The recovery from carpal tunnel surgery is going splendidly. Immediately after the surgery my hand was so weak that I was restricted to lifting anything heavier than a paperback book. Yesterday, 23 days from the surgery, I easily lifted The Tank and, later, The Mule onto my bike rack. The next milestone will be when I can comfortably do a bird dog pose during my daily stretching routine. My guess is that will happen next week.
I no longer have any stitches or steri strips on my incision site. I keep it covered with an oversized band-aid to be on the safe side.
Bike Physicals
As I alluded to above, I took The Tank to Beth at Bikes at Vienna for its annual physical and picked up The Mule. Beth spec’ed Wolf Tooth cushy handlebar tape for The Mule. It seems a bit like overkill but I suspect that I won’t feel that way once I get the bike out on the road. Once I try this tape out, I’ll decide what kind of tape to put on The Tank.
I had Beth install a Paul Mini-moto v-brake on the front wheel of the Mule. I had installed one on the back a couple of years ago and love it. Mini-motos brake better (I can even skid) and are much easier to adjust. Moreover, they disengage much more easily when changing tires. No more knocking the brake pads out of alignment for me.
Natchez Trace
Having signed up for a one-week, van-supported tour of the Natchez Trace Parkway I did a little research on what I am up against.
Adventure Cycling rates this as Level 4 out of 5 for difficulty. I think the rating reflects the fact that there are three days between 72 and 82 miles. They will certainly be a challenge but most of the route isn’t very hilly. Judging from some Strava metrics I have seen, the rides around my neighborhood have about 30 feet of elevation gain per mile. That’s less than all but two days on the tour.
I also checked how this compares to my ride up the Maine coast in 2022. Google Maps says that from Wells to Bar Harbor is 220 miles and 8,200 feet of elevation gain, 37 feet per mile. I handled this without much trouble. And it’s much less than the 45 feet per mile between Lexington and Damascus Virginia that I did last summer. I did both those rides unsupported. It’ll be nice not to have 35 pounds of stuff on my bike for this tour.
Start
Finish
Miles
Elevation Gain in Feet
Feet Per Day
Day 1
Natchez
Rock Springs
61
1,332
22
Day 2
Rock Springs
Ridgeland
48
912
19
Day 3
Ridgeland
French Camp
82
1,450
18
Day 4
French Camp
Shannon
70
1,600
23
Day 5
Shannon
Tishomingo
54
1,200
22
Day 6
Tishomingo
Hohenwald
79
2,900
37
Day 7
Hohenwald
Nashville
62
2,185
35
Total
456
11,579
25
I have several friends who have ridden or driven the Trace and they all say it’s pretty and pretty easy.
I also will be taking one or two days off before the tour to drive to Nashville so I’ll have fresh legs. The tour starts April 7 which gives me a little over six weeks of time to prepare my aging carcass for the effort.
The month started out a bit slow and stayed that way. I think I ate more cookies than miles. By the end of the month, I found hills to be a bit more challenging. Ugh.
I rode 634.5 miles for the month. This was my lowest mileage month in two years. I did 90 miles on Little Nellie, 307.5 miles on The Tank (my CrossCheck), and 237 miles indoors on Big Nellie. (I convert time to miles based on 10.5 miles per hour.) The Mule took the month off.
My long ride of the month was only 35.5 miles and this was split up into three rides. I rode 30-miles round trip to Friday Coffee Club with a detour to a hardware store on the way home. I followed that up with 5.5 miles on two short rides running errands to the office supply store and a different hardware store.
I ran a ton of errands by bike this month. The errands help me get motivated to ride outdoors on cold days. I have noticed that the daylight is lasting much longer now. I did lose about a week of outdoor riding because of two light, but messy snow events.
My indoor riding has helped me get some reading done (see below). I am currently halfway through David Copperfield which is turning out to be not quite the slog I had anticipated.
Watching
The Big Dig – I began listening to this nine-hour podcast from WGBH News last month. It tells the story of the biggest urban highway project in the country in which Boston’s infamous elevated Central Artery was buried and a new tunnel to Logan Airport was built. I learned only after listening to seven episodes that a video version is available on WGBH’s YouTube page. If you are into transportation, construction, infrastructure, urban planning, and such, you really should listen to this. The entire ordeal reminded me of the building of the Brooklyn Bridge and Panama Canal as described in books by David McCullough.
Loki Season 2 – Oddly well acted mess of CGI and multidimensional nonsense. There’s this sacred timeline and it’s spawning branches but the time loom can’t control them so the time lines will break and everyone who lives on them will die. Or something like that. YMMV.
Echo – Another mediocre Marvel miniseries centered on Maya, a Choctaw, deaf, amputee, who is a badass fighter, of course. Promos make it look as though Daredevil has a big role in this but he’s in it for all of a minute. Hawkeye, played by Jeremy Renner, is in it for a few seconds.
Armaggedon – A Netflix Ricky Gervais stand up movie. Crude. Funny in parts.
The Enemy Below – Robert Mitchum, U. S. warship captain, faces off with Curt Jurgens, U-boat captain, in WWII. I saw it as a kid and loved it. Star Trek ripped it off. Das Boot did it 1,000 times better. Still entertaining though.
Barbie – An absolutely fantastic opening sequence but otherwise meh. I am a big Greta Gerwig fan but let’s just say I wasn’t the target audience for this one.
Two NFL “Championship” games – I watched the Super Bowl semifinals so that I may look somewhat knowledgeable at our friends’ annual Super Bowl get together on the 12th. I need to bone up on my Taylor Swift songs though.
Reading
Why We Love Baseball by Joe Posnanski. What better way to spend the time before spring training than reading 350 pages of stories about baseball. IYKYK. There all all kinds of oddball anecdotes in this book but sadly it leaves out my two favorites from the Washington Nationals. Juan Soto hit his first home run five days before he was called up officially to the majors. Weirder still was how Michael Morse hit a grand slam without a bat in his hands. As Joe Garagiola said, “Baseball is a funny game.”
Prequel by Rachel Maddow. Americans, acting as agents of Hitler’s regime, carried out a long campaign to keep the US out of WWII and, even, to try to violently overthrow the US government. Sound familiar? If you listened to Maddow’s podcast Ultra you pretty much know this story. This book fleshes out many of the details that could not fit into Ultra. Among other things, the plotters used the free mailing privileges of a number of sitting Congress people to distribute Nazi propaganda. Suffice it to say, the connections to recent events is obvious.
Blood Memory by David Duncan and Ken Burns. The companion book to Burns’s American Buffalo documentary on PBS. Both the book and the film are excellent. The book and film describe the slaughter of tens of millions of buffaloes and the efforts to bring the buffalo back from the edge of extinction. Just seeing one of these creatures up close is an intense experience. I can barely imagine seeing them as far as the eye can see.
Eat, Poop, Die – How Animals Make Our World by Joe Roman. Birds do it. Bees do it. Whales do it. It turns out poop (and pee) is a wonderful thing.
Medical
Lumbar Spinal Stenosis – My lower back woes continue. They are getting worse incrementally in spite of me doing a physical therapy session nearly every day. I decided to take up walking for a couple of weeks. It’s uncomfortable and slow. Using a cane is a must. I managed to top out at 3 1/2 miles one day last week. I read today that Merrick Garland, the U. S. Attorney General, is having spinal decompression surgery to address his similar problem. It will be interesting to see which doctor he uses and how he makes out. Personally, I don’t know how much longer and I put up with this.
Neck woes – Somewhere back in December or November I screwed up my neck. It feels like I have whiplash. I think I brought this on with a combination of fiddling with the handlebar height on The Tank and doing side planks as part of my stenosis routine.
I get sharp pains that shoot up into my head when I turn my head. I can feel the tightness in my lateral neck muscles with my fingers. It even affects my bite. I was seriously considering going to my doctor for some advice or maybe an x-ray (to ROC – rule out cancer) just to be safe. On a whim I pulled Yoga for Cyclists off the shelf and looked up neck stretches.
Basically the stretches involve moving your head to the each side as well as the 45-degree forward position. My neck is so screwed up that I actually had to gently guide my head back into a neutral position between stretches. I am happy to report that after just one session of stretches my neck felt much better.
I learned a couple of things. Neck stretching should only be done to the sides and front. (This is contrary to the stretches in Richard Hittleman’s classic yoga book.) Rotating your head back makes things worse. I augmented the book’s stretches with corresponding head twists (assisted by a gentle guiding hand). I can now comfortably turn my head while riding which is kind of important when you’re trying to avoid big metal things.
Today was my final prednisone pill. It’s powerful stuff. It has interesting side effects. It makes you speedy, improves your mood, and boosts your appetite. Basically, you run around the kitchen eating all the Christmas goodies. It’s a dirty, lousy, thankless job but somebody has to do it. Oink.
Stenosis
After breakfast, I did a half hour of yoga for my back. Normally, I start by doing standing stretches, but today I did nothing but stretches and core exercises on the floor. Child pose is the bomb. I think the prednisone allows me to relax and stretch without muscle soreness. It’ll be interesting to see how my body handles some of these positions without the benefit of steroids.
Colonoscopy
Earlier this month I had a colonoscopy. The doctor found three abnomalities. He found one to be obviously innocuous. Two were suspicious. He biopsied the baddies and removed all three. Today, he showed me the results from the pathology lab. My two suspect polyps were adenomas, the kind of polyps that can develop into colon cancer. Had I not had this colonoscopy I might have been in for a rather rude surprise in 2020. Long story short, I’m good to go, so to speak, for another three years.
The Last Ride
After a 20-minute meditation session down by the river, I went for my final bike ride of the year. It was a 28-mile gentle meander on the Mount Vernon Trail aboard the Cross Check. My back did not much like the bumps on the trail. After the ride I lowered the saddle a couple of millimeters. We’ll see how that feels next time. (Later in the evening my hips and left leg were sore from stenosis. Hmm…)
Fleet Miles
I have four bikes. The end-of-year odometer readings are pretty cool. Clockwise from top left: Little Nellie, The Mule, The Cross Check, and Big Nellie. These are only outdoor miles. I put some miles on Big Nellie in the basement every winter so its odometer reading is probably short about 1,000 miles. Grand total: 135,050 miles since 1991.
December Miles
In December I rode 667.5 miles. All but 44 miles were outdoors. I rode 24 out of 31 days. My long ride was during the Hains Point 100 when I did 37.5 miles.
2019 Miles
I rode a total of 10,618.5 miles in 2019, 2,978 of them during the No Name Tour from May to early July. During the tour, I climbed over 150,000 feet. I rode 188 miles indoors, evidence of a mild winter. I climbed 0 feet indoors. Boredom has its advantages.
2019 Events
In addition to the Hains Point 100, I squeezed in a few other bike events this year. I did my 11th Fifty States Ride, my fifth Cider Ride, another Great Pumpkin Ride (I can’t recall how many times I’ve done this one), a ride looking at murals in Alexandria, and still another with a George Washington theme.
For the last six days I’ve been taking a declining dose of the steroid prednisone to calm the irritated nerves in my back and legs. Prednisone pills taste gross but they are very powerful. My pain became tolerable after a day. Although I didn’t notice, they improved my mood and, my wife and daughter report, even made me chatty. As I said, it’s powerful.
Until I took prednisone, I couldn’t tell where in my lower back my nerve problems were coming from. Now I can feel tension above my left butt cheek. Hello, you little bugger. I’m coming after you.
The best part of this pill party is that I am riding my bike like it was the summer of 2018. I have nearly zero discomfort, I am accelerating like a boss, and can cruise 20 percent faster with practically no effort. In five days, I’ve ridden 159 miles. Each day I stop long before I get tired. I could easily have ridden 50 miles today but decided to err on the side of caution and quit after 36. The Mule abides.
My leg ache comes and goes and the hot spot outside my left hip is still there, but otherwise my body is so much happier. I go up hills without a care. My back, arms, and shoulder feel relaxed as I pedal.
All of this makes me wonder if my hip and knee problems have been a side effect of stenosis, rather than in addition to stenosis. If I’ve been in low level pain for months, it’s no wonder my riding has suffered. Not the mileage, but the enjoyment. Riding across Kansas this year was work; riding across North Dakota and eastern Montana last year was play.
While I have the pain at bay, I have been blending yoga with my physical therapy. Up until now I had been doing PT in a very regimented fashion. This many repeats. Hold for this many seconds, etc. The idea was to build strength in particular muscles, mostly in support of my hip and knee.
Now I am letting my body dictate what to do. I am flowing from one position to the next, concentrating on keeping my motions fluid. The regimented aspect has been one of the reasons I hate yoga classes. (And don’t get me started on yoga teachers who physically move you into the “proper” position. Must not kill!)
Instead I’ll hold a position for as many seconds as seems helpful then go right into another one without stopping. If a posture causes something to ache, I stop and move on to another posture.
A typical sequence might be (PT exercises in italics):
Step over a horizontal pole for 25 repetitions (A warm up that helps me getting on and off the bike.)
Stretch hamstrings
Stretch quads
Stretch iliotibial bands
Runner’s calf muscle stretches
Shoulder scrunches
Add standing yoga positions
Rishi’s posture
Chest expansions
Deep breathing
Toe touches
Side bends
Trunk rotations at the waist
Neck rotations
Squats
Dancers posture
Lay on the floor and do
Open book shoulder exercises
Pull knees to chest, first one leg, then the other, then both
Ankle over knee and pull legs toward torso
Sway back and forth with bent knees at the hip
Hurdlers stretches
Groin stretches
Neck pushes
Toe touches
Back bridges
Side planks with torso on ground
Side planks with legs on ground
Bird dog
Cat/cow pose
Planks
Cobra pose
Locust pose
Twist torso while lunging
Lunges
Child’s pose
Shoulder stand
Plough
Sit ups (or crunches)
Set of super six exercises on a foam roller
That’s over 30 different exercises. And I left a few out. I have all of them written down but I tend to do whatever seems to make sense in the moment. If I’m doing a pose while lying on my back, I might pop into a shoulder stand, for example. Then I’ll gradually fall into a plough (legs extended over head while on my back) and roll out of the plough and do a back bridge.
I’m trying my best to be gentle and not strain. Some of the positions are a little beyond my ability right now but I’ll get there.
Hopefully, I can get this routine established quickly. I have only three more days of prednisone pills, and then the effects will wear off. And they can wear off rather suddenly if my prior experience with oral steroids is an indication. Taking them for long periods of time results in side effects like osteoporosis, cataracts, and growing a second head. (Okay, I made that last one up.)
On Sunday, I rode the Hains Point 100, the final event ride of the year (for me anyway) in DC. The ride is 30 laps of a 3.3-mile circuit in East Potomac Park, down to Hains Point and back. It’s about as flat a course as you can find. Serious riders form fast-moving pelotons. We mere mortals ride a few laps, socialize, munch goodies, and hang out at the raffle. (I won a gift certificate to a taco place a mile from my physical therapist. The burrito gods are on my side.)
I had no intention of riding anything close to 100 miles. It was pretty cold, in the 30s for much of the time I would be riding. The Mule and I took it easy, rolling along, mostly at 12 miles per hour, but, occasionally cranking it up to 20. My legs were holding up just fine. Until about 28 miles into the ride, that is. The ache in my left leg, formerly only present when I was walking, appeared. I managed to ride another 9 1/2 miles with plenty of rest stops but I was really not a happy camper.
Fortunately, I made an appointment with my orthopedist on Monday. I felt fine when I woke up. Oh, great. What will I tell the doctor? I decided to do some stocking shopping before my appointment. I lasted 50 feet before my leg started aching again.
I limped a few blocks to and from a store and my left calf, groin, outer thigh, and butt cheek were having a contest to see which one could make me drop a salvo of F-bombs. (The calf won.)
At the doctor’s office, I explained my woes to the doctor. He nodded and smiled. When I told him about hurting after 50 feet of walking his eyebrows went up. Forttunately, this was obviously a no-brainer to him.
He examined my legs and back. He was impressed. “Push. Pull. Resist. You’re strong,” he remarked. Funny, what 30,000 miles in three years can do.
Then he checked my back for flexibility. I acquitted myself well for an 85-year-old. I did however manage to touch the floor from a standing position without bending my legs. I took about 15 second for my back to relax though. “I’ll only be a minute.”
The diagnosis was stenosis.The passages through the vertebrae in my lower back are narrowing as I age. The nerves emanating from my lower spinal cord are being compressed. Lucky me, I’m old. The good news is that I haven’t incurred appreciable muscle weakness in my legs. (And you thought I was nuts to ride so much, didn’t you?)
The treatment plan is pretty simple. I am on a nine-day declining does of prednisone, a steroid that will almost certainly calm the nerves down. (I was on a seven-day course prior to my back surgery. It worked well. It wore off just as I was being wheeled into pre-op.)
The doctor gave instructions to my physical therapy team to change my PT regime. He agreed that the gentle yoga exercises I have been doing would be helpful.
When I arrived home, I looked up PT-for-stenosis videos. As it turns out, most of the exercises are already part of the yoga/PT routine I discontinued last year.
The plan is to follow this exercise regime for a few weeks, unless the pain doesn’t abate in which case we amputate.
Just kidding. If I don’t recover, we’ll discuss surgical remedies. Time will tell.
Ironically, my PT team has being trying to improve my posture, thinking this would help with my general mechanics, I suppose. Well, it turns out that stenosis patients find that a forward lean helps to attenuate symptoms. When I ran back in my 20s and 30s, I had a pronounced forward lean. When I sit, I naturally lean forward. Riding a bike puts my in a forward lean as well.
So I asked the doctor, can I ride my bike.
Yes.
Considering the fact that two years ago I was in a hospital bed on anticoagulants and trying to breathe with one functioning lung, I’ll take this year’s medical conundrum any day.
Today I cancelled Monday’s PT appointment. Yesterday I did a two-hour recumbent ride in the basement. My wonky left leg felt fine throughout. When I walked away from the bike, the ache in my leg returned.
I did a very abbreviated PT session, took two Tylenols, and chilled.
Today, my leg felt fine for a few hours after waking. Then, as I was telling Mrs. Rootchopper that my leg felt pretty good, the ache returned.
I went for a 30-mile ride to test out the repairs done on Little Nellie. The shifting works fine in the front. I still get some chain misbehavior in the rear but that’s the norm for this bike. I wonder if there isn’t some kind of flex in the frame caused by the folding mechanism.
In any case, my leg felt absolutely fine for the entire ride. The left knee hurt a little going up hills or grinding big gears. There’s a small painful spot on the outside of my hip, as well. I don’t know if the leg could handle a mountain out west but for present purposes it’s okay. I stopped to shop at a store and within a few minutes my leg was aching again. I think weight bearing is triggering the pain.
When I got home, instead of PT, I did a short version of my old yoga routine. There are over 30 poses involved. I spent about a minute on each. By the end, my leg was very achy.
It has been suggested by several people (my physical therapist and my brother, a retired nurse, who has similar back problems) that this ache is referred pain from a pinched nerve in my lower spine. My lower back doesn’t hurt any more than usual. It’s always stiff thanks to the family genome. I’ve had sciatica in the past as well as a herniated disk. My current symptoms don’t follow the classic knife pain from butt to calf of sciatica, nor do they follow the aching thigh numbness of my slipped disc. Still, some sort of nerve compression in my lower back is a pretty good candidate for the cause.
So I looked up yoga videos for lower back pain. The three that I found all include positions in my routine. Most include extending the leg away from the body, either while doing a standing yoga position or a kneeling one. (Some of them involve reaching back and pulling the foot back toward the body. Ain’t gonna happen.) The level of difficulty of these is easy to moderate, for me anyway. If I had full blown sciatica, they’d be impossible.
Another candidate for the pain in my calf is repercussions from my blood clot episode of two years ago. It turns out that some people who have had a blood clot called a deep vein thrombosis (DVT) in their leg have residual pain that can show up much later and last a life time. The pain is caused by the body reacting to the DVT by redirecting blood flow around the DVT. After the DVT is gone, the blood flow gets discombobulated and pain and swelling results. (When I had the DVT, I had no pain or swelling. It was a sneaky little bastard.) Depending on how my visit to the orthopedist goes on Monday, I may make a follow up appointment with my hematologist.
Digression: one way to tell that you are old is by the number of medical specialists you see. My specialty list includes ophthalmology, neurology, hematology, pulmonology, endocrinology, orthopaedics, and physical therapy. If this goes on much longer, I’m going to need a psychiatrist. As long as my list does not involve a mortician, I’ll consider myself ahead of the game.
A third possibility is acute Christmas cookie intoxification. ACCI is a bitch. The only known cure is January.
I happen to have a vibrating massage gizmo that I acquired during one of my many episodes of back pain many years ago. It’s basically been useless until now but it turns out to be surprisingly effective in calming my calf muscle down. This device can target the muscle tightness much better than a foam roller, massage stick, or a lacrosse ball.
So for the next several days it’s biking, yoga, massage gizmo, Netflix, and pills.
So the weatherman cooperated with my new regime. Yesterday I didn’t ride at all. Not riding makes my brain restless so I started the day with 20 minutes of meditation. I haven’t done sitting meditation in a long time, because long slow rides make it superfluous. (Most meditation teachers would disagree but I doubt they’ve ridden a bike across Kansas. Then again, I did run into a Tibetan monk in a cowboy hat walking down the road in Missouri this summer so what do I know.)
Cold drizzle made outdoor riding unappealing, so I rode Big Nellie in the basement for the first time since last winter. Two hours on a bike indoors may sound boring but I multitasked with a Bill Bryson book, Neither Here Nor There. It’s his account of travelling solo through Europe.
After that I did a PT session. After reviewing several YouTube videos on nerve flossing, I decided to stop beating my left leg up with the foam roller. I did four or five flossing sessions (they only take a minute). So far, I am seeing no noticeable change. If this doesn’t work, I’m going back to my yoga-based routine from 2017 – 2018. In many ways it is quite similar to the PT I’ve been doing but costs nothing. I tried some balance moves today. The Flying Wallendas will not be calling me anytime soon. I also did a shoulder stand that I cut short to avoid taking out the router on the table next to me.
After that I watched Room on Netflix. A gloomy movie for a gloomy day. Lots of really good acting though.
Tomorrow, I hope to pick Little Nellie up from the bike shop. Then I’ll go to the WABA Holiday Party. I’ll be the guy with the pronounced limp on the left and the beer on the right.
My father was an ophthalmologist. When working up a prescription for glasses, he’s swap out lenses and ask “Better or worse?” That’s what I’m wondering about my knee and hip.
I’ve been doing physical therapy for over five weeks. A few days ago I asked on Twitter how much more of this I should do because I seemed to be getting no benefit out of it.
Each week I go to see the therapist. Each week she adds another exercise. Last week she added a step over exercise. Suspend a pole or rod between two lawn chairs. Stand with your hip next to the pole. Step over the pole with your inner leg, then with your outer leg. Then do the reverse. I do 25 reps of this.
I’ll be damned if this hasn’t actually helped. Progress at last.
A couple of days ago I switched from Big Nellie, my recumbent bike, to Little Nellie, my Bike Friday travel bike. I was getting discomfort in my hip and under my knee cap. After ten miles I dismounted and raised the saddle about two millimeters.
This significantly reduced the irritation under my knee cap and allowed my hips to open up a bit. Much smoother. And I seem to be getting some power out of my left leg. Dang.
I’ll keep riding Little Nellie for a couple of hundred more miles. Then I’ll reach a thousand mile threshold and switch to another bike, either my Cross Check or The Mule. I’ll make sure the saddle position is similar to Little Nellie.
I’ve already noticed that going up and down stairs is getting less uncomfortable. The real test will be how my knee and hip handle a hike up the Blue Ridge. That will happen in a couple of weeks.
Meanwhile I’ll continue to slog away at my PT and yoga routine. An hour everyday. Sooo boring.
Last night I took 2 ibuprofen PMs (ibuprofen with a sedative) to make sure my wonky left knee didn’t wake me. It worked. I overslept Friday Coffee Club. This was pretty convenient because I would have ridden 15 miles to DC in a cold rain.
I needed the rest. I’ve been pretty disappointed with my body this winter. Sore knee, shoulder, hip, achy back,…., I want my mommie! Self pity won’t get my act together but exercises, new walking shoes, and riding my bike, alternating hard and easy days, will. So, for the last seven days, I rode 207 miles, mostly on my Cross Check. And I did a couple yoga torture sessions, a weight session, and two foam roller super six sessions. Each day included specific stretches for my iliotibial bands in hopes my left hip and knee will heal themselves.
Now that my body is starting to come around, I need to work on my brain. Bike rides and daily meditation are not getting it done. Two things happened the other day that should help. First, the maps for the middle part of my bike tour arrived. They span the gap between Pueblo, Colorado and South Lake Tahoe, California. The thought of riding this section of the country is intimidating. I will sit down in the next day or three and do a day by day itinerary in the hopes of getting enthused.
The other thing that happened is I stumbled on a video blog about a coast to coast bike tour. Ryan and Ali are two film making fitness people who fell in love. Having been together only three months, Ryan didn’t want to ride across the country solo so Aly agreed to join him, despite her inexperience at bike touring. Being obviously smitten with each other they decided to interview people along the way and ask them the secret to maintaining their relationships with their partners. They called their tour LoveCycles.
To document the trip, Ryan made 37 videos, each about 20 minutes long. To be honest I found the love interviews a bit boring after a while, but the parts documenting the tour are amazing. He even used drones to capture the spectacular landscapes and the two of them riding through them.
I’ve watched the first twenty videos. I was especially enthused by the first two that documented the Oregon beginning of their trip from Fort Stevens State Park (where I dipped my front wheel in the Pacific last summer) to Portland (where my trip ended).
Their ride through Washington State, eastern Oregon, Nebraska, and Wyoming is really beautiful. So if you want to get a sense of what bike touring is like out West, check their videos out.
There are a few things about their tour that differ from mine. First, they made up their route as they went whereas I use Adventure Cycling maps. It turns out the Google isn’t the best bicycle touring router. Yeah, well. On the plus side, they received great route advice from people along the way.
They also traveled with four panniers between them. How the hell they managed to do this and carry video equipment is beyond me. They each brought about a third the clothes that I do, for a start. Their two-person tent is about half the size (and weight) of mine. They have nothing on their rear racks and no fenders. So their bikes were considerably less heavy than mine. And their engines, lacking belly fat and boobage, were much lighter. (For what it’s worth, my father’s genome provided me with a competitively compact ass.)
People often ask me how I managed to ride across the country alone. After watching these videos you’ll see that spending 24/7 with someone under stressful conditions can be trying. (Much of the stress happens off camera, but they make it clear that the trip wasn’t all rainbows and unicorns.) After over 2,000 miles, I actually welcomed Martin’s fitful companionship as I rode through North Dakota, Montana, and Washington. It added variety to the proceedings. It’s a good thing he’s a nice person though. In general, however, solitude works for me.
So it’s back to the videos, only 17 more to go, then a big time bike planning and itinerary session.
My body has had a tough winter. For a few weeks I was really falling apart. I couldn’t stand up straight. I walked with a pronounced limp with pain in my left knee and hip.
Setting Aside Little Nellie
It occurred to me that my back pain was probably caused by the impact shocks I get while riding Little Nellie. Those little wheels don’t absorb much of the hit from countless tree roots on the Mount Vernon Trail. (The National Park Service is starved for money and their maintenance has really gone south in the last two or three years.)
I switched first to The Mule, then to my Cross Check, both of which have normal sized wheels (700c x 35 for the bike nerds). My back responded almost instantly to the softer ride on The Mule. When I switched the Cross Check some new back and knee problems cropped up. I re-measured the seat height and the distance from the saddle to the handlebars. The seat was about 1/2 inch higher than The Mule’s. After I adjusted it, I took off. The Cross Check’s bigger gears were just what my legs needed. I feel like my old self again.
I rode it to Friday Coffee Club today. The strong, persistent tailwind made me feel like a bike god. The ride home was a bit challenging but I actually enjoyed fighting the wind. I am back to my old commuting mileages. My last 8 days were: 30, 23.5, 45.5, 28, 31, 32, 32, and 30 miles (252 total). A couple more weeks like that should put me in decent touring shape.
The Cross Check at Dyke Marsh on the Mount Vernon Trail
Working Out Off the Bike
I am also doing on alternate days: yoga, weight lifting, and physical therapy exercises including some with a foam roller. I don’t much care for any of these but you gotta do what you gotta do.
Shopping
My pre-tour shopping spree has begun. I’ve bought mountain bike shorts, glasses (clear and polarized, both progressive for map reading while on the bike), Schwalbe Marathon Plus tires, Croakies, Koolstop brake pads, and a combination lock. (I am trading off weight for some security but I can’t recall ever having someone try to steal The Mule while on tour.)
The other night I attended a presentation by Jim Sayer, the Executive Director of Adventure Cycling. Adventure Cycling makes the maps that I use. Jim’s presentation really helped get my head back in the game. Jim talked up La Route Verte, the bike touring network in Quebec. This is definitely going on my to do list. The website is amazing. (And it’s in both English and French, of course.) I need to do a key word search for “black flies” though.
And just to add to the preparations, spring arrived in DC. It may be temporary but two 70 degree days are just the tonic. I rode in shorts and a t-shirt today and it was bliss.
A Few Spokes Shy of a Wheel 