More Illness and Injury

It seems like this happened years ago too...

I remember going riding with some friends from Alabama that I hadn't seen in a few months and we both had the same story: we'd been sick for almost the entire fall with only a few good days here and there.

This fall is shaping up the same way.  I've been sick off-and-on since early October.  I think I only got 1 good week total in since then.  I can't shake this last round.  My kids are both sick now.  My niece was sick and coughing last night at Thanksgiving dinner and I was hyper-aware of it.  I'm starting to feel like Howard Hughes.  I imagine flocks of villainous germs swarming around me with bad intent.

And that's just half of it.  I smashed my finger at Blankets a few weeks ago and it's just barely well enough to think about pulling the brakes with.  Then I smashed my nose on my top tube last week changing my bottom bracket when a crank bolt gave.  It's no fun having a runny nose and a busted nose at the same time.  No fun!

I barely even feel like a cyclist any more.  I can't remember what that urge to ride feels like.  I remember that it exists, but I don't wake up with it any more.  When I think about riding, it doesn't strike me.  I went for a run a few days ago too, just to do something, and it felt like I hadn't run a mile in my life - beat me to pieces.  I'm still a little sore today.

Terrible!

Health and fitness, return to me!  Return!

Illness and Injury

Not my two favorite things.

Funny how they seem to accompany one another though.

October was pretty rough, by any objective measure. I was sick from the 5th through the 25th. I barely even left the house. It goes without saying that I forgot entirely about the existence of running and would have forgotten about the existence of bicycles if I hadn't had to go into the garage periodically.

On the 25th, feeling almost better, I ventured out into the harsh, cruel light.

Fall had apparently happened while I wasn't looking.

Most of the cherry trees in the neighborhood looked like this:

As they should. But three trees just up the street were totally confused.

Yep. Blooming in the fall.

There is a species of cherry that blooms twice a year, but it's flowers look a little different and I'd swear that these aren't they. If they are, then they're the only ones in the entire neighborhood.

I was surprised to see them.

The next day I felt well-ish and figured I'd go ride at Blankets.

The suffering was indescribable. I think I almost passed out a few times.

I did see a herd of turkeys though.

Unusual at that trail.

While struggling on the South Loop I noticed lake Alatoona looking especially beautiful and took a little detour.

Especially beautiful.

That's what I remember most about that particular ride. The rest of it was sufficiently unpleasant to have escaped my memory entirely. Well, except for the turkeys.

Over the next week, I literally rode on the road every day, trying hard to reclaim my lost fitness. And it worked. A week later I felt reasonably good and went for another spin at Blankets.

It was like night and day. I could actually climb again. Woohoo!

I had another balloon sighting too.

But I still don't get enough off-road miles these days. My roadie brain doesn't seem to be able to process dirt quickly enough. Near the top of the Dwelling Loop I caught the edge of the trail, crashed and smashed my knee. Man it hurt. I even remember saying out loud: "Man, why does it hurt so bad!?"

It just hurt though. It wasn't injured. At least not terribly.

Later I discovered that I'd managed to slice a little piece off of my left index finger, through the gloves. That happens sometimes and it always fascinates me. How can you get a clean slice, through gloves? How!?!? And yet, it happens.

Things were going well for the next hour, but somewhere on the South Loop I came around a curve into some roots that looked completely unrideable. I knew that they weren't. I'd just ridden over them the previous week, and literally hundreds of times in the past 10 years. But I was wrong. They were, at that moment, to me, unrideable.

Crash!

Come on!

That one really hurt. I managed to slap my right hand down really hard on one of the roots and it felt like it stoved my entire body.

It took a minute to shake that one off.

I figured I'd better quit while I wasn't too far behind and just went home.

The next day my knee was swollen and a finger on my right hand was swollen and purple. It was difficult to type.

But two days later the swelling was gone and I felt like getting some miles in on the road bike. I added some new roads and a bunch of climbing into one of my routes. Then yesterday I rode the same route again and felt really great riding it. I felt like I was back. I had lungs again. I could push again. Woohoo again!

But then last night. LAST NIGHT. My throat started to hurt, then my head. This morning I'm coughing and stuffy and my eyes hurt.

Sophie and Iz had come down with something last week. I figured they'd just finally caught what I'd had all October. Nope. It's something new, and now I've got it too. Let's hope it's short lived.

Illness and injury. Ever-present it seems. Not my two favorite things.

Blanket's Creek

My parents have been in town all week for my Dad's birthday. Woohoo! Happy Birthday Dad!!!

This was one of his presents, apparently.

Yes, that's a crack almost all the way around his seat tube. A crack in Titanium no less.

Funny story there...

My Dad got every last mile out of an early-2000's Gary Fisher Sugar, at which point my brother gave him his old Litespeed Ocoee. My brother had broken 3 Suwanees before eventually asking them to just send him an Ocoee, which he rode for a while, gave to my Dad, and which my Dad has now broken. Not a great run for that line of bikes.

And yet, my Toccoa is still unbroken after 15 years.

To ride together, my brother rode his singlespeed and my Dad borrowed his Rocky Mountain. And we rode all over Blankets Creek for like 3 hours.

If you live in Dallas TX, Blankets has a lot of climbing, especially the Van Michaels Trail. But the padre didn't have too much trouble. Neither of us made it up Hurl Hill though. My technical climbing skills are not yet quite all back yet, it would seem.

Either way, it was great getting to ride with my Dad again. It's been too long. A year or more I think. Too long!

They're still in town too, so it's not impossible that we might get another chance.

Perhaps!

I guess we'll see.

West Cobb

Man, time flies. I took some photos on a ride over a week ago and still haven't uploaded them. I guess time flying is a good thing. Means interesting stuff's happening.

Well, a week and a day ago I'd been feeling like I'd been lazy so I got out on the road for a few hours. I've got all these loops that I do out in West Cobb County and it seemed like a good idea to string them all together. I didn't really think it through though. Each of those loops can take a few hours. It would be a pretty long day...

First I climbed Mableton Parkway, the longest climb that I know of in the West Cobb area. My favorite landmark on Mableton Parkway is the A-Head A-Time Hair Salon.

It's between two little kicks and I know I'm getting close to the top when I pass it.

Then I rode down Gordon and back up whatever road parallels Gordon. Gordon is great because you can get completely spun out for a mile or more. Woohoo!

Then I rolled through Mableton.

And there's not really much there. They have a "Historical District" sign but everything in the historical district has been redeveloped into a neighborhood except for an old depot along the tracks, and there was a train blocking that. There's this mural though.

But that's about it.

Then I took Clay Road out to Powder Springs and grabbed some breakfast at the BP.

Mmmm, chocolate donuts.

Actually I wasn't quite to Powder Springs proper yet.

But I was a few minutes later.

And then there was the long stretch north to Acworth.

I'd been kind-of suffering all morning so far. More than could be accounted for by lack of consumption of calories. Only lack of sleep, working long hours, and lack of riding could account for such suffering. I hate that particular kind. The last time I felt it was on the first day of the CFiTT and it was no good. I hoped I'd wake up and shake it but it wasn't looking good at that point.

Somewhere along the side of the road on the way to Acworth I passed two interesting bits of road kill.

The first was a badger. No kidding, a badger. I got a good look at it. If I hadn't been suffering so much I might have stopped to take a picture, but it was on a short climb and I felt like if I stopped I'd never get started again.

The second was just a deer, but all 4 feet were sticking out into the shoulder and I didn't see it until I was right up on it. I swerved to dodge it awkwardly and got all squirrely for a minute. I joked to myself that it would actually be kind of funny if I'd crashed. I could tell people that a deer had tripped me.

As I approached Acworth, some guy laid on his horn as he passed me. It had been a while since I'd been harassed on the road so I guess I was due. I was riding like a foot to the right of the white line though so it seemed a little uncalled-for. I looked back, expecting to see an old haggard-looking guy in a beat up S-10 with no air conditioning, smoking a cigarette or something, but it turned out to be a really normal looking family in a minivan.

And then there was Acworth.

My buddy Billy is getting married in Acworth in November and as fate would have it, he called me to see if I wanted to ride the next day right as I passed the place they were going to have their wedding! What are the odds?

The climb to Kennesaw was horrible. The very air was strangling me. It was bad. I was pushing through it but that's all I was doing. I didn't enjoy a minute of it.

I pulled up next to an older lady and a younger man, maybe her son, at a light. They were in a red Miata with a personalized plate "WAYTOGO". I liked the plate. The guy looked at me: "I like your bike." And I was all: "Thanks man." But then he laughed facetiously. Or did he? It sounded facetious. Or maybe not. But why else would he laugh? I was puzzled. They sped away right as this occurred to me. I've seen movies like that where the guy gets confused and the antagonist disappears right as he opens his mouth, and he's just left standing there puzzled. It was like that.

When I got to Kennesaw there was some beerfest going on across the tracks to the left.

People were arriving and looking happy, relaxed, excited... I smiled at the disparity. I could not have described myself using any of those adjectives. My adjectives would have include sleepy, weary, dragging and lightheaded.

There's a little bit of downhill on the way out of Kennesaw but I still had to climb that mountain looming in the distance there.

Ugh.

There's a new paved trail on the side of Barrett Parkway and a family rode by in front of me at the stop light. Mom, dad, 2 kids. They looked fresh and happy to be out getting a little exercise. I was jealous and it made me laugh to myself.

The mountain was horrible.

I was relieved to roll into Marietta.

There wasn't anything going on in the square there, but lots of people were about. My legs were starting to twinge and I wasn't looking forward to any more stoplights.

Fortunately Atlanta Road is mostly downhill in that direction, and there are long stretches without stoplights, but the ones that there are all seem to have hills after them. I forgot to snap a picture as I rode through Smyrna. The hills on King Springs and Cooper Lake didn't seem all that bad for some reason.

When I got home it was like 5 hours later. Five hours! No idea how far it was, but five hours seemed like a long time.

Fortunately though, the next day I rode with Billy and had a great day. Like really great. That just seems to happen sometimes. Got to burn off the poison that first day, I guess. The second day is always better. Maybe if I ride more then it'll always be the second day. To ride more I'd have to work less though, and that's not going to happen any time soon. Duty calls! Speaking of which, I probably ought to get back to it.

Back to it!

Silk Sheets

My brother and I tried to coordinate a Silk Sheets ride for 3 or 4 days. I kept getting the times and dates of potentially conflicting events wrong though, and it wasn't until last night that we finally settled on this morning, bright and early.

Except that it wasn't that bright. Just early.

I felt great for about the first 10 miles, except that it was so foggy that my glasses were useless. It doesn't look all that foggy in the photo. My iPhone must have some kind of built-in FLIR that I don't know about because it was seriously wet and damp and foggy.

Along the first few miles of the route we saw some scaffolding set up and a few pop up tents, and small security crews in orange vests. They film the Walking Dead out that way a lot, so that was my bro's first idea, but then he remembered that he thought that they were having the Futureworld Rave out there like a week from now or something. I'd never heard of it but he said it was like the Woodstock of raves. Sounds cool. I'll have to take his word for it though, as I am not plugged into any such scene.

We took a fairly circuitous route in a generally southwest direction. The roads were familiar, but I'm usually on them heading back instead of out.

Around Rico we went through an intersection with 4 things that you don't see that often, all at the same time. There was a firetruck on the left, a girl jogging through the intersection (loaded up and looking like she'd be out there for a while), a pair of dogs running down the middle of the road, and something else that I can't remember now. Dangit I wish I could remember that 4th thing, it's important!

Somewhere around mile 10 or 15 the fun turned into work. I hoped it was just a tough spot but I feared it was lack of good recovery after yesterdays excursion to Blankets, compounded by weeks of bad sleep.

I have this ridiculous schedule these days: work all day, then around 9 or 10 run a process that takes 3 hours, set an alarm and get up to check it, then run another process that takes about 15 minutes. If all that worked then rerun the same 3 hour process in Brazil and set another alarm to get up for that one. If it worked, run the 15 minute processes again there. Then get up at 6:30 with the kids for school. Grab a few hours of rest somewhere during the day, if possible, usually between 9AM and noon. I'll be glad when I'm done with this project, or at least this phase of it.

So, anyway, we headed southwest forever, out past Serenbe, out past the Old Tin Gin...

Around mile 35 or so we'd climbed one hill too many and the work turned into suffering. I couldn't keep up.

No good.

A mile or two later I was sitting on.

We passed a lot of other cyclists, several runners, a guy on a bike that I'm not sure I'd call a "cyclist" per-se, some guy running down the dead-middle of the road, way out in the middle of nowhere, in the fog, and countless other odd things. A flatbed carrying a combine passed us going the other direction once too. It had to come way over into our lane to keep from crushing into the trees along the road too badly.

We stopped at the Roscoe store for a little bit. I wasn't feeling good there so I rested up a little, drank a bunch of Gatorade and ate an ice cream sandwich.

This little dog with an injured leg came limping across the street to see if we had anything for him too.

Cute little dog, but all I had were Clif Blocks and an Ice Cream sandwich and my experience has been that unless you have something with meat in it, dogs are happy to let you throw it on the ground, but then they just sniff it and walk away. No way I was doing that with my ice cream sandwich.

No way.

Right as we got up to leave I realized I had a flat. It turned out that the rubber had just cracked around the valve stem though, no little piece of glass or wire or anything else in the tire. Woohoo! Fortunately I had a picnic table right there to sit on and fix it. Mmmm, hmmm. If you have to fix a flat, then being at a store, with a picnic table, right after refueling and re-hydrating is the way to go. May I be as lucky next time.

I managed to sit on for most of the rest of the ride, until we hit the two kicks on Creel Road. Ugh. It was bad.

And that was it. No additional excitement. The miles were good, and I guess it's good to suffer some, but I usually like suffering when I'm in the mood to suffer and this morning I was decidedly not.

The lack of sleep is the big killer in this equation. Got to get this project finished. Better get back to it now, actually...

Blankets Creek (again)

It's not hard to imagine that I was back at Blankets Creek today.

This time I was there all alone, trying to figure out what went so wrong the last few times.

In a word: tire pressure. Actually that's two words. All the issues I was having with cornering were purely a function of tire pressure. It would appear that my pump is less accurate in the mountain bike range than in the road tire range. Might be time for a new pump.

After letting a little air out everything felt right and I had about 90% fewer problems than last week.

Not to say that I didn't have any problems. I'm still not as smooth as I need to be. I'm still under-geared all the time. And then there is this:

Dropping bottles.

I dropped my bottle at least 3 times today. The cage is lower than on the road bike and I end up sticking the bottle like 1/3rd of the way into it. That happened twice. The third time I just rode into some crap all of a sudden and had to drop it. Ridiculous. How did it come to this....

On the bright side, I "discovered" a new trail. There's this little downhill run near the freeride trail. It's even marked at the bottom, but it's not signed at the top, kind-of hard to see, and from the lack of wear, it doesn't look like too many people know about it.

I saw a doe and a fawn together on Mosquito Bite. Could have been the same pair Billy and I saw 2 weeks ago. I almost T-Boned another doe heading back toward the lot too. That's an exaggeration actually. I had plenty of time to stop, but I had to stop to keep from hitting it. It was just standing there sideways across the trail, uninterested until I got about 3 feet away.

Also, I know that hikers and runners are supposed to yield to mountain bikers at Blankets, but it seems wrong every time.

So today wasn't quite shred yet, but I did rip a little. I also rode all over the little skills area and it appears that I still have decent balance. The skinnies didn't seem all that skinny. I cleared the small table top on the freeride run too, and 2 of the three on that rock and shock section. Jumps don't feel natural yet. They are admittedly low on my list of things to work on though.

Plenty of progress but plenty more to go.

Good money says I'll be there again next weekend.

Weekly Beatdown

Can I call it that when this is only the second one that I've done, and not in a row, and it's near the end of the season?

I jumped in with the Smyrna Bicycles guys again this past Monday afternoon. I was still feeling beat up from riding Blankets the day before, but I figured I'd be OK. I was. The ride was OK too.

I got dropped on the first big hill, but pulled on to another group of stragglers and wasn't the last guy to roll up to the regroup. I guess that's a good way to describe the whole ride. I could never hang on to the lead group, but I was always either the first of the rest of the guys, or in the first group. I guess that's something.

I realized that aside from one time 2 weeks ago, it's been like 2 years since I did a group ride. It seems like I used to suffer every year when the season would start back up too. Maybe that's what's happening. Yeah, I'll go with that.

The ride was a lot of fun. The route is crazy. Ten-million turns. The guys are cool and friendly.

It is getting darkish toward the end though, so the rides are numbered. Maybe only 3 or 4 left I imagine. Got to get em before they're gone.