12 weeks out
Tomorrow is February 1 and I figured that it is twelve weeks from the start of the trip. Twelve weeks is the critical number for starting a training program. I mentioned that tomorrow will make us twelve weeks away from the start of our trip. I thought perhaps there was a bat in the house again. “Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God.” There was not bad in the house, just a person experiencing a panic attack. I asked if he knew where an old journal was and was informed that they were all in the storage unit.
Yep. We don’t really have a permanent address so decided that a permanent storage unit might make things seem, well, permanent. I swear that I had seen a journal lying around here somewhere, but that had to be a figment of my imagination. And what is this journal?, you are probably wondering or maybe don’t even care. As our school trips had an academic focus, we required all the students to write a journal. The first one that we made seemed very simple and logical until we read the typical response to the directive to describe your day. “Good” was frequently the answer to that. We had to make the journals more interactive and require that each student respond with at least a two word sentence making almost everybody’s day very good.
Also in that journal was a training regime put together by the sports medicine professionals at the local medical college. We all got an initial evaluation, with the high point being submerging yourself in a tank of water for a body fat test. In addition to that dunk we rode a stationary bicycle and did other physical activities to the point of fatigue. Some of the test weren’t much different than the stress test that I did a few years ago when I had an irregular EKG, which turned out to be because I was tested on a faulty EKG machine. The really only difference between the two tests was that I was much younger the first time around. Both seemed to have the underlying agenda of making me sweat or glow if you prefer, a lot and feel like my fitness level was beyond abyssimal.
The fitness evaluators looked over the results and prescribed individual training programs for each of us. I followed mine religiously and was glad that I had considering that I took a high-geared 10-speed bicycle to NZ. There are definitely advantages to ignorance and youthful muscles. Now, even though my prescribed program probably wouldn’t apply to me right now, I am trying to find out exactly what I did to train for that first trip. I try to block out of my mind that I did one bike ride on January 1 for the last long trip that I did. I just didn’t have the time to do a prescribed program. I figured that the first week might be tough and then I would survive fine. After riding for a few minutes on that January day, I thought that I might be in big trouble. That turned out not to be the case.
I thought today that during certain riding conditions my hands and arms feel stiff like they do right now. I have been scraping, painting and spackling for what seems like an eternity and my poor digits don’t appreciate it nor do I. Maybe I should wear some cycling gloves or something or quit using the death grip when I hold tools. I know that I often use the death grip when cycling especially during strong headwinds or crosswinds. Usually, I can shake out the soreness, but that technique doesn’t seem to be working right now.
“Oh God, oh God, oh God. I have to work on the bikes and get them ready.” Now my plan is to take the proceeds from the sale of this house, which causes me great pain, and to buy some decent touring bikes. It seems incongruous that we would spend more on bicycles than we ever have spent on a car, but that’s probably ok, especially if we really do sell the house before we leave. Not selling before we leave could throw the proverbial pedal wrench into the plans, but we can make things work out.
I know that calendars don’t always conincide with my perception of time so I checked on online calendar, which meant flipping through several screens, which for me can cause some confusion. It appears that we really have more than 12 weeks until the start of the trip although my counter says that we have 90 days, which sounds like three months to me and if there are four weeks in a month, then that should be 12 weeks. But 12 x 7 is 84, so I guess that if we want to be accurate we can delay our training panic for another week. That would give us time to see if we still own a trainer that I could set up inside. Until then, I think that our training will involved walking quickly to the portapotty, climbing up and down ladders, scraping, spackling and rolling paint.