Cough Cough

Oh, no ride followed by no ride followed by no ride.  This is bad.  This is how the time off the bike started in the first place, isn’t it?

Okay, so the first day of no ride was a planned rest day.  I’m good with that.  Physiologically you have to have rest days to build up some muscle (in my case not a whole lot of muscle), to allow your body to consolidate the effects of your exercise, and to catch up on that last season of Dr. Who.  All good.

Day two of no riding was simply the result of too many other things to do.  I’m okay with that.  It happens.  Band practice, household chores, running errands, and so on. 

Day three of no riding was supposed to be a long (well, longish) ride day.  For various reasons that ride had to be in the morning, and that morning I woke up to find myself in a cloud.  I’m not implying anything about my mental state.  I mean that the whole area was saturated with fog.

Ride in the heat?  Okay.  Not fun, but okay.   Of course, there was that one time I almost got heat stroke. But that’s a whole other post.

Ride in the cold?  Sure.  I have the gear for that.  It’s always hard to get motivated, but after a few minutes on the bike, it’s fine.

Ride in the rain?  Not my favorite thing to do, but I’ve don’t it often enough.  It isn’t that bad.  Don’t ride with your mouth open unless you’re at the front of the pace line, but, other than, okay.

Ride in the fog?

No.

That’s death waiting to happen, in my opinion.  I mean, I really wanted to ride, but, no.    I suppose I might have said something like, “I’m dying for a ride,” but this would be more like, “I’m riding to die.”  No, thank you.

So, in place of not doing that stupid thing, I did a different stupid thing the following day.

I woke up with a sore throat and general malaise.  Fortunately, I was able to go into work a few hours later than usual, so, of course, I drank plenty of fluids, got some rest…well, sort of.  I did drink plenty of fluids, but I did kind of sneak in a little ride.  Should a person who isn’t feeling ride go out on a ride?  Of course not.  Did that sensible knowledge stop me?  Of course not.

See, there’s weather ahead:

As the cold front marches toward the Eastern seaboard, a band of rain and thunderstorms along the front is expected to intensify Monday afternoon as strong low-level winds overspread the region and the storms move into an environment with high dewpoints (atmospheric moisture). This combination will be favorable for damaging wind gusts to develop with some of these storms. An embedded spin-up tornado cannot be ruled out in this situation.

That all sounds very complicated, but I pretty much got that I’m not going to be able to ride later today, and maybe not tomorrow, either, and, given the few days just past, that’s a lot of days with no riding.  So I rode.

Sick or not, I didn’t think it was a big deal.  Eleven and a half miles.  Of course, the wind was blowing 11 mph (an interesting coincidence) which made it a little more of a big deal than I had planned.  Being sick, I thought I would take it nice and easy, not stress myself.  I really don’t know what happened those last four miles…my legs were starting to feel good, so I starting pushing it a little bit.  Then, with only a mile to go I was moving along pretty nicely, and then it occurred to me that I really hadn’t made any use of the big chain ring since my bike had been tuned up, and, obviously I needed to rectify that – after all, you have to check to make sure that everything is working properly -  so I picked up the pace a bit more, and the, by my standards, I was really flying (for a bit)…and then I was home and tireder and sicker and sore throatier.

But I did get a ride in.  You know how it is.  I haven’t been back on the bike very long, so what if I have to skip a couple of days, and then I have to skip a couple more, and then I haven’t been on the bike in a week, and then I haven’t been on the bike in two weeks…no, we’re not going there again.

So I rode sick.  Don’t do that, by the way.  It’s probably not a very good idea.

But, I did get a ride in.