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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   1519 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for October 29, 2025

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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But when I basically told the fitter your/my MO, he just hung his head for a second and then recovered. "That's pretty much the opposite of what you should be doing". At the scale of a Gran Fondo and above, little adjustments matter. And frankly, the $175 I paid for a fit seemed like a deal with how fucked up my saddle height, shoes, stem, and pedals were. We spent 2.5 hours adjusting every piece of the bike, then testing how it felt with motion capture etc. It felt a lot better in that room, very quickly, and I'll be able to report back how it felt at scale soon.

I've been trying to put off doing all this, I guess out of embarrassment over how bad I am, like I need to earn it. Also why I've put off spending any real money on a bike. But maybe all the persuasion on here has made the bike shop up the road a few hundred bucks.

The Peloton is a great way to up your cadence, the workouts really focus on that over power or distance. Plus Olivia Amato is.... motivating. Even if it's a huge rip off of a workout platform.

I despise everything about their business model, but Mrs. FiveHour wanted one off craigslist and she loves it, it's worth any price to keep her working out, so we already have one in the basement.

For a long time I was so focused on losing weight that I would not eat on rides. You don't need performance food: Some sour patch kids, one of your bottles having gatorade, and something else you just like eating are probably enough. But don't not eat, because it'll slow you down bigly. I almost never bonk, but when I do it's a frustrating waste of time to try and limp back home with cramps slowing me down to a crawl.

For the places I've done long rides, wawa is my rest station, so I've got a wide variety of junk food on tap. Tastykakes are the thing I allow myself only in the middle of large cardio events. I doubt its optimal, but its good enough.

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