All posts by Mike

Still riding, need to keep writing

Personal stuff, Tues/Thurs 7:45am ride

It’s important to keep routines going when things come into your life you can’t control, like my wife’s cancer. The inability to control outcome is one thing; the process, yet another. It’s been determined that surgery to remove the one pretty small tumor in her lung makes sense, because there’s no evidence of the cancer anywhere else. But it’s been 5 days since we spoke with the Thoracic Surgeon and we still don’t have a date for the surgery or even the heart echo testing that needs to be done first. And every day that thing is still in there, is one more day it’s got to spread somewhere else. But wait, there’s more. Kaiser is set for a 3 day strike October 4th-6th, which is probably throwing a wrench into their scheduling. And my sense, is that Karen’s surgery is for something life-threatening and should be put ahead of most others. That’s a more self-centered, selfish way of looking at things than I am normally comfortable with. But that’s where we are, waiting.

Meantime, it’s good to be doing the full Tuesday/Thursday morning route, regardless of how slow I’ve been climbing Kings lately. Back in the day, we’d return from the ride somewhere between 9:18 and 9:22; these days a “good” ride has me back at the start by 9:30 and sometimes as late as 9:37. Once I get up on Skyline I’m ok, and by the time we get to West Old LaHonda, I can ride at a pace where it’s not completely obvious that others are having to wait for me.

They say that one of the signs of depression is not being able to look forward to fun things in the future. By that definition, I’m doing pretty well, because not only am I looking forward to going to France, again, for the Tour, but Facebook has been sending me all these cool posts from people doing the Stelvio in Italy, and that’s something I just have to work into my plans. And I’m looking forward to taking my wife on the cruise from Hong Kong to Singapore and have even planned a “perfect day” in Singapore, a day prior to embarking on the cruise.

If only we could speed up the process of getting that tumor removed from my wife’s lung. That will make everything seem better.

Where did King Kong go?

Ride reports (not Tu/Th)

Don’t know how many times I’ve been down the road shown above, but it’s a lot. Started back in the early 70s, and the road was memorable because someone had painted gigantic footprints on alternating sides. If I recall correctly, they weren’t there at the beginning (of my riding that road),but appeared shortly after.

They remained in place for years. Must have been a very well-built road, to not need resurfacing (which would have eliminated the painted feet) for so long. They were there long enough to register with me in a very permanent way, so permanent that 50 years after I first came across them, I still look for them, I still imagine that I’m seeing some remnant of the huge white painted feet.

I’ve searched the ‘net for pictures of those feet, or a story referencing them, but nothing. It was 50 years ago. It probably did appear as a story in the Palo Alto Times (back when newspapers were a big thing), but it doesn’t appear easy to access archived records on-line.

It’s funny, the nature of things you never forget, and imagine them today just as they were then. And interesting that something of such apparent important to me, didn’t leave much of a mark on anybody else, at least not enough to reference it on-line.

Today’s ride… not much. Kevin was having issues that you’d associate with a bad cold so anything long and challenging was out of the question. It was surprising even to get him on the bike in the first place! Wouldn’t have been a good thing having to descend any big hills anyway, as my rear wheel needs some work and doesn’t coast well right now. So an easy and very very slow ride to Los Altos, stopping at Peet’s for the usual before heading back.

And funny thing about the way back. In a pretty short period of time, shortly after leaving Peet’s, the ride went from “ugh” (and an implied, “Why am I riding at all if I feel this bad?”) to really feeling good about being out on a bike. For Kevin, it is frustrating how often this happens. And he hates it.