Biking & Booking
Jun. 7th, 2016 10:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shannon_aJust before I left for New York City, my specialist told me that I could cautiously start biking again. Though I was still having (and am having) ongoing symptoms, the inflammation she had been seeing was gone. None of this particularly surprised me, as I never felt like my symptoms lined up with an inflammation-related diagnosis.
But, I was happy to be able to bike again.
(And I had a CT scan today to look for other organic issues as the annoying next step; I've now got a CD of my innards which my doc will look over next week.)
Despite the fact that I never particularly believed that biking had anything to do with anything, I've carefully followed my specialist's orders. Including being cautious about starting up again. So, I biked out to Endgame the weekend after I got back from New York, but I also continued to BART and bike some.
Then, this last Saturday, I went on a recreational bike ride.
I believe it's my first recreational bike ride since January(!), an impossibly long time ago. And, it was practically my only bike riding since March, when I stopped entirely except a few required trips to the optometrist.
I was also practically starting out from scratch with my new bike, which I just got in late December.
My destination on Saturday was the Wildcat Canyon Trail, a ride that I love dearly, but which I hadn't done since the rains started in November. (Ah, rain, I recall it fondly, and not just because I kept getting wet in New York.)
Still, I was careful. I BARTed up to El Cerrito Del Norte. But, from there I biked up to the Alvarado Park in Richmond, then turned around to ride the Wildcat Canyon Trail through Wildcat Canyon Park, into Tilden.
I'd been afraid that my hill-climbing muscles had atrophied in the last four or five months, and I think they somewhat have.
There are three major (but short) climbs within Wildcat Canyon, then a longer slope to get onto the roads in Tilden Park, then a major (and long) climb to get out of Tilden Park. They're always challenging. Even at my peak, most rides I'm only able to bike 1 or 2 of the climbs in the Canyon. I always bike the slope up to the roads, but then it's 50/50 whether I walk out of Tilden on the shorter route or take the longer route and perhaps ride, but perhaps walk part of it.
But on Saturday I actually biked all three of climbs within Tilden. The last two were very difficult, and I could feel that I'd lost some muscle as I was sometimes putting my legs down and having almost nothing happen. But I feel like I've also built up some endurance and improved my cardio-vascular fitness in four months of regular hiking, and I think that allowed me to keep going. So, it was tougher, but more doable, weirdly enough.
(I was also able to ride the slope leading to the Tilden roads, but then I walked the quarter or half-mile short route out of the park.)
I enjoyed seeing the park again, although it's somewhat the worse for the half-a-year I've been away. Storm damage has closed one of the major routes into the park, and that means that it's been like that for months and they haven't repaired it. (Unrepaired storm damage is becoming an increasingly big problem at many of our local parks; it seems to be accumulating in Redwood Regional and Tilden and Wildcat year after year.) Meanwhile, the whole top of the hillside was cut off for fire abatement work.
Fortunately there was a clear path through from Alvarado to Jewel Lake, then around to the roads, and up and out of the park.
The thing that surprised me the most about the ride was how good I felt. How healthy I felt. Now, I don't think biking is any healthier than hiking, and I'd been doing some darned good hikes, but the fact that I was doing something that I'd been denied for many months for health reasons made me feel better (even if the core problems linger).
The other thing that surprised me was that I missed my hiking! I've really come to enjoy walking our nearby trails in recent months. If I'd had a place to lock up my bike inside Wildcat Canyon, I would have left it a while and hiked up and down a hillside.
I mean, I've always hiked a bit, but I really came to enjoy it more in the last few months, so I guess I've found a new hobby.
And now I can choose to specifically bike to somewhere to hike, if I want.
(And so far, no worsening of symptoms or anything from the biking; I continue to watch it carefully, and I'm going to continue to do some BARTing over the next week or two, but I hope I can continue on. Of course the annoyance is that my chronic symptoms have always continued, which makes it slightly hard to measure if they're getting worse.)
That was Saturday. I had some other stuff that I wrote today about the Berkeley Book Faire on Sunday. But Livejournal gets flaky about its autosaves when you write something on one computer, then recover the autosave on another computer. So, when something or another killed my Safari it wiped out that last part of this journal entry (and my editing!).
Suffice to say: beautiful open air book festival; less beautiful content because there was too much crazy Berkeley stuff; and a great row of food trucks, which I wish we'd known about in advance. K. and I got a book of Berkeley Walks that we liked for how much information it had on its walks, and I got her a cute "K" necklace cut out of a book cover.
And that was the weekend.
And since then, I worked and hiked on Monday, and I worked and CTed and voted today. And I've been feeling burned out in the evenings again and not getting reviews and histories I wanted done. So it goes.
But, I was happy to be able to bike again.
(And I had a CT scan today to look for other organic issues as the annoying next step; I've now got a CD of my innards which my doc will look over next week.)
Despite the fact that I never particularly believed that biking had anything to do with anything, I've carefully followed my specialist's orders. Including being cautious about starting up again. So, I biked out to Endgame the weekend after I got back from New York, but I also continued to BART and bike some.
Then, this last Saturday, I went on a recreational bike ride.
I believe it's my first recreational bike ride since January(!), an impossibly long time ago. And, it was practically my only bike riding since March, when I stopped entirely except a few required trips to the optometrist.
I was also practically starting out from scratch with my new bike, which I just got in late December.
My destination on Saturday was the Wildcat Canyon Trail, a ride that I love dearly, but which I hadn't done since the rains started in November. (Ah, rain, I recall it fondly, and not just because I kept getting wet in New York.)
Still, I was careful. I BARTed up to El Cerrito Del Norte. But, from there I biked up to the Alvarado Park in Richmond, then turned around to ride the Wildcat Canyon Trail through Wildcat Canyon Park, into Tilden.
I'd been afraid that my hill-climbing muscles had atrophied in the last four or five months, and I think they somewhat have.
There are three major (but short) climbs within Wildcat Canyon, then a longer slope to get onto the roads in Tilden Park, then a major (and long) climb to get out of Tilden Park. They're always challenging. Even at my peak, most rides I'm only able to bike 1 or 2 of the climbs in the Canyon. I always bike the slope up to the roads, but then it's 50/50 whether I walk out of Tilden on the shorter route or take the longer route and perhaps ride, but perhaps walk part of it.
But on Saturday I actually biked all three of climbs within Tilden. The last two were very difficult, and I could feel that I'd lost some muscle as I was sometimes putting my legs down and having almost nothing happen. But I feel like I've also built up some endurance and improved my cardio-vascular fitness in four months of regular hiking, and I think that allowed me to keep going. So, it was tougher, but more doable, weirdly enough.
(I was also able to ride the slope leading to the Tilden roads, but then I walked the quarter or half-mile short route out of the park.)
I enjoyed seeing the park again, although it's somewhat the worse for the half-a-year I've been away. Storm damage has closed one of the major routes into the park, and that means that it's been like that for months and they haven't repaired it. (Unrepaired storm damage is becoming an increasingly big problem at many of our local parks; it seems to be accumulating in Redwood Regional and Tilden and Wildcat year after year.) Meanwhile, the whole top of the hillside was cut off for fire abatement work.
Fortunately there was a clear path through from Alvarado to Jewel Lake, then around to the roads, and up and out of the park.
The thing that surprised me the most about the ride was how good I felt. How healthy I felt. Now, I don't think biking is any healthier than hiking, and I'd been doing some darned good hikes, but the fact that I was doing something that I'd been denied for many months for health reasons made me feel better (even if the core problems linger).
The other thing that surprised me was that I missed my hiking! I've really come to enjoy walking our nearby trails in recent months. If I'd had a place to lock up my bike inside Wildcat Canyon, I would have left it a while and hiked up and down a hillside.
I mean, I've always hiked a bit, but I really came to enjoy it more in the last few months, so I guess I've found a new hobby.
And now I can choose to specifically bike to somewhere to hike, if I want.
(And so far, no worsening of symptoms or anything from the biking; I continue to watch it carefully, and I'm going to continue to do some BARTing over the next week or two, but I hope I can continue on. Of course the annoyance is that my chronic symptoms have always continued, which makes it slightly hard to measure if they're getting worse.)
That was Saturday. I had some other stuff that I wrote today about the Berkeley Book Faire on Sunday. But Livejournal gets flaky about its autosaves when you write something on one computer, then recover the autosave on another computer. So, when something or another killed my Safari it wiped out that last part of this journal entry (and my editing!).
Suffice to say: beautiful open air book festival; less beautiful content because there was too much crazy Berkeley stuff; and a great row of food trucks, which I wish we'd known about in advance. K. and I got a book of Berkeley Walks that we liked for how much information it had on its walks, and I got her a cute "K" necklace cut out of a book cover.
And that was the weekend.
And since then, I worked and hiked on Monday, and I worked and CTed and voted today. And I've been feeling burned out in the evenings again and not getting reviews and histories I wanted done. So it goes.