Assessment:
RAYNAUDS SYNDROME (primary encounter diagnosis)
Mike E Jacoubowsky is a very pleasant 67 Y male presenting for evaluation and management of raynaud’s syndrome.

That’s in the after-visit notes from my video doctor visit this afternoon, dealing with my Raynauds (my circulation issue where my fingers turn white and icy). Leaves me wondering how honest they might be with an antagonistic patient. My guess is that the scale starts at mentioning nothing at all (which would actually indicate someone you’d rather not deal with) and then at the top of the range, wonderful superlatives and perhaps a mention that the doctor is looking forward to their next visit. I’m good with “Very pleasant 67 & male” though.

Regarding this morning’s ride, well, it was definitely one to challenge someone with circulation issues! This is mid-April, right? That’s what the calendar says. So should it really be dropping into the mid-30s on Skyline? Any answer other than a solid no is not acceptable. Fortunately it wasn’t that bad starting up Kings, and even more fortunately, I decided to attack the climb differently, hoping that maybe I could improve my time. And attacking it differently meant… not attacking. Taking that first steep part more easily instead of quickly getting out of breath and not recovering.

It really did work. I would have had a pretty decent time to the Park entrance, if not for that new one lane piece with stop signs at each end, and me, being a nice guy, letting two cars go through that were coming down, not just the one. I’ll have to check out Strava to see how much time I was actually stopped, but it was definitely more than enough to have gotten me a 33-something time (I ended up with 34:04 I think?).

At one point, prior to the archery range, I even managed to put a gap on Kevin, but it wasn’t intentional and it didn’t last.

As has been the case with most Tuesday/Thursday-morning rides lately, we’ve been looping back to Kings, shortening the ride a fair amount, since we can run into issues getting back in time (to open the shop) if we’re caught at the Old LaHonda light for a long time (it can be up to 8 minutes, and the “window” for letting cars up or down is only about a minute long). So we’re making a u-turn on Skyline at the Skegg’s parking lot and then doing a loop of Swett and the upper part of Tunitas.