Power. Data. Just knowing where you are.

For the past 10 days, I’ve not had accurate power on my bike. The power meter on my right side went out, leaving just the left. My computer isn’t smart enough to figure out that it’s only getting power from just one side and doubling it, approximating (very closely) the total power I’m delivering to the pedals. But no, it shows only the one side. Instead of saying 190 watts, it shows 95. Can I figure it out in my head? Sure. But it also gets downloaded to Strava, to Garmin Connect, and a whole lot of training information, that tells me what shape I’m in, as estimate for VO2 max (which is very important to me, since it shows my relative shape today vs last week vs last year and a sense of where I’m heading tomorrow)… lots of things.

And those “lots of things” can’t be manually reconfigured to account for the fact my power is being recorded at 50% of what it actually is.

You’d think this wouldn’t be a big deal. You’d think I could just enjoy riding my bike, not knowing what power I’m producing, maybe using my heart rate to judge effort. But everything’s connected; the goal is to deliver the most watts with the lowest heart rate… that’s being efficient. And I can’t see that. The goal is to see my VO2 max not decline, if possible. It had been at 46, and now, with the erroneous new data, it’s down to 45. I started blood pressure meds a month ago and wanted to see what affect it was having… before the power went out, things were looking good! Now, I just don’t know.

I should be able to have just as much fun without all the data. Heck there are people who say they finally found real joy in cycling when they ditched even a rudimentary bike computer. They don’t even know how many miles they rode. That’s OK, that’s just not me. I really do enjoy pushing myself and looking at the data. This is a bit like the people who say, why are you so concerned about connectivity when you’re on vacation? You don’t need to use your phone to check up on things. Detach yourself and enjoy a world without distractions! Yeah, right. They don’t get it. Some of us are more stressed when detached than when we’re connected. Could we be retrained? Maybe. It would take a long time and probably not worth the effort for some of us. People are different. I don’t judge the person who rides without a bike computer of any kind… well, not too much. If they want to laugh at me for my dependency on tech, great, what did that laugh, at my expense, really cost me? Nothing.

Fortunately, my experiment riding without power is about over. Speedplay sent me a new set of pedals so my ride home will feel familiar again.

It’s been weeks, almost a month, since my last post here. I used to post almost every-other-day, hence the name, almost-daily diary. Life has gotten in the way. A whole lot of excuses, mostly dealing with various family medical issues (my wife with Stage 4 cancer, my 93 year old mother with a large meningioma pushing her brain out of place and causing verbal and motor skill issues, my son’s continuing seizures from his epilepsy, my daughter’s Ehlers Damlos syndrome that causes joints to be super-flexy and not in a good way).

I should add, of all these things, the most-hopeful near-term outcome is actually my mom’s brain thingee. She’s scheduled for surgery Monday and the prognosis is really good!

I go home and feel like there’s a choice to be made, spending time writing about things, or spending time with my wife. The norm is trying to find a balance of taking care of yourself and others, having your own projects, your wife has her projects, and you find time to do things you enjoy together. It’s ok that she has her TV shows and you have yours. I would spend time after each ride, looking for photos to give a “you are there” feeling to what I was writing.

But then someone puts a limit on time, in this case my wife’s time. She’s doing well on Keytruda and hopefully will be around for years! Her expiration date has already passed at least once, and we hope she can keep on going. But that’s a hope, not a certainty, and it feels wrong, even selfish, for me to spend time at home doing something on my own, while she does something on her own.

I think my dad would want me writing about that. My search for a meaningful relationship, ways to make my wife’s life better, while there’s this cloud of uncertainty hanging over everything. How does that change what you do? Well for one thing, it changes how I’ve planned our next vacation; I’ve had to look into and buy insurance to cover the non-refundable cost of the cruise itself. I’ve learned that you don’t have to worry about the expensive airline tickets because, at least with United, the standard non-refundable tickets, the tickets where, if you can’t make the trip, you can get a credit towards a future trip that might not happen if my wife isn’t around… United will actually do a complete refund if you can’t make the trip due to illness or worse.

I wish I didn’t have to learn those things. Paradoxically, I wish I’d already been taught them long ago. Life doesn’t prepare you for life. We go along our merry way, complaining to the end of the world about things that don’t really matter that much. And we discover that a roller-coaster existence, dealing with health issues that have you feeling great for a while, then not so good, then great again, just kind of all over the map… well that’s not a fun roller coaster to be on.

I believe my father would have kept on writing at a time like this. I could be wrong; I’m not sure when he actually stopped writing, and how his illness affected that. He might have already moved on from writing long before he died. He’d left writing for a while to sell Real Estate, which, to me, didn’t seem like a good fit. He died at not-quite-57, a good 11 years younger than I am today. I suppose I can say I kept it up longer than he did (he was the Sports Editor for the local newspaper back when local newspapers were a big thing, so writing was literally his profession). I never asked him why he wrote. For me, it was a need, and still is. I keep a lot of stuff bottled up if I don’t write. Why did my dad start writing, and did he stop? You’d think I’d know.

This is morphing in odd directions. It’s now become things I don’t know about my father. I thought I knew what I needed to know. Now, I’m not so sure. In the meantime, I need to keep working on a life that makes sense, for everyone around me.