My monologue yesterday about the joys of REAL bicycling apparently had a real-world effect on me.  Today Mike and I were in the car and he asked me the Sunday question.  You know what I mean… Sundays are open - we can choose our diversions on Sunday so every week we discuss the Sunday question:  What do you want to do today?

I hesitated, then spoke my thought out loud:  “You mentioned you wanted to go to the bookstore today…” (really our favorite “date” - to go to B&N or BAM and read expensive books that we’re not going to buy while sipping overpriced coffee) ”… or…” I actually cringed, not sure what I wanted his response to be, “…we could go for a ride on our bikes.”

He didn’t hesitate for even a second.  “Or we could do both.”

I knew right away what he meant.  We could RIDE to Books-A-Million.  Ride our bikes.  Now.  Today.

“I’m not sure I could do that.”

I was scared!  I knew it was stupid, I knew it was silly, but I was honestly scared nevertheless.  Here’s why…

When I got my bike last March, it was a “reward” for having quit smoking for more than two months.  I was way overweight before I quit smoking and I was starting to gain even more (as I replaced my nicotine addiction with my food addiction).  I wanted the bike.  I wanted the exercise.  I wanted to experience exertion without wheezing like a smoker.

I rode it around the block and thought I would die.  My legs were like rubber, they were not strong enough to haul my 250-lb body around.  The bike then sat, unused, for almost two months.  At the end of April, I decided to try it again.  I started out slow, just a five-minute ride, then a ten-minute ride… working my way up each day.  There’s a hill nearby (not a very big one, lol) and I tried to get up that hill without walking my bike partway.  On about the fifth try, I made it.  My legs were getting stronger.

Then summer came.  My husband works days in the summertime.  Every evening we’d go for a ride.  I got stronger and stronger and soon was clocking 3-5 miles a day and then 10 miles or more on weekend days.  Bicycling became our obsession.

Then I got sick.  I spent over a month in bed, between doctor appointments and test appointments to try to figure out what was wrong with me.  I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t even walk down the hall to the bathroom without feeling wiped out.  Finally they diagnosed me with Graves Disease.  There’s no cure for GD but there is a drug that can help with the effects.  Unfortunately, as I’ve mentioned before, the drugs have the side-effect of slowing down one’s metabolism.

I stopped biking.  And I gained THIRTY pounds.  OMG, THIRTY.

I kept saying, “How can this be?  I’m not eating that much!”  But I was eating, secretly.  And I was sedentary.  No bike riding.  No exercise tapes.  Just hours and hours in front of my computer.  On my ass.

Fast forward to December15.  I had a little accident with my car and I hurt my left knee. Twisted it, tore the meniscus.  Ouch.  It’s been slowly healing but I still don’t have full mobility.  Bend it too far or the wrong way and it hurts.  HURTS.

So this is why I was scared:  This past summer, a trip on the bike up to BAM was a breeze.  It’s only two miles away and there’s only one moderate uphill on the way there, pretty much all downhill on the way back.  It’s a lovely ride, but I haven’t undertaken the challenge of that lovely ride since last August - six months ago.  And I hadn’t tried riding my bike AT ALL since my accident in December. 

I was scared when I got on the exercise bike, too, for the same reasons.  But doing even the “uphill” mode on the inside-bike is NOwhere near as hard as pulling my 280-lb body along up a REAL hill on an outside-bike.

I did it.  Wait, let me repeat that with more emphasis:  I DID IT!!!!!!!!

As soon as I got on my bike my left leg HURT - but it wasn’t on the down-push, it was on the up-bend.  Decreased mobility = stiff and sore.  I hadn’t bent my injured leg to quite that degree - on purpose - since I hurt it.  By about the 50th up-bend, my knee was screaming at me - but it still wasn’t as bad as I’d imagined it!  About 200 up-bends later, it stopped hurting so bad, it had warmed-up-loosened-up.  And I chose to think of the continued movement as “physical therapy.”  Apparently I needed to be bending that leg a bit more.  Hey, no pain, no gain.

So… today I clocked four-and-a-quarter miles… on the real bicycle.  More importantly, I clocked 40 minutes of smiling - big doofy happy smiling - because being out in the world with my hubby, making my own breeze, feeling my muscles moving, my body and mind wide-awake and ALIVE - is pure joy, no doubt about it.