Running and Cycling

I may have been slow, but I looked good in my Nuu-Muu. Photo via Nuu-Muu.com

Let’s get the crazy part out of the way first, shall we? I ran eight miles with my former teammates yesterday. Well, “ran” may be a little bit optimistic. There was a lot of walking in my run/walk ratios, because let’s face it, I haven’t really, really run since Nike last October. It was a beautiful run through the vineyards, with horses, alpacas, lots of happy dogs and one rooster that wouldn’t stop crowing. I now have one cranky IT band, but I otherwise feel that weird sense of satisfaction that happens after I run (never during, always after).

My new bike, a Novara Transfer that my child wants to call “Tranny.” Ummm… no.

In other news… the new bike arrived on Tuesday night, several days ahead of schedule! It’s a lovely bike, and works well as the cargo hauler that I intended her to be. However, on our first long ride on Thursday, I thought that my ass was going to be permanently damaged by that seat. Seriously, every time I hit any sort of a bump, I thought that it was going to shove my spine right up and pop my head off like a Pez dispenser.

I stopped at REI, and as I limped my way through the bike department to find a replacement seat, I was approached by a friendly, helpful REI lady. She asked if I needed any help and I explained that I just wanted to find the seat that I have on my other bike, which works well. And then the surreal conversation started.

“So it hurts in the bones?” she asked.

“Yes, the base of my spine, tailbone mostly, but also in my sit bones. Pretty much all bony parts of my ass are bruised.”

“Do you have a prominent coccyx?” she asked.

I stopped for a moment. “Honest to god, in all the times I’ve compared my body to anyone else’s, I can’t say I’ve ever paid much attention to other coccyxes.”  [Ok, I seriously just went down a Google rabbit hole on this one. Did you know that the plural of coccyx is coccyges? I had no idea, and it looks completely wrong.]

Anyway, I now know that I must have a particularly prominent tailbone. At any rate, I swapped that seat as quickly as possible and now like my bike much, much better. Now, if I could just fix its too-short kickstand that causes it to tip over like it’s drunk.

I’m going to Disneyland! (Slowly! Over the course of three months!)

As long as we’re on the topic of bikes, I’ll tell you that I rode 132 miles last month, for a total of 404 miles (650 km) in the three months that we’ve been tracking our mileage. How far is that? Oh, just the distance from San Francisco International Airport to Disneyland.

This week is a crazy rush week as I try to close out projects in preparation for next week’s vacation and then my annual fitness retreat in the Seattle area. I expect to return home thoroughly exhausted, but in a good way.

How’s your summer treating you?

Tags: bicycle, bike, cycling, novara, nuu-muu, REI, respiro, seat, selle royal, team in training, transfer

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