Not a very exciting update today, just doin' my baby steps :)
Did a little bit of casual riding this weekend. Found a quieter way to enjoy the neighborhood with 75% bike paths. Really only a 20 minute ride but it's pleasant and it's just enough to tide me over. I'm hoping to hit the trail a few times this week, if all goes to plan.
I performed my first bit of bike surgery yesterday. My seat was still really uncomfortable in the forward region, to the point where I couldn't really ignore it. When I first bought Freya she had a narrower contoured seat and I almost immediately hated it, like an almost instant NOPE. Clay's bike had a cushy padded seat, so we swapped, like I think the day I bought it or very close to it.
When I was putting my bike away last night I glanced over at the original seat and all my bicycle rabbit-hole googling paid off: I recognized that it was a Specialized Dolce BG seat -- or in normal person speak, a bike seat designed for women's anatomy. It's narrow, with gel-like padding, and a cutaway in the middle. I figured now that I have padded bike shorts, it was time to give the shunned lady-seat a chance.
So I pulled both bikes out of the garage and set to work. Kind of. I took both seats & seatposts out, and in my absentmindedness thought oh I can just swap them over, seatposts and all. No dumbass. You have to take the seat OFF, and reattach it to your seatpost. Which I knew. Somewhere. That knowledge was probably buried deep in my logical brain under piles of old Mariah Carey song lyrics and 70's tv show theme songs and Looney Tunes cartoons. Good luck finding THAT.
A frustration in my life is that I always overestimate my ability to accomplish basic physical tasks like loosening bolts. It's sad, but I am cursed with tiny baby hands and pasta limbs. I have bucketloads of will and I can visualize what needs to be done but in reality I can't loosen shit for shit. I picture myself with bulging forearms like Rosie the Riveter when in reality I'm a Cabbage Patch doll. If I was on my own I would probably just have banged at the allen key with a hammer til it loosened but I caved and asked Clay instead. Sometimes you just gotta admit defeat. But it was kinda fun tinkering once the blasted things were loosened, and I got the lady-seat attached & adjusted.
I took it out for a test drive today. I was a bit apprehensive - the padded shorts were still in the wash from yesterday so my only option was to ride pad-less. DUN DUN DUN.
It wasn't too bad! That's not to say that no-pads don't suck, it totally does suck. But even without pads the seat is a LOT more comfortable in the all-important forward region, 100% improvement there. So that's good. Bit harder on the old bum, for sure, but the padding in the shorts will help there I think.
So that's about all for now. Stay tuned this week for more adventures getting the bike in the car (yay) and hopefully I'll finally achieve my goal of a couple of good satisfying trail rides this week.
But at this point I've accepted the fact that I'm Pee Wee Herman and I'm okay with that. Ha Ha!
The weather has finally come to its senses THANK GOD. I know it's summer & I know it's Sacramento but 108 is Phoenix and no one wants to live in Phoenix.
I took to the trail after work tonight, with pretty good results. I'm logging it as a 'could be better' though - there's a few details that need tweaking. But I did not collapse in a heap on the side of the road this time so let's also note this one as a VICTORY.
I kept the car at work again, even though I swore I wouldn't. This time I took a different trail that picks up not far from work and goes along Folsom Blvd & down to the trail entrance near my old job.
It was lovely, riding-wise. I really do love the feeling once I'm on the bike and going. But on this new route I had to cross two large intersections with traffic lights, stopping for both, both ways. I'm definitely not into the stopping and starting. And adding even a little bit of traffic in the mix, it takes away some of the enjoyment so I don't think I'll take this one again.
Because of the traffic stops, it took a bit longer than I expected to get to the trail entrance & I was very conscious of the fact that I was going to have to turn around and go back almost immediately, or I'd be in the same predicament as last time. But I did take a few minutes to toodle along the lake. It was lovely!
At one point two very fancy cyclists on VERY fancy, Tour De France-looking road bikes whizzed past me & one of them shifted gears and it made this amazing KACHUNK sound & I stared after the shiny frames and big black rims in a sort of confused wonderment.
Allow me to paint you a picture:
You're driving an old Ford Pinto, windows down, radio on, you're going at a good clip, the wind's in your hair and you're having a good time. And then a Tesla zooms past you and you absentmindedly marvel at how shiny and fast it is and how quickly it disappears over the horizon and then it feels like maybe you're going backwards or not moving at all & you suddenly realize how incredibly slow you're going and you can barely conceive of what it must be like to drive such a futuristic machine... basically you feel like Rip Van Winkle waking up from a hundred year nap with birds flying out of your beard.
Also I saw a tandem bike today. I never understood the appeal and now that I'm riding for recreation I still don't understand. It just seems like an eccentricity for the sake of a spectacle.
On my way back to the car, I saw a boy take a header off his bike in the middle of a big intersection. I caught up and asked him if he was okay, he said he was fine but his chain had come off, and his friend was helping him put it back on. Since he was ok and he had the chain under control I pushed on (also very conscious that I would be little to no help putting his chain on).
He bloody well jinxed me because 10 minutes later mine came off too.
Okay to be honest it was kind of my own fault so maybe he didn't totally jinx me. He only sort of did.
Cyclists rarely recommend shifting your big gear and your small gear simultaneously because, well, it's a stupid thing to do. I was climbing my final hill & shifted simultaneously & too quickly with both hands like a moron, the whole thing went CLUNK and I knew exactly what had happened without even looking at it. Dumbass.
By then I was ready to walk so I figured this was just the universe giving me a slightly noble excuse, maybe as an olive branch for last time. So there was walking AGAIN but it wasn't anything like last time's walk of shame, thank god. And I didn't really even lose my breath (very much). For the most part it felt pretty good!
I definitely decided that that final stretch back to the office is just too goddamn much for me. That long slight gradient just kiiiiiiiiills my fat ass on the bike. So I'm just going to start from the trailhead next time, and see if that works out better.
I definitely need an odometer or something to clock my miles & time.
Oh...I had another ridiculously stupid tango with the bike again trying to get it in the car. I know, I know. I should have this down by now. I just couldn't get it to go! I got so frustrated that I figured I'd just concede defeat and remove the front wheel. I got the pin out and then discovered I needed to loosen the brake clamp to let the wheel go free. No allen key meant no means of loosening the brake clamp which meant i had to put the wheel back together and try AGAIN to get the dumb bike in the dumb car without breaking the bike, the car or me.
I told Clay about my uncoordinated adventures and we decided that if I am still riding in October, we will invest in a bike rack for the car. Anyone who has known me for any length of time will know that I am very, very VERY prone to terrifying whirlwind obsessions that come and go like summer thunderstorms. Cycling being a rather expensive obsession, it's wise to exercise some financial caution; especially since we know how my last cycling obsession turned out.
But overall, I'm still enjoying myself immensely and the challenges are yet to deter me.
And as a final passing thought, I will say that the thing I'm really enjoying about riding is that it's a very mindful form of recreation. It's not like walking where you can listen to music and/or daydream. With cycling you have to be 100% present at all times. You can't listen to music because it's illegal and dangerous. I wondered early on if that would become a dealbreaker for me, but so far it hasn't been at all. I don't even notice. Focusing my attention on how I'm riding, how I'm feeling, on my breathing or my gear changes or possible traffic ahead or behind me...I think this kind of mindfulness is healthy for me, my brain was getting kind of sluggish and easily distracted. And it's not exhausting...it's sort of zen? I dunno. I sound like a big dumb hippy.
