Tour De France – Weight Loss Diet Solutions

Late on Friday and Saturday nights I will lie in bed and watch a movie on my iPad on Netflix. It is a nice quiet time for me and I tend to watch stuff that no one else in the house would care about. Last night I watched the documentary Ride the Divide.

Ride the Divide is just about an hour and a half long and it follows closely three people out of 16 people in total that do a bicycle race from Banff Canada to the US-Mexico border. The ride is purely individual although everyone is tracking each other and supporting each other as much as they can. There are no teams, or team support like you see in the Tour De France.

I won’t spoil the result but the winner takes about three weeks and the last take about five weeks to complete this race. Not only is the distance absolutely ridiculous but since the race goes down the continental divide they have to deal with mountains, snow, rain, and crazy elevation changes all the time while trying to ride as far as they can every day. Oh, and lots of wildlife as lots of the riding is not on highways but trails instead.

The riders ride as long as they want everyday and they tend to stop where they can in hotel or tent and eat from gas stations, restaurants, or grocery stores. Early on you would see four or five people riding together and stopping at a gas station to get some snacks to get them going, there was a vegan that was struggling to find food but all the riders are very concious of how many calories and type of food they need to keep themselves going.

As the race goes on the riders definitely get spread out and there are all kinds of emotions going through the ride the divide riders, loneliness, fear, boredom, exhaustion.

And how about the physical toll that these guys go through? One of the riders, Mary Metcalf-Collier goes from strong, to swollen knees and ankles, to better, to worse and back again. I could feel for her everyday of the race as she kept persevering. Another racer Mike Dion left his family for a few weeks to race and had terrible knee problems as well that went away and then came back, while the third racer being followed seemed to have no physical problems at all.

The music in Ride the Divide is great. The scenery is spectacular and the music used compliments it perfectly. for a late night movie Ride the Divide was a fantastic way to spend and hour and a half to see a crazy race with real people competing against themselves and the elements. I know that the maker of the movie has a follow up movie and am looking forward to seeing that one as well.

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Usually people do things in half measures. I have in all of my articles talked about the things you can do to make a change and most of them are not particularly hard. Take a look back now at all of the changes that I have put forward. Are you comfortable with each of these changes? Probably. But once all of these changes are instituted you are looking at a whole new you, a new outlook, a new body, a new way of looking at eating as well as exercise.

Most change in life that is really serious and permanent comes from radical changes. When you make a break from the past and change the way that you look at all things in your life you are changing a paradigm and you never need look back. I have been in points in my life in the past where I would look at some kind of exercise or lifestyle change and would kind of chuckle saying “No, I couldn’t do that” and six months later I am at that point.

I would like to pop up some role models that you can look at to see what is in fact possible. First lets look at Lance Armstrong, as many of us know Lance Armstrong endured cancer and came back to win the Tour De France seven times. Here are a few things that make Lance Armstrong seem like a normal guy: he has 2 kids, and a failed marriage, part way through his first Tour De France he considered quitting, he came from a trailer park in Texas. Now let’s look at what it takes to do what he does. He leads a team of seven riders that protect his position in the race, he rides 3500 KM in 21 days and in the last Tour De France he only won one stage but was so close to the lead in every other stage that he was able to easily win overall. One more person would be Bill Clinton, like him or not Bill Clinton cam from a very poor family, a broken home, put himself through university to become a lawyer which should have been tough enough but this gave him a chance to become a politician and to become the governor of Arkansas and finally to beat all the “backwoods” stereotype attitudes from the rest of the country to finally become president. Just so we could look at him again as a real person, Bill Clinton committed infidelity within his marriage and is now trying to rise up again as a great international statesman.

Both of these stories teach us that anyone can do great things and that there can be doubt and setbacks to our great changes. The other thing that we see is that most people are normal people and that we can pull ourselves to succeed

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