After just two lumbers and 12.21 miles, I have had my best week of hiking in roughly 3 weeks. That is no reflection on how good this week is going but more on how freaking bad the previous three have been.
The snow that we got Sunday night into Monday was completely gone by Tuesday morning, and the woods were back to their pre-spring meets rotting garbage palette of browns, blacks, tans, and greys.
I am quite used to dealing with large gaps for such things as my résumé, my memory, and the distance between pants buttons and their holes, but in my “fitness” calendar, not so much.
I know, the sentence above makes it sound like I am some whispy fitness junkie who has 2% body fat, runs like a gazelle, and eats like a bird. But as we all know, or should know, I fill my calendar with lumbers, snowshoes, hikes, walks, runs, and rides as much as I can to make up for the fact that I am a 53-year-old man who loves to cook, drink IPAs, and works like a dog just to limit my pounds overweight to 50 and to keep my mind centered and in the present rather than racing with self-loathing, doubt, depression, and anxiety.
I can’t even wrap my head around the fact that at this time last week, I was en route from Michigan to my late father’s house in Pennsylvania to help my family clean out and dumpster the plethora of junk in it. Since then, I’ve come back to Michigan on Monday, found out my mother-in-law passed away that evening, returned to Pennsylvania on Thursday for the service, and BACK to Michigan on Friday.
The rollercoaster of emotions between two different family deaths and miles traveled has me feeling like I’ve lived five different years in one week.
Part I Things Got Worser
After nearly 20 years of writing this bullshit, I still don’t consider myself a writer. Mostly because I have zero formal training as one, and often, my posts are an unintelligible scrambled mess of thoughts. So, to say I have “writer’s block” sounds stupid, but I really have been at a loss for words this week, and I have tried writing this post about 4 times. Mostly because the past week has been a whirlwind of travel and, unfortunately, more sadness.
I skipped a lumber on Wednesday due to heavy rain on potentially still icy trails. I should have got on the magic Whoosh machine in the basement, but alas, I did not, ’cause fatty gotta fat.
In the summers of 1999 through 2004,1 Wifey and I would drive from Pittsburgh to Colorado to ride bikes, hike, and goof off in the most amazing mountains my untraveled eyes had ever seen; the Rocky Mountains. It was quite the adventure for two Western Pennsylvania flatlanders who, during most of that time, lived in an apartment in what I think qualified as “the city,” given our proximity to traffic, tall buildings, and the sounds of nighttime gunshots.
After I got home from running some errands last Friday, I shut the garage door and didn’t leave the house again until 7:40 AM on Monday.
I have little desire to go out of the house if it’s not a hike, groceries, or beer shopping. I have little need for the American public, and the American public has little need for me. It’s your classic win-win sitch between a couple of assholes.
With temps already in the high 20s and an expected daytime high in the mid-40s, I knew trail conditions could be “iffy” on Friday morning, but with three good trainer rides already in my meatsticks this week, I really wanted to get outside for some miles in my feetz and hopefully some images on my SD card.
Over the past couple of years, I have had a couple posts about rabbits.
There was the time I accidentally hit one with my car as I drove to the trails to lumber and, ironically, attempt to take photos of wildlife. That one hit hard.
Then, last summer, there were three baby bunnies, alone, snuggled up in a small hole in the backyard, that I had to safely remove before mowing the grass and then saw them reunite with Mama Bunny before bed that night.
Now I have another one.
I know it’s hard to tell, but sometimes I do actually know a thing or two. Mostly just one thing, but still.
So, I admit, I took some pleasure in that one thing I know, being that the trails would be shit on Monday and Tuesday; thus, me stuffing myself into an ancient bike kit (the one that still actually fits) and riding the trainer two days in a row.
