February 13, 2024 to February 14, 2024
I1/7 -- I1/8： 海口
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Although—frustratingly enough—it only links with the MiSmartHome app and not the MiFitness app that my smartwatch talks to (an app which, I might add, had compatibility with a different digital scale), the new scale which I've got is a fancy schmancy thing that not only records my weight and keeps track of it via a Bluetooth connection to my phone, it also has a bunch of sensors which theoretically tell me my body composition in terms of things like muscle mass, water weight, and protein levels.
I say "theoretically," because—in the time that I've had it—I've come to realize that most of the swing in what it reports as my amount of muscle is actually based on how much 'unprocessed' material has yet to finish passing through. However, so long as I make a point of only getting recorded¹ weigh-ins in the morning, before I've eaten and after I've pooed, I can see what the actual trends are.
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Since coming back from the end of last year's Big Tour, my weight has been trending back upwards. This is a normal thing for me. It happens every year between Tours.
What's different this time is that, unlike previous years, I've got both the smartwatch² and the fancy scale telling me that even if I thought I was still being "very active" by always biking³ to whatever I was doing or wherever I was going, I actually wasn't being very active at all.
I really would have thought that the heavy city share bikes—with their total lack of anything resembling aerodynamics and their shitty bearings—were a pretty good work out. Turns out that they are just a relatively efficient way of getting from Point A to Point B. Walking, on the other hand, is a great burner of calories; and, now that I've worked up to doing 10,000 steps nearly every day, I'm actually getting in nearly as many calories burned as on an average touring day⁴.
Weirdly enough, since urban walking (even in a city as pretty as mine) is a consistent thing with no coasting and no reason to stop and take in Amazing Scenic Overlooks, despite a lower peak heart rate, I also burn more calories per hour in deciding to walk to the Coffee Shop I'm working out of today than I do with my cross continental luggage carrying bike stuff.
However, at least until this currently interrupted Winter Tour started, my weight kept trending up, up, upwards. And, it wasn't until I was back in Haikou for a few days that I realized why.
On Tour, I eat for sustenance. I intentionally choose more meat, less carbs, high fat, high protein. I can inhale a few pounds of tangerines in one sitting, and if I do something like leave a jar of peanut butter within reach, may find myself Sleep Eating.
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At home in the city, however, although I'm more likely to go longer between meals, I eat not so much for sustenance as for pleasure. Even when I'm not going to western restaurants like Roxy's or Happy Monk, and I'm not being posh with some kind of fancy fusion twaddle, I know where and how to find food that's more than just a satisfactory way to fill the yawning hole that is my grumbling stomach.
And that, even more than how little exercise I was surprised to find that I was actually doing, is why the 10+kg swings were always happening after I got back from one year's Tour and before I started the next.
Bearing in mind that the riding I did during the counterclockwise semi-rotation of the island was on some pretty intense roads, even if I was riding a former race bike that practically demanded that I try to ride faster than the Tour Bike ever wants to go, I lost an insane 2.8kg in 10 days.
Has it all stayed off during the Emergency Work Break?
Of course not.
Even with my maintaining the minimum 10,000 step a day habit as part of the enforced periodic breaks that still won't be enough to stop my tendonitis⁵ from coming back, I am—of course—seeing a bounce back, but, now that I know why it's happening, I can do something about it.
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¹ Owing to a bizarre and convoluted fuckup on the part of Customer Service when the original scale stopped working two weeks after I bought it, I've now got two scales. As I've only paired one of them with my phone, I am free to use the other with indulging my current fascination in things like the nightly 100 gram swing in weight from exhaled moisture or surprise at just how much a really satisfying dump weighed.
² Given as a gift by someone who had upgraded to a shinier model and couldn't be arsed to sell it.
³ Combination of sticker shock over the cost of taxis and the severe motion sickness I suffer from after three months of not being in cars.
⁴ The combination of continuing to work from the road, the time spent exploring cool things, and the time spent taking video of me exploring cool things mean that average days—even on something as big as the Summer Tour—are only around 70 kilometers a day.
⁵ As I met the dreck's deadline by over 5 days, and the science was only supposed to have "at least half" done by the end of Chinese New Year, not all of it, the tendonitis is entirely my own fault.
Today's ride: 20 km (12 miles)
Total: 536 km (333 miles)
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