Category Archives: Tues/Thurs 7:45am ride

Endless ramblings regarding the every Tuesday & Thursday-morning bike ride, leaving Olive Hill & Canada Road at 7:45am, rain or shine

Surprisingly, able to ride hard enough my legs are a bit sore. A good thing!

Tues/Thurs 7:45am ride

I wasn’t sure what it was going to be like, getting back on the bike for my first ride in, what, almost three weeks? That two-week vacation started on a Sunday, so missed a “good” ride (Sunday rides are longer and usually more challenging than the regular Tuesday/Thursday-morning rides), so my final ride pre-vacation was on a Thursday, and when I got back, late Monday, I was out on the “regular” ride the next morning, jet-lag & all.

While off the bike, I wasn’t looking forward to getting back on it, approaching it with some degree of fear & trepidation. How much weight would I have gained (A lot; I left at 161 pounds and came back at 169) and how long would it take to lose it (not too long; I typically lose the gained weight almost as fast as I gained it). Would I willingly head out into the cold? How slow would I be? Would it be a matter of just surviving the ride?

That first ride back, a few days ago, was much nicer than I thought it would be. Ex-Pilot showed up and the ride over Jefferson to the start seemed surprisingly normal (even though my Garmin reassured me that my fitness was at negative 8, lowest I’d ever seen) and I was seeing pretty normal power numbers. The ride up Kings was slow but not dreadful, never that feeling of why am I doing this, why not turn back and do something more practical. It’s possible the number of stairs my wife and I had to ascend and descend helped maintain some level of fitness (so I could have been even worse than negative 8?).

The temps were cool but not cold, getting down to 49F I think? And dry, 100% dry. Had it been wet, I might have likely gotten on the trainer, or perhaps nothing at all. Thank goodness for the unusual completely dry spell Northern California is seeing right now.

Kevin (ex-pilot) had to get back early so we didn’t do the full version of the ride, choosing instead to loop back from the Skegg’s parking lot and do the Swett/Tunitas loop and then back down Kings. It was enough that my legs started feeling a bit sore later in the day, and the next, and even through Thursday morning. That was a surprise, a surprise that I was able to ride hard enough to make my legs sore. That’s hope!

Thursday ex-Pilot showed up again and this time we did the full ride, including West Old LaHonda. Beautiful up on top, hitting 60F, 10 degrees warmer than down below! Completely clear at the coast. Only negative is a LOT of road construction right now, including the descent from Sky Londa into Woodside, where you head around a corner and BOOM there’s the guy with the stop sign and the construction work. When you encounter something like that, assuming you were able to stop in time and not hit the car that suddenly presented itself in front of you as you rounded that corner, very good idea to pull off to the side of the road. Why? Because you want to be a witness to the car coming up from behind, skidding into the stopped car in front… not part of a car/bike/car sandwich.

So I’m far more resilient than I’d thought, and at times during the ride I was even thinking that my year of turning 68 wasn’t all that bad. My loss of power, ability to climb, wasn’t nearly as bad as the year I turned 67. Or, perhaps I’ve just come to terms with it and not being so hard on myself. Don’t think that’s really it though; I did much better this past July, in France, than I thought I would.

Having said all that, I’d trade away my relative strength and durability for better health for my wife in an instant. Very relieved that she goes back on her Immunotherapy/Chemo treatments today.

Feel like I could be riding faster!

Personal stuff, Tues/Thurs 7:45am ride

It’s getting a bit frustrating; for the first time in ages, I’ve been feeling like I’ve got the ability to push harder on the climbs, air it out a bit, but it wouldn’t be kind to put any distance between myself and people I ride with who normally would leave me in the dust on a longer climb. I can’t maintain a hard pace for a long time, since I run out of air (maybe, finally, getting that looked into mid-December), but the legs do feel like they want to go. But ex-pilot, who’s retired (and thus “ex”-pilot), has been putting in daily rides and is sometimes a bit run down on Tuesday & Thursday-mornings.

I was telling Kevin )ex-pilot) on this morning’s ride how I had been thinking, been a bit concerned really, that the 2024 trip to France might have been the last, because I was running out of what it takes to get up the big climbs. But that’s not how it played out. We had a few challenging rides and I held up fine, even on the ultra-gnarly Col de la Bonette.

Of course, any sense of progress comes crashing to a halt shortly, when I’m off the bike for 2+ weeks, on vacation with Karen (my wife), a non-cycling vacation traveling to Amsterdam for a day, then train to Paris (was supposed to be for two days but there’s a just-announced train strike that requires we move things forward a day) and then a 9 day cruise ending in Barcelona. This is a trip that didn’t seem all that likely to happen at the time I put things together, as we just didn’t have a good feeling about where Karen’s Stage IV cancer was going to go. I booked it about as late as I could (August, for a mid-November cruise… people typically book their cruises about a year ahead of time, sometimes more!) and navigated the myriad of rules regarding travel insurance that might apply, and not, based on Karen’s cancer. But now, just 9 days away from flying to Amsterdam, things are looking really good. Karen had a Cat Scan last week that showed no progression, and it was read by the amazing interventional pulmonologist (who saved her life last January) who concurred that her lungs were looking good and there was no need for him to perform another clean-up of her airways.

Staying on the cancer stuff, it’s tough interrupting treatment that has clearly kept her alive. You worry about what’s going to happen without treatment for a month. You try to rationalize things, as in, maybe the body needs a break from toxic chemical so it can endure another year of treatment. We’re literally praying that’s the case; we don’t want to go into the next scan and see things not-so-good and be thinking we shouldn’t have gone on vacation!