Day 151: My Shortest Ride

I finally succumb to the advice of friends today. I’ve been fighting many hurdles lately, and I now need to be realistic about my health. To fill in the blanks if you’re a first time reader, I broke my ribs a couple of months ago while enjoying a wonderful ride on Mount Tamalpais. It wasn’t the first time that I’ve broken my ribs. There was the drunk driver that hit me while I was driving my car to work in 1982 or 1983, and then I had an “off” while riding with friends five or six years ago. So the pain is familiar, and quite distinct.

This time was not much different in terms of pain. At first there was none, and then as I rode on the pain increased, at which point I knew that I was in for a long recovery from broken ribs. It’s a dull pain that simply takes time to overcome. I’m fortunately fairly immune to pain, or in clinical terms, I have a high threshold for pain.

So now that I’m making a long story longer, I broke my ribs, and then I went through the healing process, all the while riding each day and pretending that I wasn’t injured. Then I caught the nasty cold that’s been going around, during which I'd experience multiple hour-long coughing attacks. During one of these attacks my recently fractured rib/s finally gave way under the stress. So my ribs were broken again. L So I was then sick and having massive coughing attacks with broken ribs… Ouch!

My ribs started healing again,while I was also getting over my cold. I finally felt 98 percent better and was riding longer distances again, including the fun 60 mile ride that I did on my birthday. Then things blew apart again, so to speak, when I went over the handlebars during a slow speed crash on Saturday. At first I thought that I’d avoided injuring my ribs again, but then it hit me, and hard. My rib/s were causing me tremendous pain, and by Sunday night I was in pretty serious pain. So it's back to the drawing board for me.

The bottom line here is that I’ve been living with pain and discomfort from one thing or another for a while now, and I’m getting really tired of it. I need to get back to 100 percent.

This morning I spoke with my friend “J,” and she made me realize that one can actually die from broken ribs. A friend of hers died during his sleep after breaking a rib and then not tending to it. That said, I’m fairly certain that I don’t have a punctured lung, or heart, but it did make me think that I need to keep my goal within sight, and that’s to ride every day for a calendar year. I can only do that if I'm healthy, and I can do that without causing myself harm. So today I did my shortest ride since starting R2R. I rode for under an hour on a super comfortable full suspension bike. Although I feel like I didn’t work hard enough today to “justify” calling it a ride, I do believe that I did the right thing for myself. Believe me, I know that I’ll make up for today’s short ride at some point down the road. In looking at my Garmin information, I’m averaging 26 miles of riding per day, and that’s not too bad considering that more than half of my rides are on a mountain bike. Enough said about this… On a positive note, today I saw a beautifully kept 1975 BMW 3.0 CS, which is one of my favorite cars. I’m no longer a “car guy,” like I was during my teenage years, but I can still appreciate a car like this one. As a teenager I used to know every car, and their specifications, etc., etc. This Beemer was one of my favorites from that era, and it was just sitting there one quarter of the way up Mount Tamalpais. They had a wonderful style to them. I wonder how it drives?

I'm slightly embarrased to publish such a short ride, but it is what it is...

Distance: 6.26 miles Calories burned: 637 Time: 45:10 Elevation gain: 1,407 Garmin Connect ride details: http://connect.garmin.com/activity/19004320