Yesterday about 4:30 I noticed that I was completely unproductive with no prospect of becoming so before 5:30. So I snuck out for a longer ride. Instead of turning right for home I backtracked left down the ARBT for a few miles. Coming back I was still ahead of schedule so I front-tracked past Willow Creek. Total distance 3.5x normal and I still got home a little early. For some reason heart rate didn't record. That's annoying. I also have been more annoyed with the bottle cage situation on the trike. The bottle is a Hydro Flask, and normally this would be ok, but on the trike the cage is level so it wants to shake out, and the cage the trike came with is an aluminum plate thing, so it's scratching the powder coat on the bottle.
I'm mostly envious of Tundra Man's recovery. I'm
very lucky I didn't get any afib. But my heart was malfunctioning going in, so I didn't have the same base level of fitness - though still better, probably, than average for HOCM. My heart is only sort-of-fixed, I still get symptoms. I feel much better than I did before the surgery. But I don't feel better than I did, say, ten years ago before I was diagnosed. As noted earlier, though, I improved since May and I think that improvement is continuing. This might be temporary due to scar tissue from the surgery that is still swollen and will subside. If that keeps getting better it would be really nice to get off the beta blocker so I can really work out hard. I haven't been able to do that in ten years. On the sternum side of things I've been naughty about lifting toddlers who weigh substantially more than 5 lb, so my recovery has been slower. I'm getting there.
For some reason I was idly fantasizing about bike racing. This was brought on by seeing photos from the
Motherlode Epic, a 32-mile trail race right in my backyard last weekend. There's other local offroad bike racing including Folsom Rodeocross in Sept-Oct, Sacramento Cyclocross in Oct-Jan, xc racing at Prairie City in the spring. I resolved a while back that I wouldn't do any MTB until I don't feel like it would really hurt to crash, figuring that would be in the spring. And what the heck am I thinking looking at racing while I'm 200lb and taking a beta blocker? But I'm sure it would be fun. Rodeocross and Prairie City both allow tandems, too.