About Episode
Jim Read is a a highly sought after graphic designer and creative director. He works long hours and also has three children but somehow manages to fit competitive cycling into his already ridiculous schedule. Four years ago Jim lived the same sedentary lifestyle we all struggle to overcome; he was overweight, had bad eating habits, and incorporated little to no activity into his day. Then one Thanksgiving he realized that if something didn’t change in his life, in ten years he would be facing a terrible health crisis.
In this episode Jim and I talk about Jim’s journey going from overweight and out of shape to putting his life back together, and then ultimately becoming a competitive cyclist.
Episode Highlights
- How Jim manages to make time for THREE different jobs – working as a graphic designer, a father to three children and cycling
- Jim’s story of how he went from sitting behind his desk to spin classes at the YMCA to competitive cycling
- Jim’s simple solution to sticking with a diet and exercise program
- How generating momentum was one of the keys to Jim’s success
- Food addiction is a real problem. We discuss how to manage junk food cravings around the home and office
- Jim gives us some helpful digital tools for anyone who is serious about cycling
- We discuss how time management and efficiency helped Jim fit cycling into his busy schedule
- Sleep is also incredibly important! If you can’t recover with a good night’s rest, you can’t maintain this sort of lifestyle
- How to “gamify” the small tasks in your life so you can become more efficient at doing them
- Working with your limitations not against them
- Jim talks about the dark side of competing at this level–injuries, losing and it’s tough on the mind and body. Make sure you do this safely!
Useful Links
Transcript
Zack Arnold: So I’m here today with Jim Read, and you got kind of a bit of a background on Jim when I gave his bio before in the show intro. But what I failed to mention is that Jim is a Renaissance man slash badass. He’s somebody that I met actually one of the very first people I ever met in Los Angeles in the film industry when I was working as an assistant editor at this little independent trailer house, and Jim may not remember this, but he’s one of the first people to ever call me out on my giant head in my bowl, where I was, and I’m sure Jim’s like, yeah, that sounds about like me, right? But I was just this big-headed college graduate that thought, yeah, no, I’m I’m an editor and a graphic designer because I spent a semester using After Effects, and you’re just like, yeah, you’re not a designer, and you started showing me stuff, and it completely blew my mind on how little I knew and how far I had to go, and that is a lesson that has stuck with me for 15 years. So I appreciate you having brought that to my attention, and it’s really made a big difference on me. So welcome to the show, Jim. Oh, I’m
Jim Read: Glad to be here, Zack. Thanks for having me on. And you know, it was a pleasure working with you back back in the day. You know, just being young and green and fresh and full energy. You know, it’s it’s you know working with the young upstarts that make this whole thing fun and worthwhile. So yeah, and obviously you’ve you’ve you know kept it up and done really well for yourself, kicking ass. Well, I appreciate that. So nice, nice job.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, thank you. So before we start to get into some of the nitty gritty, I just want to give people a little bit of a background of kind of what your day to day looks like, kind of what what keeps you busy, and then kind of incorporate on top of the the professional stuff like the design work, your schedules and stuff. Just kind of what you’re doing outside of that that is more fitness and post related.
Jim Read: Sure, I feel like I have three lives almost. You know, first I’m a dad. I have three awesome kids, eight, six, and four, and that’s insane. I mean, I have so much fun with those guys, and it takes a lot of time. It’s a it’s a huge deal, you know. You have one child, then that seems somewhat manageable. Then two is not as manageable, and then three, you’re outnumbered, and you know you’re pretty much hosed. So my approach with that is just roll with it and have fun, and and that’s been amazing. But you know, that’s you know, job number one. Job number two is yeah, I work in advertising. I work at an experiential agency, so I get to you know think of and produce interesting and wild stunts. And then my third job is cycling. You know, I treat it pretty seriously. I train pretty seriously. Having all three and trying to balance and manage all three doesn’t always work out.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, that’s something that I can relate to as well. I don’t have three kids, and that just kind of blows my mind how that’s even remotely possible, given that you’re also doing athletics and working in this industry. So, but you’re right. It’s like with one, you’re like, whoa, this is kind of overwhelming. But then you get into the thing, you know, you get into the swing of it. You’re like, oh, this isn’t so bad. I can manage it. And then you have the second one, and you’re like, what just happened to my life? Oh my god! Like it’s not twice as hard. It’s like six times as hard. And I don’t understand the math behind that, but you talk to anybody that’s just had their second kid, and they’re like, “What in the world has happened to my life? So I can’t even imagine what happens with the third. But the fact that you’re balancing all of that is really fantastic. And the the thing that I’m the most interested, obviously, is how you’re finding a way to balance all of these three and find way to be when you’re not a Tour de France cyclist, but I follow you on Facebook and I see the stuff you’re doing. You’re not a guy that jumps on a mountain bike and does 20 miles around town. Like you take this seriously. So talk a little bit specifically about that side of things.
Jim Read: Sure. Yeah, I came into cycling. I guess I discovered cycling again a few years ago, and I think, like a lot of your guests on on this show, you know, I had put in probably 15 years of sitting behind a desk and not exercising enough, and had put on a lot of weight. You know, and that’s just what’s going to happen when you eat a lot, eat unhealthy foods. Let your emotions maybe drive some of those eating habits, which can be really stressful in a in a creative work environment. Entertainment’s a tough business. We work really long hours, and a lot of folks don’t don’t fully understand. While it’s amazing and fun, and I couldn’t imagine working on anything else. We put in so much time, and especially early in in the career when you’re really figuring a lot of stuff out. So the first thing that goes is is exercise just gets tossed out the window. So I had gained a lot of weight, and I you know wasn’t feeling very healthy. My life. I was maybe drinking a little bit too much, staying out too late, not making good food choices, and you know, I it was around Thanksgiving maybe four years ago, and I just decided you know enough enough of this. This is not working for me. You know, looked at myself in the mirror and I couldn’t believe what I’d seen, and you know, I was imagining in in my mind if this is what I look like now, you know, what’s going to happen 10 years from now? This just you know something snapped, and I realized I needed to do something about it, and I was like, well, what can I tolerate? What what can I do that would at least be fun? I’m not. I’m not a huge fan of of going to the gym. It just you know, the the motivation to work out. I knew I needed to find a motivation to work out, so I discovered my local YMCA and it had offered spin classes. So I started going to spin classes, and when I went to spin class, I went with real focus to kick ass to work very hard. I didn’t really know much what I was doing, and I followed and went along with the classes, and I just you know found that I was working a lot harder than maybe even the instructors, and that started by you know, and I’m I’m super competitive too, and that kind of helped keep my motivation high. One of the things I noticed is, hey, that’s cool. It keeps track of your calories that you burned. Okay, wow, that was a really hard spin class, and I just flipped the calorie counter, so that’s cool. Okay, so how fast can I flip the calorie counter? So basically, you know, how hard can I work to flip the calorie counter? You know, break that 1000 mark as early on in the class as possible. So then I started doing that, and then I started doing two classes in a row. And you know, the people there thought I was a little nuts. There are a lot of older retired people, and I was, you know, this 40-year-old guy who’s rediscovered cycling, and I’m treating it a little bit like a race. And that’s when I realized, like, hey, you know, maybe I should get outside and, you know, keep the momentum, keep excited about cycling. And honestly, I’m getting a little bored of just spinning on an exercise bike in a class, but the class is great. You know, you have people around you, and that definitely helped. And and I found the instructors that I liked, and they’ve since become good friends. So, you know, I think it was maybe three or four months of spin classes, and then I was like, “Well, I’ll sign up for a race. Let me go and check it out. And so I go online. I start looking around. I found a local cycling club, and I found a bunch of races. And I was like, “Oh, this race looks really cool. It’s called Killington Stage Race, and it’s three days of racing: a TT, a circuit race, and a and a huge road race with a massive climb, and I just had no idea.
Jim Read: I had no idea what I was getting into, but it looked pretty awesome, and it was in Vermont, and I love Vermont, so I was like, sure, I’ll sign up for that. And I didn’t even at that point have a a real road bike. I asked my brother to send me his old TT bike, and I started riding that around, and I mean, just thinking about that now is just insane. But you know, you you you work with what you have. So you know, I remember going out thinking like, oh, I should try and ride 100 miles. 100 miles sounds like a lot. Why not challenge myself with that on a TT bike? That was just insane. I you know I probably crippled myself for a week trying to do that, and and I did. I rode pretty slow, and the gearing’s totally not right, and you know it’s completely the wrong bike to do something like that on. But I did it, and and that all fed into a lot of really positive kind of momentum. You know, I went and did Killington stage race, and pretty much got my ass kicked, but I loved every moment of it. And I mean, I made all the wrong mistakes, but I had no idea what I was doing. I mean, all the classic mistakes in cycling, in racing, for you know, if you’re trying to win. But I actually had pretty good goodness in that.
Zack Arnold: So, so sorry about that quick interruption. We had a little bit of a connection failure, and you’ll notice that Jim’s his audio quality is a little bit different. But the story’s just as awesome. So, sorry for the interruption, Jim. Go ahead and continue.
Jim Read: Yeah. So, you know, that kicked off my after Killington. That kicked off my, I guess, cycling racing career, and I committed pretty intensely to keep up training, learn more about cycling training, and read a lot. And you know, mostly it’s to stay motivated to stay healthy. You know, I found the thing that I like doing, even though it takes hours. You know, I’m on the bike. You know, probably between you know seven hours is a short, a very short training week. Up to about 20 hours would be a heavy training week. I found something I loved, and it worked. You know, it’s kept me motivated, helped bring the weight off, and you know, honestly, I use that, you know. I’m burning so many calories that even if I have a bad nutrition day, it’s not really that big a deal.
Zack Arnold: But I’m sure that when you have a bad nutrition day, you you also definitely feel it because when you’re doing those kinds of hours, and all of a sudden you have you’re just oh I’m going to go out and have burgers and fries and a couple of beers, and the next day you train, you’re like oh my god that was the worst decision ever.
Jim Read: Yeah, you know, I can tolerate things pretty well. You know, there are some things I stay away from, but honestly, after a really hard ride, a calorie dense meal, if there’s some a lot of red meat in there and some fat, I’m I’m not afraid of that. And you know, when you need to get the calories in, you know, my favorite thing post post a really hard ride is chocolate milk. Yeah, chocolate milk is an amazing recovery drink. A lot of protein, a lot of calories, and you get them in right away. One of the things that we try and do after a hard ride is to restore glycogen. You know, get get those calories into a usable form of energy back into the muscles because the kind of riding we do on those hard days really empties you. And if you’re going to go hard again the next day in those kind of higher power zones, you need to be you need your tanks topped off.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, I mean that all that stuff makes complete sense. And the the part that I really want to go into is about developing that motivation, how that motivation was developed, how to keep it up, and also how to balance the time that you’re spending on the cycle with your family. But before going into that, I want to do a quick tangent, just as a place for people to start with a story like this. Are you familiar with Rich Roll?
Jim Read: Rich Roll, no.
Zack Arnold: Okay, you need to find this guy immediately because you’re going to look at his story and say this guy’s my hero. He’s basically he’s an acquaintance of mine. I’ve been following his work. He was an entertainment attorney that had the exact same epiphany that you did at the age of 40, where he couldn’t walk up a flight of steps. He was probably I don’t know 210 215 pounds, and he realized this is not the life that I wanted to lead, and I want to change it. And he became an ultra endurance athlete, and is one of was named one of the 20 fittest men on the planet. He did something that he called the I think called the Epic Five, where he did five triathlon distance races on all five islands of Hawaii in seven days, and this is a guy that was an entertainment attorney that couldn’t walk up the steps, and he did it by becoming plant powered. So he became 100% vegan and completely reshaped his life. It’s one of the most inspiring and amazing stories I’ve ever heard, and I’m hoping to have him on the show soon. But just go to richroll.com or just go on Amazon. You need to read the book Finding Ultra because your story is almost identical to his. The way you’re talking about power zones, and I had no idea how to get on the bike. Like this is a guy that you’re going to look at a story and say, “I can go to the next level. This is for anybody, not just for you specifically. But if you you just read Finding Ultra, it’s one of the best books I’ve ever read. It’s like a two-day read. You know, just couple hours a day. It’s fantastic. You will love it. And for anybody else listening, check out this guy richroll.com or look up Finding Ultra. Really, really good. Just motivation for saying I want to make a change. And like you did it, you did it in an extreme way. So what I want to do is go back to that day where you looked in the mirror and said enough is enough, and I’m a really firm believer that if you look in the mirror and say, “Oh, I don’t like the way that I look. I need to lose 10 pounds, so I’m going to find a diet and exercise program that says I can lose 10 pounds in 90 days. That clearly doesn’t work, and research proves that like 90-five plus percent of people fail when they do that, and I feel that your motivation has to be much bigger than “I want to lose a pant size. And for me personally, it’s all about being able to function better as an editor and being a high performer, and even more importantly, being a much better father to my kids and being present. So, what are the deeper things that you found when you started digging into your motivation that got you from where you were to doing 20 hours of cycling a week.
Jim Read: Yeah, that’s a that’s a great question, and it’s a really good point. I had tried you know traditional quote unquote diets, and you know I don’t like to speak ill of them or and you know any of the current trending diets, you know they may work for some people. You know it didn’t work for me. I needed to identify a motivation and start generating momentum. Momentum is so important and has been really important in my in my fitness and you know in the beginning of my weight loss. Now my weight loss is less of a well. I guess by finding something that I liked doing that expended a lot of energy, I didn’t even much have to think about the fact that I was on a diet. I mean, at first I I did some pretty extreme changes in my diet to kind of kickstart things, and I don’t recommend this to anyone. Essentially, what I what I did, what I figured out with myself is that you know traditional approach to dieting wasn’t going to work, partially because of my own unique psychology, which is I love food a lot, probably too much. And so what I did for myself is I fasted all day and then ate whatever I wanted for dinner, and I wouldn’t recommend that to anyone. It’s probably it’s it’s it’s not a diet that’s probably documented.
Zack Arnold: That’s like the worst advice ever for anybody listening. For the love of God, don’t do that. But carry on.
Jim Read: Well, I think my point is that different things work for different people for different reasons. So for me, once I start eating, the floodgate is open. At least at that time, with what I was dealing with at the time, with you know the stress of working and how many hours I was working, and why that worked for me is you know after and and and you think you can’t do it, but you know after two or three days you really can tolerate a lot more hunger than you might think. You know, so I was running at a pretty steep calorie deficit. I lost 45 pounds in six weeks, which is pretty yeah, it’s pretty extreme. Then once I hit like 4040-five, pounds of weight loss, it became much harder. You know that trick stopped working. But what I did is I then I phased in smaller meals, portion control, and at that point I I feel like you know I don’t exactly know what was going on in my body and psychologically, but I had generated that momentum. I had lost the weight. I was on, you know, this cycling program that I really enjoyed, and I kind of returned to probably a much healthier, more normal way of eating. You know, just paying attention to eating whole, real foods that I cook myself. I love cooking. I’m the cook in the family. That made things a little bit easier because I could control what we’re eating at meal time. I think it can be really tough when, you know, if you’re not the cook, you have no idea what’s going into what you’re eating. Zack, I don’t know how you manage lunches around you know post production facilities and all the snacks around post houses. It’s impossible, man. How do you do
Zack Arnold: It? Yeah, I mean it’s it’s it’s basically an art form in and of itself. And speaking of art forms, I’ll just put an aside to your story that when you say you’re the cook in the family, when I say I’m the cook in the family, that means that I’ll make my kids chicken and vegetables and whatnot. Like people need to understand, you are a chef, you are an artisan. You developed an entire food app around these amazing recipes. So when you say you love food, that doesn’t mean you gorge on cheeseburgers and Doritos. Like you are an artist when it comes to food, and I can’t even imagine how hard it would be to take something you’re so passionate about, and remove that from your life, and say, “Well, I just can’t eat all this stuff during the day and have one meal at night. So I can’t even imagine the mental power that it takes to do that. But the the way that I manage food at the office now, and this is something that has taken me years of experimentation, is that I just don’t order anymore. the The show I’m on right now, Empire, they have the budget to get everybody lunch every day, and that’s basically because they don’t want to let us leave. And that’s not that uncommon in post production, where it’s gotten to the point where the people running the department are saying, “Well, I don’t really want them to walk outside and get fresh air for like a whole hour. Like we can’t afford that, so let’s just give them their lunches, and then they can eat their lunch in front of their workstation to keep going, and we never lose them. And I refuse to just be a part of that philosophy. So I almost never, and I say almost because there are days when it just isn’t possible. But I almost never eat in front of my workstation. But I bring in my own food, and what I’ve done on Empire specifically, because they are paying for the food, is I just went to them and said, “Listen, I don’t want to be eating takeout every single day. It’s going to affect my performance, and I have a fairly strict diet. And I don’t want you guys have to worry about my finicky tastes. Whatever your budget is per day, I just want to be reimbursed that for the food that I bring. And they kind of looked at me when I proposed that season one, like, “Are you crazy? And I said, “Well, no. This is the way that we’re just going to do it. I’m not asking you. I’m saying this is what we’re doing, and every once in a while I will order out if it’s like a Friday and it’s you know been a fun day and I sent out a cut and everybody loved it. All right, I’ll get a burger with a group, right? But I’m very I manage that very much, and at this point I probably order out maybe two three times a month. So budgetary wise, I’m actually. Not spending money on the food that I bring, and I will either batch cook on a Sunday where I’ll just make a couple of meals where I know very specifically what’s going into them, very simple meals, healthy meals, and I’ll just eat the same thing all week long, or I’ll use a food delivery service that cooks the meals and I know that it’s fresh ingredients and that it’s some are organic, some or not, but it’s not like I look. It’s not like a lean cuisine where you look at the back of it and there’s 50 ingredients. You don’t know what they are. Like I’ll have like four ingredients on these meals right now. I use a service called Freshly, and I’ll put a link in the show notes if anybody is interested in looking into Freshly because I just have a meal in front of me every day. It’s different. Like it’ll be salmon and vegetables. It’ll be you know like they’re really, really good meals. It’s not the kind of thing you would expect from an order service, but it’s basically being paid for the way that any other lunch from Chipotle or you know the Japanese place or the Chinese place.
Zack Arnold: But I’m, I know what’s in my food, so that’s how I manage that part. And as far as the snacks, there’s a kitchen. There’s actually two kitchens that we have at Empire, and one of them you walk in, and it’s just a wall of all of this stuff. Fair portion of it is really bad. Some of it is good. I just don’t go in there. I get water from a different room. Like there’s another office on the side that doesn’t have any food. It’s just more of a utility kitchen that has like dishes and the coffee maker, but it doesn’t have anything in it, and people don’t congregate there. So I just don’t allow myself to get the bad stuff within my field of vision because I know as soon as I see it, the temptation is going to strike, and I bring my own snacks as well. So I make sure that in my office or you know on the desk right outside the office we have this little common area with snacks. I just make sure I never have the bad stuff in my field of vision, and if I’m hungry, I just go to where my snacks are, and now I’m not tempted to eat the bad stuff. Because if you don’t actually see the bag of Doritos, you usually aren’t saying, “Oh my God, I need the Doritos! I need the Doritos. But as soon as you see them, that’s when the brain is triggered to say, “That’s what I want.
Jim Read: Yeah, totally. And that’s that’s a that’s a really good point. You know, and and I find for myself too, just at home. If if we don’t have it around, I don’t eat it, and the kids don’t eat it, and the family doesn’t eat it. So you know, I’m also the primary grocery shopper. So I just make sure that that stuff just isn’t around. And then guess what? You don’t really miss it. You know, if you can instead of you know the bag of Doritos, we’re huge nut fans. So we have you know we buy nuts in bulk and we have tons of them around at all times and you know dried fruit that between that and dried fruit you know the the kids love it. They don’t miss the Doritos. They don’t need it, and it’s just way easier because you’re not tempted to maybe go down that road if that bag of Doritos is around, and I’ve done that, man. If those if that bag above Cool Ranch is around, it’s it’s just a dangerous thing to load a gun.
Zack Arnold: Exactly, and that’s the thing that a lot of people don’t realize is that we in our entire society have this massive addiction to food, but we don’t actually realize it’s an addiction, which is why it’s so powerful. If you smoke cigarettes, you know you’re addicted to cigarettes. Like there’s no doubt about it. You’re not thinking, “Oh no, I’m not addicted. Like you know that it’s an addiction. But when you’re eating the Doritos every day, or the Froot Loops for breakfast, or whatever it is, these are addictive substances that fMRI brain scans prove are activating the same pleasure centers in your brain as doing cocaine or heroin, but when people don’t understand that that’s actually the case, they don’t realize there’s there’s that addiction. And you and I grew up in similar generations where that’s just the way that you lived was you had a bowl Froot Loops for breakfast, and then you had your sugary yogurt, and you had your peanut butter and jelly sandwich on Wonder Bread, and it’s just all this addictive stuff. So now, when you get to the point where we are, and I’m sure you’ve gone through this as well, that never goes away and gets out of your brain. Like I didn’t grow up eating healthy. I didn’t figure any of this out until a few years ago. So there are still times where I’m like, man, I could go for a bowl of fruity pebbles for dinner right now, right? It doesn’t go away. I don’t know if you deal with that same struggle, but I constantly have that struggle just because that’s what’s been in my brain for 30-five years.
Jim Read: Yeah, and that’s to circle it back to momentum. You know, you you know you have a habit or you’ve done something for a while, and at least for for me, you know, I’m sure everyone’s different on the spectrum is, you know, once I do something for like a couple of weeks, then whether it’s a positive thing or a negative thing, it’s in there and it may be part of the routine. So, for me, I’ve noticed that I’m really powerfully drawn to that routine, and if I can keep it positive, then things stay great, and you know we’re we’ve worked up momentum and in a good direction, and and that’s awesome. Right now, I have to confess, Zack, my momentum this week has been terrible. It started with a bike race on Saturday where I got my ass handed to me. It was really really difficult. And I needed a day, day and a half to recover. Combine that with a few other work and family-related things. I have not been on the bike once this week, so it’s okay. You know, you need time to rest and recover psychologically, physically. So in my training calendar, you know, I’m calling this an easy week, and the weekend is coming up, and I know I’m going to have some time to put in some quality rides. But there are bad weeks too, and it’s cool because things go in cycles, and you’re going to have a down week, you’re going to have an up week, and the the larger thing that I try and pay attention to is that longer-term cycle. So we’re going to talk about digital tools for a little bit here. If that’s if that’s cool with you, there are a couple of
Zack Arnold: I love geek it out. Love it. Great.
Jim Read: Yeah. Let’s let’s geek it out with a couple of amazing digital tools for cycling and for running as well. I use a an online service called Strava, and I also use a service called Training Peaks. Both of them I use to track my fitness progression in slightly different ways. Strava, if you’re not familiar with it, it’s very community and socially driven. It has a lot of technical goodies in there as well, but it’s it’s more of a camaraderie thing, and they have things called KOMs, which you know, if you want to be the fastest person up your local hill, it’ll keep track of that, which is great for motivation. Training Peaks is a pretty serious tool. I’m lucky that I work with an amazing coach, the coaches at at Cycle Smart, and I work with them. They, you know, my coach Jacob lives in West Virginia. I upload all my data, which is recorded into a GPS computer, and all of that data is tracked in the aggregate. You know, so Jacob can log in and see where I’m at, and you know, dial in my plan for the rest of the week, the rest of the month, adjusting things around races so that we’re we’re moving in in a positive direction, and you can get really nerdy with this stuff. I was maybe fortunate because I you know started the cycling thing kind of so late that I had done the research and committed to buying a bike that has a power meter, and that’s a big deal. Power meters are really expensive, so that took up a huge chunk of the budget that I had. And for gear weenies, you know, if you’re a gear weenie, road cycling is like the best thing you could possibly be involved with because it’s just insane. The bikes are incredible. They’re you know made out of really fancy materials. They’re getting more and more aerodynamic. They’re really incredible machines. So I committed to a system that had a power meter, and these are the same power meters that pros are using to track training. And the reason why power meters are important in training is they will measure your true power output, and that’s measurable in watts. And if you are, you know, tracking the different things you can track, like heart rate and miles and speed and all that stuff, it’s great. But power is the one that gives you a true indication of your performance, you know, speed is just-it’s just a result of pedaling really hard. And how hard you can pedal and how hard I can pedal are going to be impacted by a lot of a lot of variables: genetics, size, weight, biomechanics of how you fit on a bicycle, your aerodynamics, your bike zero dynamics. So power kind of levels all of that stuff out, so that you can look at your performance in a way that that many of the coaches kind of know and understand. So when I’m out on a ride, if it’s a training ride, I’m paying pretty close attention to how much power I’m outputting, so yeah, you can get pretty geeky with the cycling stuff.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, I’m I’m definitely familiar with both of those sites and apps. I’m not a cyclist myself, so I don’t use Strava. But anytime anybody will contact me and say, “Hey, Fitness Suppose is great, but I don’t really want to be in the Fitbit leaderboard. I’m not much of a runner, but I’m a cyclist. What can I do? And I say, jump on Strava. It’s the number one place if you’re going to be on a bike and you want to be able to quantify. And like you said, there’s the social aspect. I’ve also gone to Training Peaks. I haven’t subscribed myself, but it is serious business, like you said. And that’s where the triathletes go and the professional cyclists go. Like if you really want to do this right, that is the place to quantify your information and your activity. So I’m familiar with it, and again, I’ll put links in the show notes to all the stuff. So if you’re listening and saying, “Oh, I don’t know how to find these, everything will be there right in the links. But what I want to do now is take everything you’ve talked about so far, and I want to start breaking it down. I’m a really big fan of kind of reverse engineering how. You got where you are, because if listeners are listening to this, or even I’m listening to this, and saying, “Now wait a second, you’ve got three kids, you are working a high-stress job in the entertainment industry, you have the same amount of time in the day that I do. So where are you putting in those 20 hours a week, and what are the habits and systems and rituals that are allowing you to do that-that to me are the action steps that somebody can actually walk away with and say, “Oh, well, if I break it down, I can start to see how I could get there too if I want to. So, kind of, what is the path from the point where you said I’m 45 pounds overweight and I have three kids to I can actually make this work and find the time during the week and balance everything.
Jim Read: Oh, it’s easy having an amazing wife and partner. I mean, that’s really it. You know, my wife is really supportive of everything I do, and you know, even when it’s ridiculous and involves travel, and you know, when I disappear on a really long training ride, you know, a couple of times during the weekend. I mean, she’s amazing. There’s no way I could have done this without her, you know. So, got to give credit where credit is due. You know, she’s a large part of why I’ve been able to be competitive and keep the weight off. And there’s also, you know, having good time management skills, understanding a schedule, and trying to figure out, you know, when you can squeeze things in, and just being efficient about it. And for example, I’m much more of a morning person, and I like to start my day with a workout. It really helps to set my day up. I get up at between four and 530 in the morning to start my workout day, and a lot of that, you know, there’s some variability there. It’s hard to get up that early, you know, and and there was a long while I was getting up at 340-five so I could be on the road at four a.m. to get a two and a half hour ride in in the mornings, that was pushing it a little bit. So we’ve adjusted, and what I say we, you know, my coach and I mostly, you know, try to be realistic about what and how much you can do, and you you need sleep, and you know you can’t always get to bed at a normal hour, but sleep is hugely important. And if you’re not sleeping well and recovering from these really hard efforts, it’s going to be hard to get up and do it again and have good results. You can do it. You can do it for a while. You know, I did my first year of cycling without a coach, and I overtrained myself. And what happens is, without enough sleep, and with too much riding, and too much hard, intense riding, and I mean, it was rare that I took a day off. You just can’t do that. It’s just going to kill your performance. Eventually, you just feel tired and fatigued all the time. Your performance drops. You feel lethargic. It’s yeah, it’s not a not a good thing. So, I’ve been lucky that my coaches help me avoid overtraining. I think just you know that’s something I’m predisposed to. I’m just going to work so hard. I will just ride myself into the dirt. So we’re past that one, which is which is great. Time management, a great wife, and you know being efficient at work. You know, Zack, we’ve been working for a little while in this industry, and you get better at it, man. You you know you you learn the tricks, you learn what to avoid when you’re younger. You have to just learn by brute force, and you make a lot of mistakes, and you work inefficiently because you’re learning new things, and that’s fine. That’s part of it. You know, staying up. You know, there were there were probably 10 years that I was staying up till two, three in the morning, learning, trying new things, experimenting, learning new tools, researching, and that’s part of the education process. At some point, that’s a very difficult thing to sustain.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, and I mean, there’s there’s no doubt that it is a part of the process. And I went through the same thing where I mean, you and I actually didn’t even work together that long because you had gone to another place within like maybe a year or so, but you and I were usually the ones that were there until 12 a.m1. a.m. Like I just lived at the office and absolutely loved it. But I was 20-two years old and I was learning and I was just building a reputation and trying to prove myself. And I would be like, oh well, it’s it’s only 11 o’clock at night. I want to learn this new trick in After Effects. And I would come down to you and be like, “How do you do this? Like, you know, what’s this and that? Like, I was just geeking out on all that stuff, and then all of a sudden you have kids, and you don’t care about anything but sleep. It’s like I just want sleep. I just want to find out how to get more sleep. Like, how do I do it? And that’s when you really start to realize that, like youth, that sleep is important. I will go to the next level and say. Sleep is the most important thing you can do to hack your performance, whether it’s mental performance, physical performance. If you’ve got your diet dialed in, and your fitness dialed in, and your time management dialed in, but you’re not sleeping, you are just wasting all of your time on everything else. And sleep and recovery are so key. So I think that’s a huge takeaway. That for me, I didn’t really start to nail all of these things until I started figuring out how do I actually get good quality sleep, you know, and that was such a huge, huge thing for me. So if we go back to when, like you’re saying, all right, well, I get up at four, 430 in the morning and I do two hours of cycling and I start my day. I already know that the vast majority of people are saying, oh well, then I can’t do this. Like that’s never going to happen. So I’m assuming that that isn’t just something that you always did, and you woke up at 4:30 and then watched TV for two hours and went on Facebook. You probably started waking up earlier to make that room. So what kind of when you said that you manage your time more efficiently? I’m a total productivity geek as far as finding ways to manage time and make sure that you’re the most efficient possible. I know that you’re very similar to me, where you’re very systematic, and you figure out ways to to do things as a system. Yeah, here’s my here’s
Jim Read: My main motivating factor. I’m lazy, so I want to do the thing that I don’t like as efficiently as possible, and I’m maybe a little nuts about this. I mean, even like you know, load loading the dishwasher. The pattern that I load the dishwasher, I want to do it the fastest way possible. May not be the best way, but it’ll be the fastest way. Same thing with you know, loading the grocery bags. I love I love bagging groceries. Why? Because it’s like to me, it’s like three dimensional Tetris. I want to fit it in four bags. I want to distribute the densities exactly right quickly. I want to get my groceries in four bags, double bag it, and have them full so I’m being as you know as least wasteful as possible. Yeah, I mean I make all these little these little games out of it in terms of the efficiency, but mostly so I have the time to do the kinds of things that I like. Yeah, I mean, I think I think it’s kind of fun to make give myself these challenges, these time efficiency challenges. It makes it like a game, and for me, that that you know kind of that approach by gamifying, maybe because I grew up with two two brothers and we were always competitive and played a lot of video games, for me that that helps.
Zack Arnold: It’s so funny that you brought up the dishwashing thing. I don’t remember when this was. It was maybe a couple years ago, but you put a picture on Facebook that was a diagram of the most efficient way to fill a dishwasher. And I didn’t I didn’t actually type this, but I would have just put it in the comments field. I love you, Jim Read, because you are so a man after my own heart. Where my wife is the polar opposite of me, she has no ability with spatial relations whatsoever, and I love her to death. But I’ll open the dishwasher and I just hang my head. I’m like, oh my god, I can’t deal with this, right? Because I’m really OCD about how things are organized. Like I grew up on Tetris. It’s all I did for like a decade was play Tetris. So that’s just the way my brain works. And I actually think it’s a real reason why I’m very good at what I do for a living. Because I just play Tetris for a living in front of a timeline in Abbott. Like that’s all I do is play Tetris. But it’s so funny because I still think about that picture that you posted about here’s how to load a dishwasher, and I’m like, oh, that’s so cool. Somebody else gets me, you know.
Jim Read: Yeah, it’s pretty. It’s pretty funny. And and to circle it back to the sleep thing, you know, everybody has different requirements. And you know, I when I’m training, I’m getting up between four and 530 in the morning. It’s not immediately easy to get up that early. There’s a way to do it if you want to, and and the other you know the flip side to that is everybody’s different. So if if if you’re more of a I’m more of a morning person. I’m going to do better in the morning. I just know that about myself. If you’re more of a night person, then work with it. So I think the reason why I’ve I’ve been able to maintain some success with all this stuff is I realize my own limitations and then work with them rather than against them because if you try and fight yourself on some like you know if I try and do my workouts at night it’s just not going to work out very well for me you know what happens to me is I go work out and then I’m stoked. I’m jazzed. I’m all pumped up. You know the endorphins are going, and then I can’t get to sleep. And then I get up later and then I feel like crap. And you know so for me that just doesn’t work. So if if I know I need to get up early, I try and get to bed. You know at a reasonable hour and just do it slowly. So you know, I might just get up a little bit earlier each day. You know, 15 minutes earlier. You know, not by that much, because what what can happen is if you if you try and do too much, then you know you might not be able to do the four a.m. thing right away. But eventually, you know. If you do it for a couple weeks, you’re gonna be on that schedule. And here’s the amazing thing: if you go and work out really hard, you’re gonna be tired. You’re gonna be tired at night, no matter what. If you you know you you put your time in, I used to have a lot of sleeping problems too. I know you mentioned that, and the easy solution was exercise. You know, if you work hard, even for just an hour, if you work really hard. So you know, if I only have a short amount of time, I’ll dial up the intensity. If I only know I have an hour, I’ll I’ll go pretty hard, and you know, I’m able to kind of maintain that that sleep schedule and get up that early. You know, if I’ve had a couple of weeks to adjust, then you don’t even need an alarm anymore. You just start waking up.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, and that’s the experience that I’ve had where I’ve never been a morning person. I grew up on a farm, and growing up on a farm and not being a morning person is just like the worst hell on earth because everything on a farm starts at four and five a.m. and you wake up and you take care of the animals.
Jim Read: Zack, Zack, I think the universe is telling you something. You’re an editor,
Zack Arnold: Right? So yeah, I just it was it was the worst experience ever, and it took me years to figure out how do I actually get up in the morning. And obviously, when you have kids, that’s just like you have no choice because they’re going to wake up whenever they wake up, and it was like three or four years of just the worst hell trying to figure out how do I function when I have to be waking up at five and six in the morning with the kids, and it wasn’t working. And what I discovered was that I have to stop worrying about the amount of sleep. And let me just preface this by saying the amount of sleep you get is incredibly important. But I was at a point where I was saying I know for this period of time when my kids are babies, I’m just not going to get eight hours. It’s never going to happen. So I just need to accept that and know that I have to improve the quality of my sleep. And I started learning all these different little changes you can make. Because if you’re just thinking, well, I just need to wake up earlier, it’s never going to work. Willpower is very finite and a very weak thing that you have, but if you develop systems and strategies, that’s when you can start to actually become more of a morning person. And now I’m up like a bullet at about six a.m. in the morning, which has never been me my entire life. So it’s not like my natural circadian rhythm. And some of the really really simple hacks that I can give people that don’t cost any money and are just part of my daily routine are number one. I make sure that for at least 30 minutes to an hour before I know my head’s going to hit the pillow, I have no screens in front of me, and I don’t have any full spectrum lights. Meaning, I don’t have lights on in the house. All I’m using are red lights. I’ve replaced all the the light bulbs, like in my office, with red light bulbs. Where at night my room is just red because I’m not exposing myself to the blue spectrum of light, which will reset your circadian rhythms. Another thing that I do, I do this every morning and every night now, is I just take a cold shower, which means I don’t even turn the hot on at all. I just turn on the cold water and get under it, and that is an amazing, amazing way to just lower your core body temperature. And by the time you hit the pillow, you don’t even remember that you hit the pillow. You wake up seven hours later, and you’re like, “Oh, whoa, wait a second! I feel refreshed. And that cold water helps a lot. And the third thing that I do, pretty much without fail, no matter what time I go to bed, even if I’m working until two in the morning because I have no choice and I’m under deadline, is I will do a meditation practice for 15 or 20 minutes, or a yoga practice right before bed that slows me down. It slows down my thoughts, and by the time I’m ready to go to the bed, I essentially sleepwalk from the area where I do this to my bed. And most times when I wake up in the morning, I don’t even remember that I walked to my bed. And there will be times where I’m so deep in this state where I will actually fall asleep doing this, and then I’ll wake up in the room at like two in the morning and be like, oh my god, I didn’t even walk to bed, right? But I get full, complete sleep cycles, and I actually have an app on my phone called Sleep Cycle Alarm Clock that you just put under your pillow. I put my phone in airplane mode, which is another huge hack, is you don’t want your phone charging next to you with all of the EMFs going right next to your brain because that screws up your sleep cycle as well. So I look at my sleep score and say, well, this is how many times I moved. This is where I got into a deep sleep cycle.
Zack Arnold: I was in a shallow sleep cycle here, and how can I just change and tweak my routine? And then the one of the other big things that I do that again is also free. So I’ve developed a system where I take like 15 to 20 minutes at night and look at what are all the things I need to do the next day. Right, so I already know when I wake up. Here’s what I’m doing. So I’m never thinking, oh my god, what do I have to do tomorrow? Have I done this yet? Have I taken care of this? I have no worries because I’ve either completed all of my actions by the end of that day, or if I haven’t, I’ve sat down for 15 minutes and strategized and said, “All right, well, what am I going to do when I wake up? What am I going to do when I get to work? Then I don’t have to think about anything, so I sleep like a rock. And my wife is like, “Did you know our daughter woke up three times last night and wet the bed?” Nope, I had no idea, but I’m out like a rocket at six or 630 in the morning because I have all these things that are improving the depth of my sleep. So those are some really simple ways to just, like you said, you you have to build that momentum, and sometimes it’s this vicious cycle where you say, “Well, exercise is the best hack on the planet for sleep, but I need to get sleep to have the energy to exercise, so I’m just going to give up, and I don’t know where to start. But if you can do some of these simple things, and all of a sudden you wake up with energy, now you’re like, oh, maybe I do have some time to go take a walk, or maybe I’ll take a jog, or take a spinning class, and then all of a sudden you really experience the deep sleep that you get when you do intense exercise, and that is the best feeling on the planet.
Jim Read: Oh yeah, it’s great when you know your head hits the pillow after after a long hard day, and and you’re zonked until the moment you wake up, and you get that really deep quality sleep. It’s it’s it’s just so so important for so many reasons, you know, for for a lot of our our bodily systems, and you know, for many years, you know, it then start like once you start getting that quality sleep. What I noticed is, wow, for the last 10 years, I have not slept at all. My sleep quality has been terrible, and yeah, you just, you just, you know, you’re able to maintain that momentum throughout the day, you just feel better. You feel better when you when you wake up, and that all makes it easier to to get up and get out there, and then you know make it through the day and kick ass, and then have some time to hang with the family. Absolutely,
Zack Arnold: Exactly. And whenever people say, “Oh yeah, I heard you’re into productivity and all this other stuff. Like, what’s what’s the the number one tip? What’s the best tip? And they’re thinking it’s like, oh, well, use this app or use the Pomodoro technique or here’s Evernote or whatever it is, and like learn how to sleep because once you learn how to sleep, all the dominoes start to fall into place. But if you’re trying to figure out these little tiny tactics in this app and that app and whatever it is, but if you haven’t figured out sleep yet, nothing’s really going to fall into place. And that was the magic pill for me. And there are things that you can spend money on that are going to improve the quality of your sleep. But for the most part, it’s just implementing these really simple, common practices and routines, all of which are free. So if you’re thinking, I just want one simple place to start. Just focus on getting better sleep, and once you do that, then you can start to stack on top of that and do more things that are going to help your productivity, help your time management, give you more energy. Then you’re going to, like you said, build that momentum and that motivation to start eating better, to start exercising. So that, to me, is really kind of the number one place to start. So I’m glad that that ended up coming up because I wasn’t even thinking we were going to talk about that today. But that I think that’s a that’s a really really great point to make.
Jim Read: So it’s not all good news though. So here’s the the dark side to being very competitive and falling in love with cycling is I had to, you know, make my way up the ranks of amateur cycling and compete against guys who have been cycling their entire lives and are animals, and you know, maybe retired or spend the winter in Arizona training or do fancy, amazing training camps in Italy. I don’t get to do any of that. So where I’m at right now with my racing is I’m competing at the masters level against these guys who are just animals, and I’m getting my ass handed to me. So you know we’ll be adjusting some training and maybe some results expectations. But along with that, I’ve also suffered some pretty terrible injuries, and you know, again, you know, it’s it’s it’s great. I think that I’ve found something that I love and have kept the weight off, and this has gotten me into into a pretty good routine. But I’ve I’ve now had a a broken clavicle and surgery to repair that with a titanium plate. I then rebroke that same clavicle and basically destroyed everything in my shoulder and had to have that rebuilt. And I am, as we speak, nursing a broken hand. Though in contrast to the other injuries, the broken hand’s like nothing. I broke my hand on a mountain bike training ride. Got home, went upstairs, apologized to my wife. I was like, “Look, I’m gonna make breakfast for you guys, and then I gotta drive myself to the hospital because I just broke my hand. And she’s like, “Oh man, come on!
Zack Arnold: Yeah, and I’ve I’ve seen all the pictures on Facebook to prove it, which is part of the reason I was so excited about this call because, like I said, Renaissance man slash badass, and you just you keep going through. You do the cycling, then all of a sudden on Facebook, hey, here’s me in traction, or hey, here’s my new cast for the day. It’s like, oh, okay,
Jim Read: Yeah, and you know the injuries are really tough. You know, you have to you have to take a break. You have to let your body heal. And you know the pain and the pain management. I will say this: I was not prepared for the pain and the recovery time that a broken clavicle involves. You know when you have to have surgical repair. And you know I’m not a huge fan of of surgeries. In fact, this latest injury, the the hand injury, the the broken hand, you know, I my doctor offered to fix it surgically, and I was like, no, no, we’re not, we’re not going to do that. So what can we do? And we literally did nothing. And guess what? Bones healed should justify by themselves sometimes under the right circumstances. Work with your doctor if you have an injury, but yeah, when you have surgery, it’s a really big deal. It takes a long time to heal, and the pain and the pain management can be really terrible. Along with that, you know, your sleep is going to get disrupted. I can only sleep on my right side now, probably forever. You know, my left shoulder is just so jacked up. That’s you know created some interesting challenges in in trying to get quality sleep, and then that you know the pain meds that are just so easy to get and so dangerous. You know, I was lucky. I had a you know I had them for my procedures to help manage the pain, and they did work, and it was easy enough for me to get off of them, but you know I have a lot of friends who you know developed really serious drug addictions out of you know pain medication for things that were really necessary. You know it’s it’s sketchy, man, really sketchy. So I do nothing now, but you know, pain management is nothing. I, I don’t do. I don’t even do ibuprofen anymore. You know, as you know, some of my research had turned up that it could interfere with bone mending, and so it’s just nothing. Just you know, maybe a little meditation, right? And that’s it.
Zack Arnold: It’s all part of the journey, and I mean, I’ve I haven’t experienced quite the the severity of the injuries that you have, but I know I’ve experienced my share of them through doing Spartan races or doing the martial arts that I’ve done. And I wouldn’t trade any of it for the world or change any of it. I’m guessing you’d probably say just about the same thing. So,
Jim Read: Yeah, I mean, I I’m definitely adjusting the kinds of races that I’m doing and not being as aggressive as I was when I, you know, started this renaissance in cycling. You know, there are races called criteriums, really dangerous, really fast in urban environments. Four corners, short course, and very very competitive, and you have people who are who want to win, and they will put themselves into very dangerous positions. So you know, I’m learning how to avoid those kinds of races and still feel physically challenged and be safe. You know that’s important because you know when I when I suffer these injuries, it’s not just me that suffers. It’s it’s the family and work and it’s a big deal. So you know we’re still figuring that one out.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, well it’s it’s always an endless process of experimentation and finding the balance and I think there’s a lot of really good motivational stuff in this show and steps that people can take. But just hearing that it can be done with people that have our schedules and work in our industry, I think is really, really inspirational. So I’m really, really glad that we were able to have this conversation and finally catch up. If people want to see an example of some of the work that you’ve done or your story. Where can we send people? Like, what’s what’s a good website for them to start with?
Jim Read: Sure, I have a website, Jim-Read.com, and that’s Read R E A D. You know, and that’s where I’ve collected a portfolio of work that I’ve done over the ages. And yeah, you can check out some of the work there. And if you are on Strava, you can find me and follow me.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, and if if anybody goes to that site, they’re going to see some bad ass work because you do just some of the the most top notch graphic work that I’ve seen in the industry. And having said that, 15 years ago, that meant nothing, and I didn’t realize just the the quality of work that you brought to something. But now that I’ve been in the industry for 15 years, like you you do like top notch stuff. So if anybody here is a designer and they don’t give two craps about cycling, but they want to see some good design work, go to this site.
Jim Read: Thanks, man.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, absolutely. So thank you so much for being on the show. I’m glad that we were able to catch up, and hopefully we can inspire a few people to to take some some steps towards better health. You bet. Thanks for having me on.
Episode Credits
This episode was edited by Curtis Fritsch, the show notes were written by Natalie Boschan, and this show is executive produced by Kanen Flowers. We are a member of the THAT STUDIO podcast network.
The music in the opening and closing of the show is courtesy of Dorian Cheah from his brilliant album ARA.