Nagging Back Pain was Back!

I wrote this in February 2018

Over Christmas vacation, I found myself with lots of pain in my back, so I stopped riding and did my old stand-by when faced with pain in my back, namely Yoga! After three days of reduced activity and lots of yoga, I was no better! WTHeck! 

I took to spinning a huge gear to get my back to feel better because the above fact became apparent. So now I regularly/daily spin a huge gear dirt slow 30 RPM (Gospel music like Kirk Franklin and others works great).

To take this even further, I have recently as in the last three days added HIIT sessions to what I was doing and slowly even out of the saddle efforts are becoming doable without pain and without pain afterwards!

Yes, spin like a twelve year old, but also mash a big ole gear for the yin-yang, balance of what we love to do! 

Back to this week and last week:

My mantra right now is, “Pulling out all the stops!” 

Reading above I am reminded that two years ago yoga didn’t help! But if I'm pulling out all the stops then yoga and core work has to be part of the build-up!

Last week I did a couple of yoga sessions to try to knock out the pain I’m having in my lower back. And the pain in places where I didn’t know about continued.

I talked about using the MTB as well. It has helped keep my body warm and diminishing the pain, but did not knock it out! 

The core work continues as well as the stretching! The yoga is still there tightening places I’m not even aware they exist!

The thing that is making the biggest difference is spinning the big gear on the Position Fixe rides in the basement on the trainer! Even on days that I’m not exercising outside I am doing fifteen to thirty minutes in a big gear downstairs!

For those that don’t know these big gear workouts, they are very hard on the joints! My knees have been a problem these past five years as well! Today, I have good news! All the bike work, coming up on 1300 miles so far for the year has strengthened my knees to such an extent that today on a tough and taxing ride on the trainer my knees had no complaints even after thirty minutes in the big gear with standing accelerations (activity that used to cause pain in my knees)! That is very encouraging!

 

April fools, but not April Fool's 2021 update on my back! So I'm taking lots of days off before I retire at the end of May! It has been fun, but being unleashed to ride all kinds of mileage is not conducive to my sketchy back! I've done some big gear workouts and some time trials. Not a whole lot of difference there! I hae a new set of Ultegra Wheels because I busted up my Mavic Open Pro that we got a few years ago! As a big guy the best solution is to get down to 200 lbs. so the 32 spoke wheels can handle the weight and no buckle under my weight! I replaced the bad spokes that were stressed by the derailleur derailing into my back wheel! I trued that wheel very carefully so now both set of wheels on the Litespeed and the Caloi Time Trial are nice solid wheels! New curve ball has been puctures of the front wheel. I rode a little today with a 15K trying not to tempt fate with more mileage. So if I can keep the mileage reasonable I might be ok!

Wow, what a short memory I have!

Both of the following articles are from 2018 and it’s the exact same thing that is currently happening!

SUNDAY, JULY 29, 2018

My New Miracle Drug - A Minha Droga Nova

Full-blown Atkins! Yup, I said it! No more sugar, no more carbs other than the ones we get naturally in legumes and such!

It was a desperate move, but a necessary one! Last week, I worked my butt off on the bike and the results? There were no results! Zilch, nada, niente! My rides were strong and as fast as I could do them, yet no results! My weight, ta da dam! Ballooned to 293!!! That's almost 300 lbs! Holy tish! Batman! So the only course was to quit sugar, including my beloved cereal and my drinks and to quit my love 'em/hate 'em carbs!

The result? Ta da dam! 13 pounds gone (actually: 13.25 and I broke 280 lbs! Poof! WTH?

I had always opted to do South Beach because I would still get some carbs! But my body cannot function with carbs and it can't function without carbs (I said that last thing because yesterday's attempt to go long was sabotaged by not having enough glycogen in my system to complete the task!) Sucked so bad! My only solution for this is either to go ride with the Cool Cats or with the Hill Country Touring and Adventure Club. Once I get fast enough, perhaps the Cyclones! Right now I can't even muster their lowest speed range for their slowest group.

I never did full-blown Atkins, because it was too much! I assumed as an athlete I had to maintain a higher level of glycogen in my system.

So, I am going to continue to work on my swimming, and my cycling without carbs until I reach a weight management level. That would be 200 lbs! Honestly, I do not know if I have what it takes to go that far, but I have to do something! Or a Heart Attack! No thanks, I don't want to be part of the zipper club!

I’m Back with my Back Again! I’m Back!

THURSDAY, JULY 19, 2018

Why? Por qué?

Not that I've been researching this, but it is the best idea I've heard in a year!

So, for a year, what I normally did to lose weight stopped working such as: walking a lot at school, doing intermittent fasting, and keeping up with my cycling! It's almost like the three months I took off from activity last Summer changed something! I have been active all my life, but last Summer when I couldn't be active because of my knees caused me to spin into the abyss of being a couch-potato! Blame it on eating worse than normal, but that's not the case. Blame it on not being active enough, but no that's not it either I'll explain in a sec. Or perhaps my metabolism took another dip. I wasn't expecting another dip until my sixties, but maybe because I have been so hard on this old body, it came early. In the fall last year, I noticed things were not progressing like they should have been. What to do? It was now Christmas, my knees were coming along fine, but my back on the other hand was hurting almost constantly! Now what? Over Christmas, I took a few days off the bike to see if it would go away, nope!

https://greatist.com/move/beginners-power-yoga

I also picked up my power yoga that would normally knock out the pain in two or three days and that didn't work either! Now it's New Years and time to change some things so I decided to streak! A streak is something you do everyday no matter what! So, for the new year I decided I was going to spend twenty to thirty minutes on the bike everyday in order to push away the back pain through activity and it worked!

I had noticed that with all the spinning (easy work, light efforts on the bike to get my knees active again and increase synovial fluid in my soft tissue and musculature around my knees) was causing me to be weak off the trainer out on the streets. My solution to the back pain and transition away from all the lite spinning I was doing for my knees was to do some weight-lifting on the bike. So twice a week I would spin on the hardest, most exhausting gear I could manage on the trainer and the other days of the week I did a speed session, a tempo session and a long ride. This worked, like I said, to knock out the pain in my back! But what about the weight-loss? No dice, I yo-yoed through-out the year without any definitive results! What to do? I had relegated myself that I would in my later years be a bigger big guy than I really wanted to be. I was very close to getting rid all of my clothing that was not extra-large! Actually, that's still on the table, we shall see!

I read lots of athletic stuff, training stuff, studies, research etc. all the time to stay with it for my own training and for my e-blast and my blogs! I came across a phrase that stuck with me recently that I wasn't even looking for for any reason. I think it was an add for an e-book on RoadBikeRider.com

https://www.roadbikerider.com/earticles-training/

I'm not 60 for a couple of years yet, but there it is in black and white! As you get older, you don't want to slow down, you want to ramp things up! So, on the New Year, I started streaking on the trainer to keep the pain in my back away. I have never been one to ride my bike every freaking day or even when I was a runner, I took two days off per week at least! And now that the Summer is here and the Fall Semester is just around the corner I have picked up swimming for a total body workout and am encouraged that the swimming will take me into my twilight years feel fit and strong!

I pray that it will also allow me to get back to faster riding and lose some of this extra weight I have been carrying around. Remember, as you get older, don't slow down, ramp things up!

Alas...

So one of my riding buddies took this picture on the way back from Castroville when my back was hurting!

So have you ever found a picture of yourself from a time when you knew you were fat, but now that you’re fatter you wish, “Man, I wish I was that skinny!”

Well the last five years have been one battle after another to get well, uninjured, and then lose the weight gained while convalescing! The last bout of inactivity that pretty much ended two posts ago! January, yes January! From October to January nothing, heck I wasn’t even supposed to be walking on my dislocated metatarsal! That last battle to lose the weight continues till today! Before five years ago, I gained weight, but would drop it like a hot potato! No problem! But then, bam! No more, most recently, during two months of COVID-19 I did everything right like I used to, ate sensibly, exercised religiously to build up mileage and not get injured, but only lost two pounds of weight! Yeah, water weight came and went but the number that stayed off two! Ahrrgh!

This picture taken by Patty Clark, thanks Patty! On the Medina  River  Linear Park

On Sunday, I hit the 1,000 mile mark! So, base miles at 1K not 65 hours, but 133 slow hours! My weight has budged past the two pounds lost, but not because of the miles, but because of the Pre-Diabetic scare. Reminds me I still need to see Dr. Horn about that! But I made life changes before even going! Those life changes have now translated to eight, count them 12345678 pounds down in two weeks! Today,Tuesday, my best day to check my weight! Do you know your best day to check your weight?!? A post for another time! But today, 282.8 pounds still 20 freaking stone!An improvement! COVID-19 283 lbs. no less, but definitely more!

After two months of hardly no weight loss, after I started the RideYourArseOff page, I gave up! Thinking, “why am I stressing myself and getting almost nothing to show?!?” Ballooned to my scariest weight ever 290! I’ve hit that once before, don’t remind me! Then came the blood work! I was hoping the bloodwork would explain something! It did visceral fat, subcutaneous fat! Bad!

Future, was not bright, type 2 Diabetes! I had friends in HS with type 1, sux! Now as an adult, I have friends with type 2! Still sux! They changed their health lives and so can I!

If you’re reading this you are part of the solution! Thank you to Gayle for your patience with me! If only I would have swallowed my pride and done this ten years ago! Thank you to all of you for your friendship and encouragement and allowing me to write with you! God bless you and hold you in the hallow of His/Her hand!

Meanwhile...

Can you tell Steven Colbert’s show has become a don’t miss for us! Last I wrote it was January and I had just started getting back to training! BTW I did the right thing because my foot has not gone back to pain or a twinge or anything! That has been wonderful!

Then, all hell broke loose in the world and there is an incurable virus running rampant through the world! Experts say it was a cross-species virus from bats to us who-mans! (I’m Batman!) It is a novel coronavirus that the world has never seen, but we have seen others like it. Everything shut-down for quite a while, then reopened, and now we’re in the process of shutting back down again because people are stupid and so is our leadership. But here in the US solo exercise bouts were not against the rules. Other countries were able to manage the PANDEMIC much better than we have so far. They shut everything down including outside workouts.

School closed, actually it never reopened after Spring Break, everything has been postponed! It is crazy to write what I’m writing! Life will forever be changed! Due to the Corona Virus Disease of 2019 or COVID-19 for short 120,000 Americans have died, another 380K have died around the world! It’s-a freaking disaster!

Lots of stress eating all around till we realized, “oh, heck!” (more like WTF)! I’ve gained massive amounts! No problem silver lining to COVID-19 we can exercise a lot. On call, was a blessing! Not to minimize anything millions of lives have been shattered, families destroyed, health care workers and others on the front lines will have issues for the foreseeable future! I have not cried so much in my life! My new tell when I’m tired, I weep at seemingly insignificant things! Our lives are not the same.

 So middle of April we’re getting the hang of things and putting in the miles, changing our eating habits, and expecting great results! Alas, it wasn’t to be, nearly 400 miles last month and nearly 300 miles the month before that and I lost a whopping two, duas, deux, due, zwei count ‘em 1, 2! Heck that could be water weight or a huge BM! Something is wrong!

So Now...

It has been three weeks without the boot with Christmas Break, I only wore it once. Probably should have worn it twice.

I didn't want to go back to the boot at school when school started, so I toughed it out last week! The first day was the hardest or most painful, but then Tuesday there were hardly any issues at all! I have had the boot in the car every day I've been at school. There is some comfort in that were there to be an occasion where the boot would be needed!

So, it all feels almost normal! All this normality makes me want to get back on the bike last week, this week, today! But I told myself I was going to slow down so that means I going to be abundantly cautious and go from there. I will do my best to give it two more weeks. With two more weeks it will have been fourteen weeks with the boot or recovering with and without the boot.

I almost went this morning on my normal Sunday Morning ride, but chose yet to stay cautious! These things are always an experiment of one. We all have to work out the way we can find success in recovery! The cautiousness has worked for me! Hopefully soon...

No, this is not me, but I do own a blue jacket, a black helmet, and a red mountain bike!