All posts by Mike

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas…

Tues/Thurs 7:45am ride
Heading down 84 into Woodside on a foggy almost-winter day. Check out the Christmas Tree on the right.

I wasn’t sure how I was going to feel this morning. I had a pretty good idea I’d be feeling better than Tuesday-morning’s first ride back from Morocco though. And heading up the hill from my house, that feeling seemed vindicated. Sometimes that first 30 seconds heading up, well, your legs just feel heavy and you’re thinking yeah, it’s going to get better, it has to get better. Today was one of those morning where it felt good right from the start. A rare thing, that. Something that can’t be explained but you’re happy for.

No Kevin this morning; the kid (26) was having a colonoscopy. Ouch. At 26? Thankfully the results came back tonight and turns out just an “irritated rectum.” Um, OK. But Karen showed up for the very-foggy ride. Nobody else out there. Tuesday it was a slow 36 minutes up Kings the normal route; today it was 3 minutes faster on the tougher through-the-park version. For a cold foggy day in December, that didn’t seem too bad. Was even able to engage in short conversations.

Today’s view on West Old LaHonda

We climbed up past the fog maybe half-way up, and it was still waiting for me, actually worse, on my return home. I did manage to get a nice shot of the Christmas Tree someone set up on the 84 descent though, just before dropping back into the fog. Also made an unscheduled stop on West Old LaHonda for a huge owl that flew across the road in front of me and perched in a nearby tree; unfortunately, the only picture I got has him turned the wrong direction.

The nicest thing about the ride was that I was able to feel something in my legs for the first time in a while. Pain. Normally I’m so nastily breathing-limited in my capabilities, my legs rarely feel that bad. Today, seemed like a better balance. Life is good again.

We’re back (Not sure what kicked us off-line)

Personal stuff, Tues/Thurs 7:45am ride

What a mess. I missed a ton of entries while playing around in Morocco for two weeks with my wife, then I come back, FINALLY get on a bike again, and BAM, I’m off-line. Our webhost, Lunarpages, deactivated my account for a few days without warning and seemingly without reason. This sort of thing nearly always relates to missed payments, but that didn’t seem to be an issue here. It’s set on auto-pay and should never have gotten behind. Well, whatever, we’re back now.

I’ll try to formally post Tuesday’s first ride back but probably won’t get to it so what the heck. Here it is. Got home around 6pm Monday night, totally out of whack because, as usual, I couldn’t sleep on a plane. Should have been able to, because we’d been able to snag biz class seats, but the plane was too danged hot! Whatever, got a few hours sleep before getting up to ride. I didn’t feel tired per se, just sleepy, if that makes sense.

Click on the photo for the larger version and check out the bike she’s riding up Kings!
Just myself and Kevin (kid) on the ride, maybe because it was cold? Strange thing that we saw nobody out on Canada. No riders returning from the “morning” ride. But climbing Kings was another thing entirely. Got passed by two people we didn’t know, and then, about halfway up, saw someone ahead that we weren’t sure we would catch. Closing speed was really slow. Eventually the gap came down. Oh. My. Talk about depressing. A younger lady on a klunky cheap mountain bike with a monstrous seat and wearing tennis shoes. Wow. I mean, depressing for us, but impressive as heck for what she was doing, and told her so as we finally passed. A little further up we came across someone riding with her, a guy on a much lighter road bike.

It wasn’t a fast ride up Kings at 36 minutes but it felt… OK. And right now, two weeks off the bike, OK is just fine. We’ll see how it goes tomorrow morning.