina and normal blood pressure, cholesterol and sugars, those really feel good.  

Hindsight

In hindsight, that's a lot about me. People that use foreign substances to change the way they feel, right now, are often described as addicted to their feel good substance of choice and we share a lot of common traits. One is an inability to do things in moderation, we don't have a governor, we are all in or we are all out, there is no middle ground. So when we set a long term goal to never eat Cheetos again, we either succeed or we fail, completely. 364 days without Cheetos is completely lost in one little orange puff, complete failure. As strange as that may sound, it is my reality. I simply cannot balance the 364 good days with the one bad day and after the bad day, I thought well, I blew it and was done and with that kind of all or nothing perspective, I failed hard. History taught me that I could not do that long term thing so weight loss always overwhelmed me. However, if I boil it down to today, I can get my head around that, I am not overwhelmed by the thought of never eating another Cheeto, I just won't have one today and if that works out, I can try it again tomorrow. Adding the ingredient of ringing that feel better bell made it quickly become a habit, a habit my doctor claims I can live with. 

Why I believe, it's why I ride

Welcome

I have been wanting to do a blog for a while, for those that have seen me on Facebook or Twitter, the #spinningintightslacks has been showing up for a while and I've been kicking around this blog. I've lost weight but I've still got a couple of pounds to go and I never knew how to pick up my story in the middle of it, my initial drafts were just too long, just like this note probably. However, I got the right answer at the end of last week, in one 24 hour period and decided it was the perfect way to kick off Spinning in Tight Slacks. Let's call it Why I Ride.

It's really a lot more about why I believe in God and why I know He is real. Before you click close, hold on, I'm not going to beat you down with the G word, I believe God has played a big role in my weight loss, it's been a journey and He has walked with me along the way, if you saw me two years ago, you would probably assume he would have had carried me. He probably did. I promise my story won't end up with an altar call, I believe He's talking to you and I will let Him. This also won't include a promise of eternal damnation if you don't believe in my God. I will let God get with you on the consequences of not paying attention to him, that's certainly not my goal or my role here. I lived in those consequences for a long time, for me obesity or being that big felt a lot like eternal damnation. Heck, eternal damnation might be hot enough where I could lose weight so it might have even been preferential to the obese thing. Some of you know how I feel, it's not right that we are made to feel that way but that's a different story.

This is just what my thoughts are on what happened to me and what I believe happens to all of us. My initial push into weight loss was just a series of signs that just kept popping up in front of me. However, they all sound like funny or dumb stories when I tell them, for example former Connecticut basketball coach Jim Calhoun breaking his hip while riding a bike isn't exactly a writing on the wall moment nor one where you would believe that I thought God was telling me to ride a bike ... because I heard that Jim Calhoun broke his hip ... riding a bike. However, what happened last week, that's different. Someone lined that up, they had to. Whoever did it was pretty powerful, so it's either God or the Illuminati. I will go with God and let all you conspiracy folks assume it was choice B. What I don't believe is that it was a coincidence, life is full of too many coincidences to assume that. It's probably more plausible than the Illuminati but not by much, if at all.

So here we go, I hope I haven't lost you already.

Accepting your circumstances, according to a drug dealing convict

Once or twice a month, on Thursday nights I go to the Lew Sterrett correctional facility to listen to inmates who have substance abuse issues. The guys pick a topic and talk about it. My role is to listen, offer an insight if asked and keep the focus on their issues or the topic, I mainly listen. Thursday night a convict chose acceptance and for those guys, it's accepting that they have a problem that has brought them here (again in most cases) and how they can't get better if they don't accept it. Their stories are sad and most of their recidivism sprung from when they couldn't accept the fact that they can't drink or use again. They drink or use, wreck a car or break the law to pay for their habit and then end up back in jail. Accepting doing time is different than the things I can't accept, which is mainly not getting my way, but we summed things up at the end and I thought, man I could not accept that place, everything decided for me, gray striped pajamas (orange stripes if you are a runner), when to get up, what to eat, where to go, etc etc etc. I struggle when others say I can't do something, always have. If I set the "I can'ts" it's better but not when the "you can'ts" are forced on me, that makes me say why not and then I start figuring out how to do it. It's why I can relate to a bunch of convicts and addicts, they obviously struggle with that as well, just not as much as me.

Closer to home

I went home that night and had to get with my son about his car situation. The car he drove had a cracked engine block and was stuck at a mechanics shop in Norman and not able to be driven. I couldn't get it back to Dallas and I couldn't get comfortable with trying to fix it there, I just didn't know anyone so I wanted to get it home. I believed we would figure it out over his Christmas break and we would solve the issue and get my son a new car or a new engine and I told him that. For a variety of reasons, that didn't happen and Thursday night he was going to find out after he got back from seeing a movie with friends. I didn't want to make a bad decision just to make him happy and as a parent, I would have been a lot happier making him happy. I was kicking myself for telling him it would get fixed over Christmas and then not getting it done. The decision was to take him back to Norman, rent a U-haul with a car trailer and bring his car here where I can talk to my mechanic and some friends that know more about used cars than me. I braced for quite a bit of kickback but was shocked by his response, he basically said "that's cool, I can walk. I will be okay, I can get a ride if I need one, it will work out fine." He's a great kid but he's 20, that's not typical for him or any 20 year old kid. I told him several times how impressed I was with that reply and one of his comments was that he'd been working on accepting things when they don't go his way. I guarantee he didn't get that response modeled by his dad, he's seen me blow up over a lot of things way more minor than stuck at college with no car even though his dad said he would fix it by now. 

Much closer to home

The next day we were driving back from Norman, pulling his Mini Cooper behind a U-Haul van. Believe me, I was not getting my way by having to do this on a work day instead of a weekend, by having to do this instead of finding an inexpensive alternative, by a million things. I was on the phone talking taxes with a variety of clients when I got a call from a guy I had been working with on a deal that was about to close, he was supposed to call me by Friday to let me now what day this week I would be getting a check, a big check. For 6 months or so I had been told this deal was golden and there would be no problem with it and for 6 months I had used the phrase "when this deal closes" about a million times. 

He told me that it fell apart and we were going to have to start over somewhere else. That was not the phone call I had expected, and I was definitely not getting my way. I had often thought that the amount might get reduced or paid over time but I didn't think it would just go away. Under normal circumstances, I would be figuring out who could I holler at until this deal got going again. I would then quickly roll into really mad version of me and I would be horrible to be around for a couple of days and it would get worse when I encountered all the "after the deal closes" items that I couldn't have now. Instead, my mind turned to my son's response that was just modeled for me and for that reason I just said, "That's good, now we can move on. Let's see if we can figure something else out but thanks for letting me know." I promise, the list of times I handled something like that, like that can be counted on one finger, including that time.

Now THAT'S God

I know a lot of folks don't believe in God because they can't see God or there is no physical evidence that he is there but God may not be physical like we understand physical. He might be, I don't know, so rather than trying to fit God into my expectation box I just ask myself what are the odds that a drug addicted convict would talk about accepting his circumstances and then a 20 year old kid would then model acceptance over not getting his car back? Oh yeah, and that all this would take place exactly 24 hours before I got news that I was not prepared or equipped to accept? I'm not telling you that the creator of the universe indwelled me at that moment and did that for me, he might have, i just don't know, He didn't tell me if He did. I am telling you that I believe he gave me the tools to handle that right before I needed it and then I had it demonstrated for me how that was a much better way to handle it. It takes more faith for me to believe that those circumstances could just happen with no divine intervention than it does for me to say wow and thanks to the God who laid that out for me. Of course, the next question is why now? Why not earlier? What about all the other times? The answer I can tell you with all the confidence in the world is "I don't know" and when I say "I don't know" I mean "I don't know" because "I don't know that he didn't." I was just paying attention this time and believe it or not, that's got everything in the world to do with why I ride my bike and have lost a lot of weight.

In 2012, God sent me a message and then followed it up with sign after sign and I was actually paying attention, I really don't know why but it led to a pretty remarkable transformation. I am including a timeline of pictures of what happened because I was paying attention. My journey started in May of 2012 and I hope to be part of someone else's journey. I hope to be the impetus for someone to pay attention. I can also assure you that not all of my ramblings are this deep. I actually prefer silly and fun over deep and insightful ... most of the time. 

This blog is going to be a lot about riding my bicycle and the signs I encounter, there is 120 pounds less of me now than there used to be because I ride a bicycle ... a lot ... everywhere. I also eat to ride, so I eat a bit differently than I did when I weighed between 330 and 350 pounds. Not really sure, I avoided scales. I will talk about that as well and fill in some stories along the way about what happened between then and now.

So that's it, the blog is called "Spinning in Tight Slacks" and the reason for that is pretty silly, I can cover that in a silly post if you haven't already figured it out. My mantra is "Today I Can" and my goal is to inspire others by letting them know "Today You Can." Next summer I hope to ride from Vancouver Canada to Tijuana Mexico, in what I call the "Today You Can" ride but that's a working title.

I also do taxes, I will probably belly ache about that between now and April 15th. I hope you come along and I hope I have a second post. 

#spinningintightslacks