Insert physical activity here

Throughout this weight loss journey I began to understand just how important physical activity is. Being at the weight I had been and being there for so many years, exercise really had not been a part of my life. Sometime, around the time that I became a teenager, which was also around the time that I started to get noticeably heavy, I started to become inactive, and a side note - I also started to smoke.

I quickly lost interest in sport involvement at school, I was out of shape, uncomfortable in my body and wanted to simply hang out with my friends instead, insert love of junk food at this stage as well!

I'm not really sure what made me go from skinny active kid to overweight inactive teenager, pretty much an assortment of events really. It just seems to creep up, creep in and take over. I was never an unhappy teen,  I had plenty of friends and was always a social butterfly, seldom missing out on an event, but that didn't keep me physically healthy.

It wasn't until 2003, when my husband introduced me to the sport of mountain biking that I found out just what I'd been missing.

He bought me a mountain bike, nothing fancy but it had gears and everything else that was required. I'll never forget the first time I climbed on that bike. It was in the driveway, I asked him to stay there, I had to do this on my own. I climbed on and headed off down the road. People say that you don't forget how to ride a bike, well I DID! Off down the road I went, scared to death, arms shaking, bike shaking. I got to the end of the road and had to turn around. I chose a large open parking lot, I'm not quite sure how I managed to not fall over in the middle of the turn. I seriously thought I could throw up, and really wondered what I was getting myself into. As scared as I was, it didn't deter me, nor did I give up.

Trying something new and taking a flying leap out of your comfort zone is one of the most amazing feelings ever. There is no drug out there that compares to the feeling you get when you realize you made it through something that terrified you so incredibly. Once a door like this opens you begin to realize the endless possibilities that are out there waiting for you.

A few weeks after that first bike ride, we ventured off to the Toronto International Bicycle Show. It was there that I first found out about the Fly Gurlz (women's only mountain bike group), which is when the next leap into the great unknown came about.