I'm not publishing as the The Paleo Cyclist these days. I'm saving it all for the ebook. Instead, I will just throw out samples like this one once in awhile.
Meanwhile, I HAVE been doing a bunch of reading about the Paleolithic (the actual epoch, not the diet) and I gotta say, maybe we should have quit while we were ahead.
More meanwhile, if you find your eyes glazing over when it comes to the statistics stuff, don't worry. I don't read them either. Much.
FRI September 13, 2019
Miles: 18 Time 1:40 Average Seed:12.9 Weight: 228lbs
I did the same ride with the same mileage and time as yesterday...actually, I was a bit slower this morning, owing to a headwind and I took my time getting from the trail to the trailer. I plan to ride the same 17.5 mile route for ten days then step it up to 20 miles. I think I overdid it last month by trying for too many miles too soon. Also, my average time is inaccurate because my time and speed on the trail is adulterated by my time on the 3 miles out and back from home to trailhead.
I am thinking about pedaling the NoName bike to the shop/trailhead and starting my time/distance/average speed just based on trail time only. A bit clunky but if I am going to keep records they might as well be accurate. I could drive to the shop, also...
Another concern based on recent experience is that I am having trouble getting out of bed in the morning, and when I do get up I have zero energy. I slept through the alarm this morning and that is VERY odd. Diet? Old age? I don’t know. But it seems highly unlikely that I will be doing any morning riding once the work-a-day starts back up...but if I drove to the trailhead I could do a brisk one hour on the trail, clean up and change at the shop and go straight to work.
Hmmm...well, it’s worth a try.
10 almonds 60
2 bananas 200
Big Salad 475
4 beers 400
TOTAL 1135
On another note, I have been somewhat troubled by a very dark brown, low volume urine situation. Normally I pee all the time and a lot of it but the last two days I haven’t filled a teacup, and what I did produce looked like...well, tea. Based on internet research it seems to be dehydration accompanied by too-strenuous exercise. That seems to fit in with my other symptoms of the last couple days (fatigue, mild confusion, stumbling around on weak legs)...disconcerting, to be sure...thus the beer and I am chugging as much water as I can stand. If things don’t clear up (sorry, I can't help myself sometimes) I will be seeing the VA Doc. I have high hopes though. I HAVE intuited that I have maybe been pushing a little too hard.
UPDATE 620 pm After sitting on the porch for the last few hours, chugging water and three (soon to be four) 16oz beers I just urinated in an empty water bottle with the top cut off (plenty empties lying around here) and my urine was a glorious bright yellow. Not clear, but a definite improvement over the root beer I was pissing earlier today. Still low volume, but overall, a vast and welcome improvement. So there ya go: dehydration and strenuous exercise.
SAT September 14, 2019
Miles: 14.40 Time: 55 Average Speed: 15.1 Weight: 230
Not much to say. I am weighing myself daily now because that’s how I did it last time. How did I gain two pounds since yesterday? The four beers last night? I hope not because I’m sorta planning on doing it again tonight. Hey, it’s Saturday night. Today I rode NoName to the trailhead (my shop, by some special grace bestowed on me, is RIGHT THERE. I changed into my bibs and jersey at the shop, laced up my shoes and headed out. The trail is the only way to go; I have one busy road to cross but all four directions have “yield to cyclists” signs so it isn’t too much of a deal to cross, except that it is also a main road to the local high school so ya got that to consider...but once clear of that road (Mission Road) you are mission clear for as far as you can go; the trail, this miraculous rail trail that starts RIGHT AT MY SHOP goes over fifty miles with ZERO crossings of any significance.
I remember five years ago saying “Man too bad I won’t be around when they finally get the trail up and running...but guess what? I’M STILL HERE! AND IT”S DONE! It really is too good to be true. And today I did a solid 55 minutes at an average speed of 15 mph. My decision to limit my record keeping to just trail time is a definite payoff. While blasting along on flat, almost windless (trees) tarmac (or whatever it is) I would glance down at my speedo, see 14.9 mph and then get down in the drops and pour it on.
I think this is the stuff. I think so...
Saturday, September 14, 2019
Tuesday, September 3, 2019
The Once and Future Roadie
I just found a really small animal bone on my writing table.. Most likely it is a stray cast-off from one of my alcohol-induced chicken feasts where I take a half a Winn Dixie roast chicken and hack away at it with one of my sheath knives that seem to be reproducing here in my room faster than I can give them away...everyone I know has a Buck knife that I gave them; Smyrna Jan has the big one (I originally bought it for myself but that knife, a Buck 139, for some reason gave me the willies so I gave it to Jan because he IS the willies and ain’t afraid of nothin’, not because he is brave (he is) but because he is crazy as hell and capable of anything). I kept a very nice little rubber-handled unit that cuts just right slicing ribs or apples or anything else and I also use it to cut up half a chicken when necessary and that, most likely is where this little bone came from...and yet, I don’t know.
Be that as it may, I am here to report somewhat shame-facedly that I never made it to Mexico Beach to save the day. In fact, looking at the reports from the Panhandle, nobody else made it up there either. As near as I can tell, they got things cleaned up pretty good but rebuilding has not progressed much at all. I was headed there to rebuild a string of Macburgers that I can guarantee you are up and running by now, with or without my help. The rest of it is predictable; what was once a sleepy little seaside village with an alluringly charming name will soon enough be a solid wall of high rise oceanfront condominiums. It is the Florida Way and anybody who don’t like it, well, I feel the same way while at the same time making my living building those very same atrocities and so what can I say? I am, after all, a Trailer Park inhabitant and a Florida Man…
Meanwhile, the rascally bastards that owned the Whispering Pines finally found a buyer and things are kinda-sorta topsy-turvy. The new owner is an Orlando lawyer and since taking over a month or so ago he has evicted four trailer’s worth of miscreants and deadbeats. Those newly empty trailers are scheduled to be thoroughly cleaned and painted and rehabbed with new doors and windows and then sold to worthy customers, over age 55 and preferably having pension checks or social security benefits that can be routed through a kindly benevolent Orlando lawyer’s office.
Me, I have always been something of an outlier here at Riverside Palms Mobile Home Village. (Yeah, that’s the new name. But last week they cut down all the palm trees and the pines too. They ain’t whispering any more.) Not my pines, though. Because of my unique position in a far corner, next to a large lot owned by the city, the pines and palms are just fine. They are off the trailer park property and it seems to me my squirrel population has increased in both quantity and nervousness; squirrels and chainsaws are far from simpatico but some sympathetic handouts of extra peanuts has done a great deal towards smoothing things over with not only the squirrels but also with a group of jays and redbirds that were passing through but now seem happy to stick around.
And yet...and yet; ya don’t make it to 64 years old without learning to sniff the wind and keep an eye on the sky and there’s something coming. I don’t know what, but there’s a lawyer in it and when has that ever turned out any good for anyone involved, except the lawyer?
But listen to this: I have been unemployed for over two weeks now. I have been riding my bicycle every day, and I don’t mean beach cruising. I am slamming out daily twenty mile rides and bragging about it on a new blog I started called The Paleo Cyclist.
What happened was I came in from the Road and found decent local work and got into a groove. It was a groove that involved slow but steady beer drinking all day (yeah I drank at work get over it I live in a trailer) and also involved the Blonde’s considerable skill at preparing her native West Virginia fare, fried chicken and dumplin’s and all manner of crockpot wonderfulness that, along with a case of beer and a half-quart of Capn’ Morgans a day resulted in what might at best be described as an amorphous blob occupying the airspace of what had previously been a cyclist.
So…
Well, I am pretty happy to be typing here on the TPC again. I am going to do more of it. What is over there at the Paleo Cyclist isn’t really writing, or entertainment. It’s just a journal of my struggle to find my way back to something a little more better than where I am now. But as I was typing it up every day after my ride I started to think, well, maybe someone else might get this, someone else might want to see this…
tj
I just found a really small animal bone on my writing table.. Most likely it is a stray cast-off from one of my alcohol-induced chicken feasts where I take a half a Winn Dixie roast chicken and hack away at it with one of my sheath knives that seem to be reproducing here in my room faster than I can give them away...everyone I know has a Buck knife that I gave them; Smyrna Jan has the big one (I originally bought it for myself but that knife, a Buck 139, for some reason gave me the willies so I gave it to Jan because he IS the willies and ain’t afraid of nothin’, not because he is brave (he is) but because he is crazy as hell and capable of anything). I kept a very nice little rubber-handled unit that cuts just right slicing ribs or apples or anything else and I also use it to cut up half a chicken when necessary and that, most likely is where this little bone came from...and yet, I don’t know.
Be that as it may, I am here to report somewhat shame-facedly that I never made it to Mexico Beach to save the day. In fact, looking at the reports from the Panhandle, nobody else made it up there either. As near as I can tell, they got things cleaned up pretty good but rebuilding has not progressed much at all. I was headed there to rebuild a string of Macburgers that I can guarantee you are up and running by now, with or without my help. The rest of it is predictable; what was once a sleepy little seaside village with an alluringly charming name will soon enough be a solid wall of high rise oceanfront condominiums. It is the Florida Way and anybody who don’t like it, well, I feel the same way while at the same time making my living building those very same atrocities and so what can I say? I am, after all, a Trailer Park inhabitant and a Florida Man…
Meanwhile, the rascally bastards that owned the Whispering Pines finally found a buyer and things are kinda-sorta topsy-turvy. The new owner is an Orlando lawyer and since taking over a month or so ago he has evicted four trailer’s worth of miscreants and deadbeats. Those newly empty trailers are scheduled to be thoroughly cleaned and painted and rehabbed with new doors and windows and then sold to worthy customers, over age 55 and preferably having pension checks or social security benefits that can be routed through a kindly benevolent Orlando lawyer’s office.
Me, I have always been something of an outlier here at Riverside Palms Mobile Home Village. (Yeah, that’s the new name. But last week they cut down all the palm trees and the pines too. They ain’t whispering any more.) Not my pines, though. Because of my unique position in a far corner, next to a large lot owned by the city, the pines and palms are just fine. They are off the trailer park property and it seems to me my squirrel population has increased in both quantity and nervousness; squirrels and chainsaws are far from simpatico but some sympathetic handouts of extra peanuts has done a great deal towards smoothing things over with not only the squirrels but also with a group of jays and redbirds that were passing through but now seem happy to stick around.
And yet...and yet; ya don’t make it to 64 years old without learning to sniff the wind and keep an eye on the sky and there’s something coming. I don’t know what, but there’s a lawyer in it and when has that ever turned out any good for anyone involved, except the lawyer?
But listen to this: I have been unemployed for over two weeks now. I have been riding my bicycle every day, and I don’t mean beach cruising. I am slamming out daily twenty mile rides and bragging about it on a new blog I started called The Paleo Cyclist.
What happened was I came in from the Road and found decent local work and got into a groove. It was a groove that involved slow but steady beer drinking all day (yeah I drank at work get over it I live in a trailer) and also involved the Blonde’s considerable skill at preparing her native West Virginia fare, fried chicken and dumplin’s and all manner of crockpot wonderfulness that, along with a case of beer and a half-quart of Capn’ Morgans a day resulted in what might at best be described as an amorphous blob occupying the airspace of what had previously been a cyclist.
So…
Well, I am pretty happy to be typing here on the TPC again. I am going to do more of it. What is over there at the Paleo Cyclist isn’t really writing, or entertainment. It’s just a journal of my struggle to find my way back to something a little more better than where I am now. But as I was typing it up every day after my ride I started to think, well, maybe someone else might get this, someone else might want to see this…
tj
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