Today, I came to accept that I will be postponing my bike trip for at least a couple months due to the pain that manifested during my last ride. I’ve been doing some fervent hoping for the past 2 weeks as well as staying off the bike and aggressively pursuing medical care, but we still don’t know why I get a sharp pain in my groin (a few inches from the spot that causes the pain) when (and fortunately, only when) I put weight on my perineum on a bike saddle.
Having quickly eliminated things like cancer, any external wounds, and some other “real uh-oh’s”, we’re down to “well that’s annoying but clearly not life threatening.” The most recent doctor who seems like the best fit for me is committed to getting me back on this bike, but still is advocating a wait-and-see for another week (by which point we suspect the pain will be done manifesting immediately upon mounting my steed, anyway), and I’ve bought some different saddles that put less pressure in the “bad spot” to try out then.
Unfortunately, I’ve lost much of my fitness from riding for better than a month straight and there is no way I can set out in my planned week, so I’ve decided to make discretion the better part of my valor and skip the southern tier part of the trip. This is a bummer since it’s been my main focus for the last month and a half to get riding, but hopefully we can get this totally solved by the time I’d want to set out across canada in late May.
I have resolved that I will not waste this time and will walk/write daily to keep the mind active even if the body can’t be in quite the way that I want, so expect to see some more content (and some more steps and maybe even some adventures — I was just reminded that one can take the bus out to the gorge and get some hiking in, so I plan to do that next week!). For now I am in “all gear purchased/repaired/confirmed” mode, and just need the body to get back on board with my plans. But I’d rather delay a little than cause even more months of downtime, so we’ll focus on what I can do — stretching more, still exercising (I joined Lori’s gym), writing more (to flex that muscle!), and trying not to wallow in my disappointment.
While I did wallow for a week and a half after I realized this was going to set me back, at least I did so in a quasi-productive way? I read the entirety of the Cradle book series — 12 books! One of the themes in that series was self-improvement, and it was in the end inspiring. It is a bit hard to recommend the series for folks who aren’t already into martial arts training and/or programming — while it is fantasy a lot of the plot was around measures/countermeasures and planning the order of operations as well as training.
Anyway, I’ll try to take that silver lining of finding a new mission that can always resonate (self improvement) and make the most of the in between time I now find myself with.
