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.

So which could I relate to? That’s pretty easy. Kings was pretty dreadful this morning. 35 minutes dreadful, and it’s not like I was slow because I was taking it easy. But, as always, the ride gets better as it goes and I was able to deliver a bit of power on Skyline, and didn’t collapse on West Old LaHonda.

Just me and non-pilot Kevin this morning; ex-pilot Kevin’s in France, riding the mountains around Grenoble. I’d complain that it was cold here, except that ex-pilot flew all the way to France to end up with what looks like 4 days of rain to ride in! Hopefully some of those days are typical afternoon thunderstorms, here for an hour or two, then gone.

No ride for me Thursday morning; that’s when my wife and I meet with the breast cancer expert at Stanford. Normally I let nothing get in the way of my morning rides, but for this, I’m making an exception.