After a week holed up in the basement successfully, but miserably, “running” on the treadmill, I finally made it out for a ride on dirt roads on Saturday. Woot.
Posts Tagged → journal-ish
Dirt Day II
Very fortunate to get out for another 2.5 hours on the bike today with very little pain. It’s been a pretty awesome weekend of riding after the long layoff. I’ll take it. However, between riding and the time I spent watching the U.S. NEARLY escape the “Group of Death” in the World Cup, I am out of time for blogging. Time for bed. So I will just post up some pics from today’s dirt road ride below…
Less Pain, Not Pain Free
I recently spent ten days off the bike… TEN DAYS!! Possibly the longest I have been off the bike in nearly twenty years. Some of that time off was an attempt to rest my lower back–which has been a making riding less than fun for the past month or so–and parts were due to bad luck with weather, spending time with my family unit away from home at B-Man’s soccer tournament and occasionally just not giving a shit about riding my bike. However, my back finally started to ease up a bit and I finally started to give a shit again, so I rode. It was swell.
The Off Days
Today (Monday) marks my sixth consecutive day completely off of the bike. No short spins, no trainer rides, no wide seated stationary gym bikes, nothing. And I am sort of OK with it.
Random Rides In Pictures
The past few days have been filled with random rides that featured varying degrees of misfortunes, aches, issues and minor successes, like forgetting to charge my Garmin 500 for weeks and having it die before I even made it to the dirt roads on Friday. If you do a ride and there’s nothing to record it, did it really happen? I’m joking of course, and in my case my ride, the stats are best left unknown.
A Fooled Fool
My ride plan today included a 45 mile road ride. Mother Nature’s supposed weather plans had me alter that to 25 and some core work on the big physio ball of pain and some mid-evil stretching exercises.
Better Than It Could Have Been
Today, the wind was gusting hard and at times sounded like a freight train roaring past the house… it was the perfect day to seek refuge in the woods.
Being Stupid
As any reader of this blog knows, I am not a smart man. Intelligence is a rare commodity betweenst my ears and I did nothing this weekend to prove any different.
Scales
Yesterday (on the road for 41 miles), and today on the trail, was all about the scale. No, not the scale that tells me that I’ve gained 40 pounds since 2005 when I started this blog, fancied myself an endurance mountain bike racer who eventually realized he just likes to ride his bike on trails, gravel and roads, drink beer, eat good food and sometimes race, but the pain scale. I have to say, that even though I don’t like pain, I like this scale way more than that fucking, lying piece of shit in my bathroom… Forty pounds my ass!
This week has been made up of the following: riding, bitching, moaning, hate, expanding my liver, stretching, core work, ice therapy (to that area that makes up the gulf betweenst my two giant love handles) and adjustments to my riding position. Right now, things are going pretty darn, not bad. In fact, today I completed my normal 16 mile loop and on a pain scale of 1 to 10 I think it was merely a 4… maybe even a 3. Woot!
To go back a smidge, I got out yesterday on the road bike. I felt like shit… I felt great… I felt like shit… I felt great. Grrrr…
While I didn’t feel great over the entire 41 miles of crap Michigan roads, I felt well enough that I didn’t want to sell all my bikes and take up drinking and masturbation as my “go-to” hobbies (they will remain in the 2 and 3 slots).
And I as I said above, today’s slow/quick lap felt pretty OK… ish.
Later…. I have a couple other hobbies to take care of.
Getting Closer
Back be damned! Back also be rubbed, iced, heated, stretched, rolled, medicated, electronically stimulated and cussed to hell. Things are slowly getting better in the back department, at least on the bike.