There are more than several rides over the last months that I need to put up on the blog, but work has been crazy and full of distractions. I’ll get around to it soon.
On the morning following the Climate Ride in California, cycling from Fortuna to San Francisco, I pulled a muscle in my lower back. While bending to pick up my bag at SFO (and not even lifting), something seemed to pop around my L5/S1 vertebrae and the pain shot across my hips. At least it is not a disk or nerve impingement. However, since I had just spent the previous five days hammering my way through the Redwoods and down Highway 1, the timing was at least not awful.
I’m not sure how the universe unfolds, but I’d decided over the previous few days that this was the end of my cycling season for 2012. So, in some strange way, maybe this was my body telling me that if I wasn’t going to actually stop riding hard, it was going to find a way to make me take an involuntary break. Or maybe I was just exhausted from spending two weeks traveling to Denmark, Sweden, South Africa, Thailand and Japan before hopping on a bike to ride 100 km a day for five days.
So, I took off eight days and then rode a bit over the following weekend despite the discomfort. And, on 25 September saw Dr. Angela Liu, who specializes in musculoskeletal disorders and rehabilitation at NYU Medical Center, who told me to “take it easy.” For two days after my consultation, I fooled myself into thinking that maybe her definition of “easy” could be taken as “my” definition of easy, and I tried to keep my climbing torque at under 250 watts. But, “my” easy only made my back feel worse, and so I just took another ten days off following her “easy” before my ride this morning. I’ll see how I feel today after this quick lap of Central Park.
One thing for sure… after a ten day break, my legs are ready to ride. It may not have been good for whichever of the injured Transversospinalis muscles of the lower is giving me grief, but I sprinted up Cat Hill, holding 530 watts at 33.2 km/h. Can’t wait for nature to take its course and this muscle to finish healing.
OK, Dr. Liu, I promise that for the rest of the day I’ll take it easy.. at least until tomorrow morning for another sprint through Central Park to try and recover some of my aerobic conditioning that is slowly slipping away day by day.
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