I jumped in my car for the ride home and immediately pushed the little button on my clock that switches the indicator from time to temperature. 72 degrees flashed and I knew I had to ride.
I know that winter isn’t over. You can count on at least one snow AFTER St. Patrick’s Day and that’s still a little over a week away. I’ll leave the plow on the truck until then and I know I’ll still be doing some riding on the trainer, but Spring is almost here. There is a new wrinkle in my 61-mile birthday ride though and it’s called foot surgery. I could go before the surgery. If I pushed myself through a bit of pain, I could do 61 today. The idea is to do without the pain, or so I’ve come to believe over these past few years. Or I could just go for the ride after the surgery. I don’t think my doc reads the blog and he’d never know. He knows me though, particularly after the medial meniscus surgery two years ago when he told me I could ride right after surgery. I rode 200 miles the following week and my knee swelled up and was in pain. When he examined me and discovered how much riding I’d done, he shook his head and commented, “I should have known I needed to tell you how FAR you could ride.”
Having said all that, I won’t do anything stupid. This has to work. I need to get back to hiking without pain and so I’ll take four weeks off if that’s what it takes. I know someone who will make sure I eat nothing be roots and berries so I don’t gain any weight during the non-training period, too. I do have a semblance of patience.
I headed out for a two-hour ride in perfect conditions. I was sweating by the third mile, something I haven’t been able to do on an outside ride since last fall. I rode until 6:30 p.m., which is about as much daylight as we have until daylight savings time kicks in. I also looked to my ‘steps’ monitor to see that I’d done over 11,000 once again. My heel ached to match that effort.
Kimberly and her daughter Kennedy came over to join me for a dinner of spaghetti and mocked my use of brown sugar in the sauce, amongst other things. They did eat it though, and Kennedy said she actually liked it. I held off on the ice cream, at least.
After an hour of icing my heel, I strapped the night splint onto my foot. It is designed to stretch out the calf, thus relieving some stress on the plantar. I’d used it the night before, aggressively tightening it to get the maximum stretch for the night. Mark had said people couldn’t tolerate it while sleeping, which I naturally took as a challenge. I woke after several hours with my foot having gone numb from the over tightening. I planned to do better on night two.
Bike duration: Two hours.
Training Heart Rate: 135 bpm.
Calories Burned: 1500.
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