A couple weeks ago I developed, simultaneously, a pretty sore left shoulder and a really nasty nerve pinch in my right hand. It’s likely the shoulder came from descending Umunhum a few weeks ago; the descent requires an enormous amount of braking pressure, and things were likely made a bit worse when I did a fair amount of test-riding my son’s bike prior to his taking it to France. His setup is really strange; due to a knee issue he has to have his saddle tilted way down at the nose, which shoves you into the bars, putting a lot of pressure on your hands and… shoulders.

Unfortunately, it was going to be about two weeks before I could see an ortho at Kaiser, and during that time my right hand issue resolves on its own, but the shoulder… still there. Activity generally made it feel better; sleeping has been a problem. So I kept the appointment and got a bunch of x-rays showing nothing serious, no problem riding in France. She even offered cortisone shots if it got bad enough (it’s not that bad) and overall had a great amount of respect for someone who wants to stay active.

So not exactly a clean bill of health, but a much better message than I could have received. Hard to say if that was what helped me climb Kings faster this morning, or if it was the nicer weather (finally, no leg warmers or base layers!!!).

All of this a really good thing since Kevin and I will be heading to France today (Wednesday) to catch up with the ‘Tour. We’ll be flying SFO-LHR-GVE (Geneva), then taking a train from Geneva to Annecy, where we’ll be staying until a week from Friday. Annecy will allow us to see 6 stages either solely by bike or extending our range with local trains… no rental car, yay! Some very challenging rides, a couple not so bad. More detail shortly (I’ll probably be posting our itin from the plane). Only thing I’m not looking forward to is the apparent lack of air conditioning. Annecy is one of those strange regions in France where they still don’t believe in air conditioning. But it won’t be too hot, right? Nah. Mid 90s… we might break our previous record for Orangina consumption. Fortunately, I do better in too-hot weather than too-cold.