15 September 2011 Ride: The Scarlet Pimple-nel

When thinking about ways that a journey could get disrupted, it's the major stumbling blocks that come to mind: crashes, illnesses, injuries and the like.  The mundane are easily overlooked because one would be hard pressed to come up with them in the first place.

I complained about soreness re-emerging in the posterior yesterday after I thought I had it under control.  Well, it wasn't so much soreness as a pimple that has formed in a most strategic contact area between body and bike seat. My guess is that after all the bruising and rawness, debris of some sort became trapped in the skin and formed a pustule, being somewhat infected.  Switched from ice packs to hot compresses and soaking in a salt bath.

The soaking and compresses did indeed help making the culprit feel more like a irritating piece of grit instead of a thorny pea-sized pebble.    But, now back from the ride, it's been re-aggravated; back to the salt baths!   It does seem that the smart thing to do would be to keep today's ride to the minimum.  Well, in a way, I did.  The thing, however, is that I have raised the bar and while officially all I have to ride is 60 minutes, I keeping setting new challenges for myself.  The latest is to reach 9,000 miles for the year.  At this point, to reach that goal means averaging just over 24 miles a day.  So, when I can, I like to try and ride that amount.

I have a lot of thoughts on setting new sights within the journey but I will talk about those another day.

The past couple of times that I have been on the bike trail, I couldn't see the shoes.  I thought perhaps I was just overlooking them as I rode by but I was suspecting that they were gone. Today, I did stop and walk the area and they are indeed gone.  All that remained, except another small fragment of sole, was this innersole.

I'm drawing on my Antarctic expedition metaphor.  Some equipment failure and body failure this week after a very hard push (the 24er) a little over a week ago.  Both are minor yet still nuisances and it will be good when they are repaired.  The cable will be fixed tomorrow and, hopefully, the pustule within a couple of days.

Today's Ride:  2hrs 9mins.  24.28 miles.  59 degrees.  Miles YTD:  6,431.37

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