It’s those colder Tuesday/Thursday morning rides that get me. Warmer Sunday rides, not so bad!

Ride reports (not Tu/Th)
Kevin getting off his bike for a very brief seizure on the way up Redwood Gulch. When I watched the video, I realized stopping for him added 30 extra seconds to my climb!

It’s becoming increasingly clear that colder temps aren’t my friend. My Kings times get slower and slower as it gets colder and colder. Some mornings I don’t even look forward to it, although, by the time I get to the top, I’m always, 100% of the time, feeling better and glad I did it.

But Sunday comes, none too soon, and things are very different. Leaving after 9am it’s quite a bit warmer than 7:30am. Of course, it’s not going to be too long before high temps of the day are in the 50s. But for now, I really enjoy the later start and warmer temps of my Sunday rides.

Kevin was feeling a lot better today than last week; we made it to Peets in Los Altos (the Peets at our old location’s shopping center) much faster today. Good thing he felt better because instead of turning back at that point, we turned up. Up Redwood Gulch, which, surprisingly, Kevin and I hadn’t gone since last April! I found myself running out of gears again but unlike some past rides up RWG, I was able to maintain a bit of power and finished faster than the previous 4 or 5 rides up.

The continuing ride up 9 to Skyline always seems a lot longer than it really is, and it was the only part of the ride, really any ride for a long time, where I felt some muscles protesting in my left leg. Fortunately, it went away before the top.

The rest of the ride is pretty easy, rolling stuff on skyline before heading back down 84 and home. It felt good.

Still riding, need to keep writing

Personal stuff, Tues/Thurs 7:45am ride

It’s important to keep routines going when things come into your life you can’t control, like my wife’s cancer. The inability to control outcome is one thing; the process, yet another. It’s been determined that surgery to remove the one pretty small tumor in her lung makes sense, because there’s no evidence of the cancer anywhere else. But it’s been 5 days since we spoke with the Thoracic Surgeon and we still don’t have a date for the surgery or even the heart echo testing that needs to be done first. And every day that thing is still in there, is one more day it’s got to spread somewhere else. But wait, there’s more. Kaiser is set for a 3 day strike October 4th-6th, which is probably throwing a wrench into their scheduling. And my sense, is that Karen’s surgery is for something life-threatening and should be put ahead of most others. That’s a more self-centered, selfish way of looking at things than I am normally comfortable with. But that’s where we are, waiting.

Meantime, it’s good to be doing the full Tuesday/Thursday morning route, regardless of how slow I’ve been climbing Kings lately. Back in the day, we’d return from the ride somewhere between 9:18 and 9:22; these days a “good” ride has me back at the start by 9:30 and sometimes as late as 9:37. Once I get up on Skyline I’m ok, and by the time we get to West Old LaHonda, I can ride at a pace where it’s not completely obvious that others are having to wait for me.

They say that one of the signs of depression is not being able to look forward to fun things in the future. By that definition, I’m doing pretty well, because not only am I looking forward to going to France, again, for the Tour, but Facebook has been sending me all these cool posts from people doing the Stelvio in Italy, and that’s something I just have to work into my plans. And I’m looking forward to taking my wife on the cruise from Hong Kong to Singapore and have even planned a “perfect day” in Singapore, a day prior to embarking on the cruise.

If only we could speed up the process of getting that tumor removed from my wife’s lung. That will make everything seem better.