Off-topic in one way and on-topic in another, since part of a writer’s life includes keeping the writer’s body capable of functioning.\u00a0 (Much as writers live in their heads,\u00a0 all that creativity requires a live, breathing, heart-beating body to sustain it.)\u00a0\u00a0 I know that, but circumstances in the family have put the focus elsewhere for the past (mumble) years and I realized this year I’d stretched the elastic limits of this body’s ability to keep up without maintenance.<\/p>\n
So–long story short and leaving out all the excuses I made for not starting earlier,\u00a0 for ever letting things get this far, etc.–Grace-the-Bike came to live at our house and I started trying to recover.\u00a0\u00a0 This was, in three weeks of hindsight, like deciding ( after years of not riding a horse and letting myself get fat and flabby) to climb on a big energetic hunter jumper and galumph around a field and over a few jumps “just to get in shape.”\u00a0 Yeah.\u00a0\u00a0 Auntie Grace is not a nice calm school horse who will walk awhile, trot awhile, stop when asked.\u00a0 No, she’s the bicycle equivalent of the hunter, the event horse, the horse that has a lot of GO and relatively little tolerance for old, fat, flabby riders.<\/p>\n
However, this old fat flabby rider has reconditioned before (on horses, with a local pool in which to swim laps,\u00a0 and a Nordic Track)\u00a0 and things are, in fact, moving along.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Not as fast as they did 17 years ago, but they’re moving.\u00a0\u00a0 Getting the bike trainer thing so I could do my minutes on the bike even when it was too wet to ride in the horse lot worked out as I’d hoped–no loss in the days of wet & mud.\u00a0 Getting the new exercise heart rate monitor worked out like I’d hoped (in combination with the bike trainer thing, and also for walking.)\u00a0\u00a0 Riding on the trainer let me learn to change gears (and which direction was which), an additional advantage.<\/p>\n
But this afternoon,\u00a0 after a brisk walk this morning when I checked on ground conditions on the proposed route,\u00a0 I got back on the bike to ride it for real.\u00a0\u00a0 In fact–across the top of the north horse lot, out the gate, and across the near meadow on the mowed (and compacted by the lawn tractor my husband rides) path.\u00a0 Stopped at the ditch crossing (a rock crossing with little-bitty-rocks on top–pretty smooth) and straddle-walked the bike across that and up the path on the other side to the first terrace berm.\u00a0\u00a0 Turned it around,\u00a0 waited for HR to drop to about 75% theoretical max,\u00a0 then started back.\u00a0\u00a0 Downslope to the crossing, zipping across the gravel, up the other side, across the near meadow (over half upslope to the horse lot gate, which is open) through that gate and back to where I started.<\/p>\n
Grace the bike did very well.\u00a0\u00a0 In face, riding on compacted grass track was easier than riding in the\u00a0 mixed dirt\/grass clumps\/ etc. of the north horse lot (though farther from the house if I had taken a dive.)\u00a0 Comparing my dismal introduction to today, though I’m still not sure Grace is the bike I want to ride for the rest of my life, I know we’re going to have some happy times.\u00a0\u00a0 And the conditioning is working (though slower than I like) because three weeks ago I couldn’t have done that.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 After awhile, you’ll have\u00a0 a healthier author who will last longer.<\/p>\n
Thank you for listening.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Off-topic in one way and on-topic in another, since part of a writer’s life includes keeping the writer’s body capable of functioning.\u00a0 (Much as writers live in their heads,\u00a0 all that creativity requires a live, breathing, heart-beating body to sustain it.)\u00a0\u00a0 I know that, but circumstances in the family have put the focus elsewhere for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[112,107],"class_list":["post-1665","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-writing-life","tag-life-beyond-writing","tag-the-writing-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1665"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1665"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1665\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1666,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1665\/revisions\/1666"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1665"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1665"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1665"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}