Tag Archives: Have a Glorious Day

Tuesday Trippin’ February 28

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The Training

Training is going well, but, living so far from the trail and riding more often is time consuming. There are so many things we feel pressured to complete. After our last three rides Russ has winced when he noticed the time. I don’t like that he feels that pressure, but It feels a little bit confirming for all the times I’ve ridden alone and been shocked that the day got away from me. By the time we load bikes, drinks and gear, dress, drive, ride and reverse the process, then shower, clean bikes gear and kit, it’s a 6-8 hour bite from our day and it isn’t always conveniently placed to better meet other obligations efficiently. Some days it feels like that is all we can accomplish in a day.

The reward for all the time it takes is that Russ is getting happier and happier with his riding. There’s a lot of tough work ahead for both of us, but we’re on target for the project.

Other than really feeling the time it takes on a big level, the most remarkable thing I can think of about this week’s training is the weather.

We’ve been hearing frogs since mid January and last week we saw a snake on the path at Big Creek. Apparently the first snake bite of the year is often reported in January in Georgia, So, they do move around a bit when it’s cold. But, we live in the north end of the state and actually seeing one out on the paved trail in February was a first for me. (This one was non-venomous.) Spring just feels like it came on in a rush.

Two weeks ago I was in severe physical distress when I failed to protect my hands well enough from low temperatures on an early morning ride, and this week I’m so happy about digging out the fingerless gloves, or riding without any, so I can take photos without having to take off the gloves.

You can’t really prioritize riding at the same time that you prioritize getting pics for the website, but some things are worth stopping for. If the electronic sensitive gloves don’t work (and they never do), the time it takes to whip out the phone and take off the gloves usually costs you the shot.

The Project

We’ve been busy, but aren’t ready to share results. You know that day when consistent work comes together in what seems like, but isn’t, a sudden moment? Yeah, we’re not there, but it may be just around the corner. I know we’re accomplishing things and doing good work, but that big rush of satisfaction in getting someplace isn’t here yet.

Our primary non-training foci have been to get 1. The t-shirt researched (which brand to offer, which company to use for screen printing, how to promote it) and out there. 2. Prep for our big stock reduction sale. 3. Do the million little things that that finish off websites, campaigns and projects. It’s those things that show planning, preparation and readiness for the success that we’re working on.

Until next week, have a Glorious Day, and we’ll see you on the trail!

Tuesday Trippin’ February 7

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Training

We’ve had some good rides, getting better too. Today I was actually warm enough to want to take off a layer. I think we’ll be riding at the same level soon, but it won’t last long. Russ will pass me by. That’s fine, he’s the stronger rider when we’re both riding regularly. We’ll soon both be out of winter level riding mode and shortly after that will be riding out target 200 miles a week. We won’t be so concerned about getting those miles consolidated into just two rides until the project funds. Health wise, more shorter rides are good. Two hundred-mile rides is for making the project/rest of our lives work. Fantasy Island, we’d live in the middle and spread the rides across more days.

Planning and Prep

We’re doing our best to rebound from the getting laid off curve ball. Russ and I had opposite reactions and coping mechanisms. We were both oversaturated with one thing after another, but I wanted to move into hyperdrive on the project and have it submitted before his last check. He did a lot, but he also needed some time to regroup. We’ve been moving through the transition together and trying to balance short term, long term, project and non-project goals. It’s been real, but I think we’re moving into a good spot. It will make more sense to talk about some of the things we’ve been working on when they are ready.

The Sale

For some time I’ve been planning the sale of stock that was originally intended to be listed in our Etsy Store, handmade, vintage and antiques. This week I worked in the basement a lot separating things that I still want to list from things that increases in shipping cost have made undesirable to sell online. I’m rechecking market prices on the items I’m packing for the trip to the driveway. Handling the boxes dries my hands even more than doing dishes!

Originally, I was hoping to make enough to advertise the Kickstarter Funding Campaign. Then a lot of other things happened. A modest goal of $5K would require selling 1000 items at $5 each. My target sale price would be half of recent Ebay sold prices without shipping. I have plenty of stock and that represents about a 75% discount over what ordering on line would cost, but that’s still pretty ambitious in the greater Atlanta market. If I have too much left over afterward, I’ll head off to some flea market on the first feasible weekend.

We’ll see. We also have some big ticket items in storage, like a vintage St Charles kitchen that we paid to salvage ourselves from a tear down. It is really special. A guy drove from Kentucky to get just one piece of it. Selling that alone could meet some significant goals and we’d like to get out of the storage unit. Whether you adopt Marie Kondo’s pre or post children philosophy, it seems crazy to keep things you have to pay to store. But, adding to that, the storage facility was sold to a company that likes to raise rent often and now it’s nearly double what we paid when we signed the contract.

So, there are a few different ways the sale could fund one or more of the unexpected expenses that have hit recently and we might even eliminate a storage rental fee. Worst case, it forces me into better organization.

So there’s our week. See you on the trail, and have a glorious day!

Tuesday Trippin’ January 17

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The hits keep coming. The car died. I’ll get to find out sometime tomorrow if it is worse than a dead battery, and Ill get a second opinion on that 5K of work that the dealer recommended too.

If you ask me now how things were going to work out, I wouldn’t know how to answer, or even what to base my guess on.

We got more riding together this week than we have had in some time. That felt good, and helps to deal with stress but that wasn’t as much for me as I was getting a month ago.

We went out to the area between Coots Lake Trailhead and Paulding Forest to test signal strength. Ting was better than AT&T, but both were limited. I’ll probably put the images of the readings up next week.

I have no idea if our submission task list will be complete in a useful time frame. This week has been mostly more of the same as last week, but with continued intense frustration over wanting to be upbeat and positive, but not having bigger progress to report here.

Until next week, have a glorious day, and we’ll see you on the trail.

If You Couldn’t Fail

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What would you do if you couldn’t fail? It’s a big question, with all kinds of implications. You may see it in a self help, inspirational or life coaching context, a job interview or a Ted Talk. And, you would probably answer it differently for all those contexts.

Laura Shultz and her unexpected response to saving her grandson’s life was mentioned in the first piece I ever read on this subject. The experience made her rethink and change her life. Rethinking what’s possible can change everything. Changing everything is big enough to consider often, so I chose a font, a color and a size and went to the local vinyl shop to have them cut the words for me. For at least 4 or 5 years I’ve had that question on my bathroom mirror reminding me to think bigger and stop putting things off for my future self. I see it (whether I think about it or not) several times a day.

The Big Things

My top answer, if anything really was possible, would be the altruistic beauty queen answer tweaked by my understanding of the world, and I’d mean every world of it it. I’d say things like achieve world peace and social justice. It is the social justice, of course, that results in world peace. I’d want governance, business and manufacturing to have real truthful transparency so all interested parties could become an informed and knowledgeable invisible hand.

I’d want to achieve true economic and environmental balance and have equal access to the best healthcare and phenomenal education for all because knowledge is powerful. Physical and mental healthcare would be so good that crime and bankruptcies would be greatly reduced, virtually non existent. We would build thoughtful infrastructure planned for multi-use with wide range benefits for long term low impact sustainability everywhere. My ideas go on with more things than most people agree are good, but don’t know how to accomplish.

These are my top tier dreams. I know how lofty and nearly impossible they are. I can’t bring myself to say that they are actually impossible though because, while I don’t believe a lot of things are likely, I have to leave room for these things to be possible for our future selves, for our grandchildren and theirs. It would take 7.9 billion leaps of faith, but it could happen.

A Medium Thing

I have dreams that are still big, but more realistic too. A year or more ago a vacant school for sale reminded me how much I’d like to bring my co-op idea into being. The site didn’t have enough land to do everything I wanted to, but it had some pretty awesome potential. I sat in the parking lot and imagined a green roof and what could be done with other spaces. The location solved one of many reasons I put the idea aside. It was a reasonable commute. For family reasons it would be difficult to move to a better location right now, but I got so psyched when I saw it on the way to ride my bike from a trailhead I hadn’t been going to, and was ready to set my sights high. I spent the afternoon doing enough Googling to find out the school would be razed. There were already drawings of a chic high rent glass and steel building that would replace the school.

The sighting got me looking at the possible though. I had originally envisioned something built from the ground up, a new building in a rural area near an exit on a high traffic interstate. After I found out the building I looked at was already dead I looked for other abandoned schools or other buildings inside a commute. There were, in fact, some even better sights, with bigger prices to match. I’ve even reimagined it more recently in a trailside version with overnight capacity for cyclists. Maybe after the cycling video I’ll be more of a known entity. Maybe it could be a dream come true instead of a pipe dream. Maybe the message on my mirror is setting up house in my sub-conscious having the intended effect.

The Now Thing

Part of the point in answering the question of what you would do if you couldn’t fail is figuring out how to put your time and effort where your heart is right now instead of editing yourself for some lower level of purpose, success, or happiness while putting off joy and purpose until you feel ready.

While I’m learning not to put off my most important dreams, I also do have to work within the life I currently have. That’s where the cycling project comes in. It isn’t saving all the parts of the whole world in my next to impossible dream right now, but It is consistent with my highest ideals and within my current stretching reach.

I feel encouraged by people like Marjory Stoneman Douglass, a suffragette, who was plenty accomplished before she started Friends of the Everglades at age 79, and continued to work to preserve the River of Grass for another 29 years, stopping only when she died at 108.

I don’t know what I’ll do next, probably not something nearly so as impressive or as impactful as some of the great people I admire, but I’ll just keep making Baby Steps in the right direction.

Have a glorious day, and we’ll see you on the trail.

The Sisters, 400 and Me

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There is the matter of that century I signed up for… the 400 Century. The first 3 miles are on a large limited access divided highway. That’s what even the 9 milers are signed up for, to get to go faster down that stretch of concrete on their bikes than they do in their cars. Those who finish the whole ride will also do 97 miles of local roads that I choose not to ride on under any other circumstances, after having made a few exceptions over the last 30 years. If getting chased by the Great Dane was the worst of it, I might ride these roads normally. It’s more the near misses and the times I got yelled at because drivers don’t want to share the road (and you know the kind of profane ugliness that comes with the road rage of the frustrated American driver). I only signed up for the century because it was the last time there would be a ride on 400 due to construction and it’s on that pesky bucket list of mine. It’s so hard to watch a bucket list item go away and do nothing.

In truth, conditions have improved with the advocacy of groups like the ABC, Bike Cobb, Bike Alpharetta, Bike Roswell, and others, but it hasn’t been too long since I went to a town meeting where a planning official was being abusively berated at length by an angry driver that didn’t want bike lanes. We still have far to go. Rage is a dangerous thing, more dangerous when you’re not the one in a 3000 lb vehicle. I’ll be safer in a large group activity with support, but riding these roads is not my comfort zone.

To prep for this discomfort that I not only willingly signed up for, but also dragged Russ into, I decided that on days when I don’t ride (the trail), I should go out and practice “the sisters”, those challenging hills on the century that are right out my back door. So, I went over to Big Sister. Usually when I’m on that hill, I’m walking and it’s easy to forget how long the hill stretches out. I ride flat rail trails and stream beds. I deal with hills by building momentum. But, you lose momentum at the stop sign, and even if there wasn’t one, momentum doesn’t last through a long slow grade.

After walking up Big Sister with my bike, I came home to check published elevations to see if I was initially wrong when I guessed the Big Sister was not a higher climb than Trash Mountain (The biggest elevation change on the Silver Comet, graced by the scent of the adjacent landfill. It’s built in a place where railway right-of-way wasn’t available during construction, so it’s the “real hill” on the Silver Comet). The Big Sister and Trash Mountain are comparable in elevation gain, the whole difference (to me) is in the distance the incline is spread across on Big Sister.

I noticed something else while I had the elevations up. The Sisters didn’t really stand out so much on the graph. There are a lot of hills on the ride. It’s just that the sisters come nearer the end when riders are tired.

When I first started to write this piece, I was talking about needing to train a lot and maybe even completing the whole century. I haven’t really done that level of training. I kept riding through the family trip and the musical bike repairs pretty well, but it turned out to be maintenance, not century training. In most ways, this century is irrelevant to the video project. The timing and requirements are different, but I thought throwing it into the mix would make me a stronger rider. Now, I’m looking at the ride being next weekend, and it’s taken a lot of effort just to ride at all. On top of that, there’s time of year. If you look at a temperature graph of Atlanta, the highs peak right about when the ride is scheduled, stay high through July and start to break around the first week in August. Heat is not my comfort zone either.

Of course, I knew this, and was remembering this, when I signed up. Awareness doesn’t keep it from being a pretty big deal though. I can’t just ignore it. My biggest limitation in riding is heat tolerance. When I get overheated, I get a migraine (unless it’s actually heat stroke, IKR?). I have a tell. When my face looks red, I’m still fine, but when it feels red, when I feel intense heat on my face, that’s when I need to quit and take aspirin, or suffer. I got right up on the edge during a ride a few weeks ago. I stopped when I needed to. It happened to be at the end of my ride. I didn’t take the aspirin though. My face had just started to feel red. I didn’t feel like the terrible symptoms were coming. They didn’t. That made me feel pretty good. I hope it was because I’m more fit (or maybe I just stopped at the right time).

Regardless, I’ve been pushing my heat tolerance all month because the century will be hot. That push is beginning to wear on me. Some days I’ve been tired enough not to do anything very physical except my ride. It’s time to go back to riding in the cooler temps and quit pushing the heat limits. This century will be cool at 7AM when it starts and will heat up later when I’m tired. I’m going to have to treat this as a fun diversion and make sure I don’t stress my body on a level that will cost me in the end. It would have been nice to make this last (and my first) 400 Century Ride a full century for me, but as I look at it from a week out, I’m having to face that for this ride on this day, that’s not going to be the smart choice. That’s ok. It will still be a glorious day.

Glorious Tuesday Trippin’ February 8

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A small older man with a small dog used to sit on this bench, or the other one directly across the trail from it. He would greet people and wish them well. The first few times I saw him, he was smoking. The smell was strong, and while I wanted to feel differently, I wondered how the smoke could be so intensely strong and displeasing. I was thinking “Well, my day would be better if you weren’t smoking it up.” I would give him my best effort at a smile, but the irony! The irritation was probably evident in my body language.

In the spring and summer I would see him often, almost every time I rode by. Then after a while, he wasn’t smoking anymore, at least not when I saw him, and I found it easier to respond to him the way I wanted to. His hands now only held a leash, he would shoot the empty hand up, his arm high and straight in the air, all five fingers planked tightly together as though there was nothing in the world that he could possibly want more than to have the teacher call on him. And, as he did this he would shout “Hello. Have a glorious day.” projecting strong sincere energy in high fidelity and sometimes saying even more.

I started looking forward to seeing him. I was even thinking of stopping to talk to him. I’m usually eager to strike up a conversation with anyone who looks open, but I do this less in a world of masked and unmasked people than I did before.

I haven’t seen him in a long while. As the temperatures dropped, I hoped it was the cold that kept him away, but there have been pretty days that were warm enough over the winter. Of course, it could be that he’s just there at a different time from me now.

As time passes, I fear it could be lung cancer that caused him to stop smoking, or Covid that has kept him away, or some other awful permanent or terminal thing. I miss him and his uncommon exuberance. I hope he’s okay. I hope he’s better than okay. I hope he’s having a GLORIOUS DAY! I hope I get to talk to him some day, to learn his story, to wish him well.

The Training Tuesday Part

As for the training part of the week, a lot of my rides had glorious moments. This week had fewer. It was on the cold side, and I was feeling pretty punk. I donated blood, but that was after the riding and wasn’t responsible for all of my low energy.

According to the Red Cross, I still don’t have Covid antibodies. No surprise, but being higher on the risk side, and lower on the vaccine priority side, it would be welcome to learn I’d had that magical case that was so mild I didn’t know it happened until the antibodies showed up.

I did some of my riding indoors on the recumbent. That keeps me going. I don’t get the leg pain from not riding and it fills some of the exercise endorphin drop that happens when my exercise levels decrease. Still, I don’t count that in my weekly mileage. This week I’m going to be happy with considering it part of my training though. I can ride outdoors in the more miserable weather conditions once I’m filming for the project.

Until next time, here’s hoping you find it easy to feel the glory in your days.