Over the last three days, I completed a fifteen, and a seventeen-mile excursion to nowhere on the exercise bike. During the 15 I forced myself into four miles of fairly intense tension, and six more of annoying tension. There’s a park on a ridge near our house that is about 10 miles away with about 7 hard to absurd uphill miles. I want to combine that ride with a long run in the park as well. I think that if I can do that I must be in some kind of shape. A dream and a product of misplaced desire to be sure. So I’m trying to envision that ride on the ex-bike. After the 15 miler I did five or six rounds of shadowboxing, I lost count because I was too busy texting with my family’s NBA texters. It’s playoff time so we’re busy…
I needed three T-shirts, one for the ride, one for the shadowboxing, one for the sweat that continues to pour off me for fifteen minutes after the shadowboxing. Just a tad of hyperbole there. Before I started working out in the fall of 2019, I’d gotten so out of shape that sweat poured off me at the slightest provocation. That’s one difference between being morbidly obese, as I was then, and 220 pounds of uck that does include some decent musculature; my sweat comes in creeks, not rivers.
For the 17-mile-ride, I gifted myself a nice, not really any tension to write home about, ride. I managed to get all 32 miles completed in a bit under ninety-four minutes of bike time (I’ll discuss bike time in another post). Oh, hosana, I got to my 20-mile-per-hour goal. Yay. Reaching an artificial goal, yeah…
In between the rides I ran for 35 minutes through the local suburban streets, and a couple of parks. Normally I run in the woods but we had a snowstorm earlier in the week, laying a temporary blanket of four to five inches of wet spring snow. I didn’t want to slog through mud. Been there. Like an idiot. Will probably be there again because I’m still an idiot.
Of course, from running on the roadway at my extended weight, my knees hurt the next day. Hence the second, knee friendly, 17 miler ride.
Note to self. I should probably just wear compression braces as a matter of course before running.
My plan calls for a difficult 15-mile ride and a half-hour of shadowboxing this evening, 4/23/22. I do know how to spoil a Saturday. First, I will get to play guitar with a friend, and concurrently, ruin my lungs in the process.
My desire is strong to do this level of working out. I guess that’s because my knees don’t hurt today and the carpel tunnel surgery seems to have worked. Because of that, once I get a working bicycle, shoes, helmet, gloves, and etc, I may be able to bike on the road.