Home(stead)

I can't tell you how happy I am to have (finally) ridden my bike all weekend.  It wasn't going to work out for me to camp out with the Shenandoah Gang, but I had other opportunities to tackle good long rides in the perfect September sun and for that, man, I am a lucky gal.

On Saturday, Noah was with his dad, so I rode to see Grandma and she was so much better I almost burst into tears right there in her face. At meals she complained about her food and about being fussed over and I celebrated that with her, recalling only a week ago that she was so sick the family was feeding her, encouraging every bite and sip beyond every refusal, counting her total daily food and beverage intake in ounces.... It's amazing she has once again been strong enough to bounce back.

[hold for photo]

The route to Grandma's is mostly via the Keystone Trail, which I do not love, even as I feel lucky to have it. It does allow a certain mind-wandering that gravel and street traffic decidedly do NOT, and it's paved and relatively safe.

About that: I did have an experience that I'm feeling alternately scared and guilty about. Scared because of a screaming, enraged, likely drug-trippin mad Scotsman who flung his arms about, yelling FUCK YOU and various versions of FUCK THIS and FUCK THAT as he punched his fists and clomped his legs with knees high in the air, the overly exaggerated movements of a band leader, highlighting the neon yellow hi-viz vest or something tied around his ankle and kicking up the dirty pleated kilt he was wearing.  Yes, kilt.  And I felt guilty because I didn't call the police.

I saw him from a long way off, far enough away to see that all around me was nothing & no one that would come to my aid.  No golf course, no houses, no parking lot, no businesses.  The terrain at this point fell away steeply from the trail; there was nowhere to go, so I pedaled harder, barreling on at top speed as the unthinkable happened:  he stepped directly into my path, blocking the bike.  Mere feet away I started yelling back at him in as deep a voice I could still scream loudly in, "MOVE!  MOOVVVEE!!!"and OMG he did, he stepped back, enraged, livid, still yelling.  He didn't stop yelling as I pedaled hard away, deciding to stop the bike with I was a safe distance and call the cops.  When I felt like I'd ridden a safe distance, I paused the bike and put a foot down to turn & look for him and he was RUNNING FULL SPEED AHEAD RIGHT AT ME so oh hell no, I jumped on my bike and listened to him yell behind me for what felt like the entire ride home.

SHUDDER
No such drama on the Homestead Trail - it was AWESOME.  L* and I joined a group of friendly women that I'd met before but didn't know. We had a lovely ride from Beatrice to Marysville, KS yes that's right I rode my bike to Kansas !  For those of you keeping score at home, that's 78.2 miles Beatrice to Marysville thankyouverymuch and my knee, while not thrilled, did not give out on me.  (Thank you, ibuprofen and ice packs!)

The trail is very well maintained, flat, and has a good bit that's shaded and a good bit that's alongside a river or two. It reminded me more of the Katy than the Wabash, if we're comparing rails to trails.  Other than those of us riding the Homestead 100, it was not busy.  The trail has covered rest stops every 5-15 miles with picnic tables, water fountains, and bathrooms (bathrooms will be locked & water shut off November 1st).  The rest stops include images of the trail network, trail history, and other interesting information.  One section of the bike trail corresponds with the Trail of Tears and has been deeded over to the Ponca Nation.  Another section was visited by Laura Ingalls Wilder, and a quote from her describing the area is on the wall.  While I mentioned several times how "new" I found the trail and its amenities, of course it's not new at all.  Many feet --human and animal, and many travois and wheels -- wooden, steel, and now rubber passed along the route long before we did.  It's good to be reminded.

I highly recommend the El Ranchero restaurant in Marysville though will caution those of you who are looking for an ice-cold beer on a Sunday ride will be disappointed -- Marysville does not sell alcohol on Sundays.  (I congratulated myself with pizza and an Odell's Rupture IPA on return to Omaha.)  Mmmm pizza...

  I admit it: I'm very proud to have ridden this distance.  It's my longest this year, one of my longest since I got sick, and certainly the longest since I crashed in July. It made me so happy to make the trip with a good friend and make new friends besides.  It made me so happy that I could use the knee without killing it. I am back home, home on the trail!  Maybe there's cross-country bikepacking hope for this grrrritty grrravel girl yet.


*I don't use names without permission.  Unless I've given birth to them.  (Sorry, Noah!)

Looking Up, Looking Down

Bike crash recovery isn't going exactly as planned.  I had no idea the knee injury was this big a deal until I started asking questions like, "when can I put weight on it without pain" and heard that the answer is probably never.  The PCL is gone and the MRI showed that the MCL is also damaged and the kneecap has some fissuring, which sounds the scariest but apparently is the least of my concerns.  Now I'm wondering if I have some kind of stress fracture in my foot, which was so far behind the rest of the injuries in terms of severity or pain that I ignored it, expecting it to heal on its own.  It hasn't. Or, you know, it's foot cancer.

Don't you wish we had those Star Trek devices that could be run across a body and instantly and precisely diagnose problems?  What if we could run something like that across our brains or hearts and determine how to best heal them? 

At various times just this week, my heart has broken for others -- it's been a very hard week for some people I love -- but my brain has failed to come up with how best to help them.  I can speak up, I can show up, I can listen, write, and thank.  

How best to help myself is to ride, but I'm struggling, struggling.  My answer to "why don't you wear a brace" has been, "because I want to feel it -- I want to feel when it's hurting too much so I can stop" was accepted by doc and PT alike, but I think it's time to pull one on. At least a sleeve would help keep the knee from wobbling all over the place when I try to pedal, it would help me direct the force downward like I'm encouraged to do.  Pulling backwards and lifting up are still too painful.  The hope is that my quad and calf muscles can be developed enough to take over and that at some point, I'll walk and cycle, maybe not normally, but tolerably.  I had a readjust my goals a bit without letting myself plummet into despair.  I did plummet into a bag of Arby's roast beef sandwich, a side of potato cakes, and a jamocha shake last night.  Sorry, Whole 30, I hardly knew ye.  Mo money, mo problems?  I say mo problems, mo carbs!

Riding scared the crap out of me last Thursday --er, a week ago Thursday.  I rode on the trail, less than 30 miles out and back to the new Taco Ride -- the BBF Taco Ride that's every other week at the Bellevue Berry Farm right off the Big Papio Trail.  I actually thought, in my head, "this isn't fun" and "I want this to be over" and even, when it was time to ride back, "I don't want to do this."  I was so demoralized, so down, I didn't ride for over a week.  Last Monday, in another form of giving up, I rode the e-bike on a group ride about the same distance but on the Keystone, i.e., also flat.  That hurt too, and I'm really not sure why.  I called it another form of giving up there, but that's not fair.  I showed up, damnit, in the best way I could.  

In training, you do a bit, push a bit, it hurts a bit, then you come back and can do a bit more next time.  Healing from this crash hasn't worked out that way.  It's often felt more like one step forward, two steps back.  But bit by bit, a lot of things are changing and bit by bit, I am choking it down.

Got Any ID?

I feel like an imposter on both blogs now.

A) Though still struggling with the havoc it & its treatments wrought, I'm no longer a cancer patient.  So I should be here!
B) no matter how many times I insist that I am, I'm nobody's idea of an athlete.  SO I should go back there to whine and cry.
C) Sigh.

Though I'd like to be done with caringbridge, I still feel the need for vehicle for venting ... and also, it feels wrong to leave it before I'm done with surgeries and stable under meds.  (She said "stable," LOL.) 

I've read many other cancer blogs, and one thing has been almost universal: they stop suddenly.  Either the author passes away or the writer gets better.  Either way, there's never that dénouement, and there's very rarely continued writing about cancer's aftermath...the quotidian struggles of a drastically changed life.  As an avid fiction reader (and shitty fiction writer), I'm spoiled by getting to know "the rest of the story."  I love movies like "Animal House" where we learn what happens to each of the main characters years in the future.  Senator and Mrs. Blutarski, etc.  So I'm un-quitting caringbridge.

But I'm going to keep this one going too, because I do want a place where cancer & its trappings are NOT the main subject, and where I can geek out to my heart's content over a discussion of 1x gearing.  (TL;DR: Yesterday I got excited reading a blog entry & Twitter chat about 1x gearing for gravel racing!)  ((TTL;DR: It was my birthday and I squee'd over whatever I damn well pleased.))

Mainly I was excited because I knew what the hell they were talking about -- a rarity for Ann In Raceland (or Ann In Gearland, or Ann In Mechanicland).  I knew because when I bought the Niner RLT from Jason @Method Cycles last January, we discussed the pros & cons, I chose that very setup for the build, and have never regretted it.

It could be that someday in the distant future, this blog becomes more a place for race and gear reviews, and I'd love to kick that off with a detailed entry about 1x gearing and what that means to my riding, but at this point the review would be full of words like "doohickey" and "the thing that does the thing" because seriously, I don't know what the hell I'm doing most of the time. 

I pedal.  I make circles, with one foot anyway, so it's not the "perfect circles" I advocate.  I'm uneven.  Until the left knee's ligaments heal or the muscles take over, I have been riding clipped in on the right but not on the left.  I can't risk twisting that knee on a need to quickly unclip & get my foot down. 

After riding the Haddam Hounds Hundy & Gravel Worlds with one Keen SPD sandal and one Nike trainer I finally pulled a pair of never-worn Pi tennies from my bike shelf and added a cleat to one and left the other with the cleat placeholder intact. YAY, my shoes match AND are both flush to the ground AND I can clip in with the right and not worry about twisting my knee on the left.  It's not perfect but I'm doing the best I can, sort of limping up hills and straddling both worlds.  Kind of like with the blogs.  Kind of like with my life.