I was dreading getting back on my bike last week.

Last summer, I usually rode either after work, or to and from work. But in the spring, it isn’t warm enough in the morning or evening, so I decided to try riding mid-day from work. I can’t take my bike in my normal car, so on Tuesday I packed up my gear and my bike in our (very) old mini-van. Then I planned a route from my office, and watched the hourly weather forecast and my schedule of meetings. At 3:00 I set out for my first ride of the year.

[My normal car, by the way, is a Honda S2000 roadster. It’s sleek and small, a 2-seater convertible. It hugs the road… Carolyn hates it – she calls it the “stupid car” or “the snowflake” – I call it the “fun car”. She prefers the minivan, which can hold a household full of what she calls furniture and I call crap. She refuses to believe that you can even fit a week’s worth of groceries in my trunk. Which you totally can! Carolyn adds: if you don’t plan on much cooking that week.]

Right off the bat, there were annoyances on my ride – I forgot to bring my sun glasses, the fancy new helmet intercom wouldn’t sync with my phone to play music, and I couldn’t find my full finger bike gloves. (I think one of the kids stole took them, but I’ll never know.) These annoyances were quickly overshadowed by the pain of struggling up the first hill out of the office complex. In the end I managed to slog through 10 miles and ended up cutting the ride short. Sigh.

It was during this ride that I finally realized that the reason my foot hurt was because my bike shoes were pinching my foot. And since the shoes lock into my pedals, they have to be aligned correctly or I’ll develop other aches and pains and injuries. So I decided to get new shoes and get a complete bike fit at the same time. I scheduled one for the next day.

Of course, the weather that next day was beautiful, but with taking time out of work for the bike fit, I didn’t have time for a ride. The bike fit, however, was great – I was gratified that I had the bike set up just about perfectly in the back (seat and pedals), and was surprised by the suggestion to get wider and higher handle bars. I had been thinking of raising them a bit, but had never considered widening them – something that seems to have come into fashion in the 23 years since I bought my bike. The guy at the shop set me up on a trainer with the higher and wider bars, and I really liked the result. Perhaps this will fix the pain I get in my right shoulder while riding (it’s only been bothering me for 40 years).

It being spring, the bike shop is very busy. They estimated a week to change the handlebars, so I decided to do it myself. It really isn’t hard, but it’s a pain to take off the bar tape, brakes, and mount for the front pack and remount it all on the new bar. The hardest bit was the retraining cable for the front pack mount – it is a standard braided wire cable and the end frayed a bit – I had to tin it with some solder to be able to feed it back through the locking bolt.

Thursday I tried riding again – I did the same little 10 mile loop and felt much better. I found my sunglasses, and I charged the helmet intercom so that I could listen to my music – listening to music while I ride really makes it much more enjoyable for me. Again I cut off the ride at 10 miles, but at least it did not kill me like it had on Tuesday.

Friday was supposed to rain so I drove the Snowflake and didn’t bring my bike to work, but I kept looking out the window and it was sunny and nice outside. I decided to leave work early, go home and ride and then work from home for the rest of the afternoon. Once I was on the bike and on “home turf” I decided to do one of my regular routes – a 20 mile route. I was sorely tempted to cut it short, but managed to finish the whole route – at a pathetic pace, but I felt good finishing it. I think if the weather holds out, I’ll be feeling much better in just a couple of weeks.

It started to warm up this week – the forecast called for several days in the low 50’s, warm enough to get back on the bike. I have to admit that I am a serious weather wimp – I don’t like to be cold and I don’t like the layers needed to stay warm on a cool day. The result is that I only ride from May to September.

The only winter exercise I really enjoy is downhill skiing, which is much too equipment and travel intensive to be done frequently to provide regular exercise. This year Carolyn and I decided not to ski because we were worried about getting hurt and screwing up our bike ride. I was getting a bit of exercise by walking the steps at work, but that aggravated the pain I’ve been having in my right foot, so I gave up stair walking to give it a chance to heal.

I have no idea what I did to my right foot. It just started hurting last fall. Our friends have been helpful trying to diagnose it based on their own aches and pains. Stress fracture? Plantar fasciitis? Gout? I really should have gone to a doctor about it, and I didn’t.

Then there’s my shoulder problem … which starts to hurt whenever I’m on the bike for a long period of time. Not at all pleasant, it feels like someone is stabbing me in the back with a hot soldering iron. I saw a massage therapist last fall and he helped tremendously. Even better, he gave me an idea of what was causing the pain, and exercises I could do to make it go away – which would be great if I had actually done them.

Last (and least) there is my ankle problem, which started back in college when I decided to train for a marathon by running on the beach. I gave up soccer a few years ago because every time I played, the ankle pain flared up.  Then it took longer for the pain to go away than the time between soccer games. Sigh. At least that one isn’t a problem on the bike.

So, between not skiing to avoid new injuries, and not stair walking to baby an existing injury, I got seriously out of shape this winter, even more than usual. I was really proud of losing 12 pounds last summer by riding hard, but I regained every one of those pounds this winter. And it wasn’t nearly as hard to gain them back as it was to lose them in the first place.

Meanwhile, while I spent last summer riding hard to get in shape, Carolyn spent last summer watching old movies on TV. It wasn’t her choice – she usually can’t stop moving. But she had developed osteonecrosis in her right knee, and 2 doctors told her the best way to handle this problem was to JUST STOP MOVING.  But she has a really hard time with that, so she swam and kayaked and did as much as she could without using her right leg. But now she has chronic pain in that knee, which is not quite the same as the pain she has in her left knee, which was the aftermath of a torn ACL in 2002.

Getting old sucks.

We have done this before, but it was a long time ago.

One of the things we had in common when we started dating was biking. In (I think) 1990, we had a group of friends who were planning a two week vacation in England – they were going on a canal boat trip for a week, then a week in London to sight-see and see Phantom of the Opera. Carolyn and I liked the idea, but spending a week on a canal boat did not appeal to us. So we decided to do a bit of bike touring and meet the rest of the group in Worchester. We planned to fly into London, take a train to Bath and start there.

Even though we had never done anything like this before, we decided to play it by ear. The only things we planned ahead were making a reservation for the first night in Bath and ending up in Worchester after a week. We would pick a destination each morning – the proprietors of the B&Bs were very helpful with suggestions for things to see.

We’d ride through the morning and early afternoon and find a B&B when we got to our destination. Then we’d shower and change into “walk-about” clothes and take in our surroundings. The next day was lather rinse and repeat.

We landed in London 5:30am on a Monday, assembled our bikes at the airport and set out for London by tube – and promptly discovered that bikes are not allowed during rush hours when we got kicked off the train at Earl’s Court.

We eventually made our way to Paddington Station and took the train to Bath. It’s a short 90 minute ride, but we fell asleep and almost missed our stop. We spent our first day in England touring the Roman ruins and trying to get our body clocks adjusted to the new time zone.

Our first mission Tuesday was on behalf of a coworker of ours who had gone to school in Bath. She asked us to take a picture of the water tower – she had painted her name on it and wanted to see if it was still there. So we rode our bikes up to the University of Bath. And I do mean up, turns out it is on top of a serious hill. When we got there, the guard wouldn’t let us on campus. When we explained that we had to take pictures of the water tower he looked confused – evidentially it had been torn down years before. Sigh.

Our goal for Tuesday was Cirencester, on the way we went through Malmesbury. As it turns out, I’ve visited Malmesbury several times since then working with a company located there. Life is full of interesting coincidences.

On Wednesday we rode to Oxford the end of the ride was wonderful, it was a long downhill into Oxford a relief after fifty miles of riding.

Unfortunately, that meant that the first thing we had to do on Thursday was ride uphill. That was the beginning of what we call the “Day from Hell” – it seems that every tour has at least one day like that, when nothing goes right. Our goal for the day was Broadway, but between a number of wrong turns, and towns without any place to eat, it was a miserable day. Things got better when we got to Lower Slaughter – a pretty little tourist trap in the Cotswolds. Then they got even better when we got smart and bought an ordinance survey map at a bookshop in Stow-on-the-Wold – that’s a topographic map showing where all the hills are!

(By the way, Carolyn hates every one of these pictures of her. And she thinks I look really young in these pictures, but that she hasn’t changed a bit.)

Friday we decided to go to Warwick where we were told there was a nice castle – I love that sort of thing. On our way we stopped at Stratford-upon-Avon and had a lovely time doing Shakespeare tourism.

Arriving in Warwick, we found a hotel where we left the bikes and went to tour the castle which was right next door. We had a nice early dinner at the hotel and went back out and checked out an interesting World War II museum. When we got back to the hotel afterwards we decided we were still hungry and had another nice dinner (and got a few questioning looks from the same server we had for our first dinner). That’s definitely one of the benefits of bike touring – all you can eat and no guilt!

On Saturday we rode to Worchester, which, while spelled the same as Worchester MA, is not pronounced at all the same, and met up with friends to take a train back to London for the rest of our vacation.

All in all, we had a terrific time and discovered a love for bike touring.

So, no we’re not totally crazy, we have done this sort of thing before. But I guess 250 miles in five days isn’t really the same as        2,300 miles in fifty seven days. So maybe we are just a little bit crazy.