I’ve been keeping my fitness up partly by riding stationary bikes at the gym, first on the recumbent bikes and more recently on the upright ones. But yesterday, Dave and I went out for a bike ride on the urban trails around the area. There are a lot of them, and we ended up being out more than two hours. I wanted to wait until riding wouldn’t hurt, from the pressure of resting my upper-body weight on my arms to the jolt of bumps and turning. It was a total success! I’m now quite sure that by January I’ll at least be able to ride a few hours a day on a loaded touring bike. After all, we’re not talking about the steep and bumpy Great Divide–we’ll be in Southeast Asia where, at least to begin with, it will be flat and hopefully fairly smooth on the pavement. Once we get into the northern parts we’ll tackle some hills and mountainous areas, but by then I’m sure my shoulder will be strong enough.

So, now it’s time to start looking for plane tickets to SE Asia!

We’ve been working on the website lately, and we’ve added some gear reviews, our packing list for the Great Divide Trail, and brief info on our Southeast Asia bike tour plans.

We’ve both been enjoying the unusually warm weather here in Golden these last few weeks. Dave goes for mountain bike rides in the foothills right near the house here, cranking out a solid two hours of sweaty happy goodness just about every day. I’ve been running up and around Table Mountain, accessible right from the house. It’s beautiful open space that’s wide open and usually sunny. We’ve also done some great hikes on the weekends, and Dave even went rock climbing on Sunday with Jesse in the Flat Irons near Boulder while I hiked around there. What fun! But alas, every unusually warm fall must come to an end, and tonight it is supposed to snow. And the rest of the week looks to be thirty degrees colder than it’s been. I had been running in shorts and a t-shirt, or long-sleeve t-shirt up until a couple days ago. Today we both wore tights and fleece during our outdoor playtime. Darn! I guess we’ll be extra ready for the humid heat of Southeast Asia in January.

We’re preparing for a very fun gathering on Thanksgiving with Dave’s three college friends and their families and his brother and his family. There will be massive yummy food. I start baking pies tomorrow! And the TurkeyDay festivities will start with us all gathered around the TV to watch the Packers Rool (after I drag Dave out for a run on the mesa!).

Happy Thanksgiving week everyone!

We’re nailing down details for the Southeast Asia bike tour and I’m getting excited. But I’ve got to be ready, so I’m working hard to keep and build on my fitness as well as rehab my shoulder. It’s going well.

For overall strength and fitness, I’m doing the best thing possible – high intensity interval training. This is what you do when you want to accomplish a lot in a little time, when you want to build both strength and endurance, or when you want to trim down. Loads of research has been done in this area in the last few decades, and it all adds up to the best workout you can possible do for your body.

So. Three times a week I head into the gym where I can sit on the stationary bike (still can’t ride hard on a real bike, so this has got to do for now) and do an hour of sweating. I worked up to this, of course, and I wouldn’t recommend starting at an hour. Twenty to thirty minutes is the norm. Warm up first, doing whatever activity you enjoy or want to get better at. Then start the intervals. The latest research I read says you should do a high intensity interval (80-90% effort) for 30-60 seconds, followed by a 4-minute active recovery at about 60%. Repeat a few times, lasting up to one hour including warm up and cool down. That’s it. You’ll be surprised how quickly your body snaps to attention and adapts. It doesn’t have to be as exact as this, but those who know me well understand my OCD tendencies when it comes to exercise. I love it!

I’m also motivated to strengthen my shoulder with the intention of getting back to 100% strength and usability. I don’t know how long that will take. I had a pretty bad rotator cuff tear about five years ago that supposedly needed surgery. I worked hard at PT and then in the gym and felt fully back to 100% after about a year. This injury is more complicated, but I feel I can get there again. I’m working my shoulder with free weights and multiple exercises on the cable machine. I even started weight-assisted dips today! I’ll be back on the bike in January, but will keep working on my shoulder as long as it takes to fully recover. I’ll really need it next summer for our sea kayak expedition to circumnavigate Baranof Island in Alaska. More on that later.

Here we are at week five from the crash, and I can now put my own hair into a ponytail. Oh my, how exciting! My shoulder has been painfully grumpy the last couple of days, but overall I’m really pleased with the speed in which it’s progressing. I have probably 85% of normal range of motion now, mostly without pain. I think I’ll be able to start working it on the cable machines at the gym next week, starting out really light of course. I can’t tell you how hard it is to be within view of a pull-up bar and not hop up to do a few.

Must.

Be.

Patient.

So, what am I doing with myself while Dave and I “house sit” at his parents’ lovely Colorado house? Well, I’m working on this website, for one: back-end stuff that will make updating while traveling much easier, a few design and wording changes to make navigating easier for readers, adding a bit of content here and there. You’ll also notice there have been ads popping up on the pages around here. I’m hoping that over time, with enough readers finding us and following our adventures, we’ll be able to pay for the website through affiliate income. When people click on an ad on our website and buy something, we get a wee percentage of the sale for the ad referral. Over time that could add up. It might be enough to pay for web hosting, our internet access fees on the road, maybe even someday a sat-phone internet connection so we can update whenever we want when we’re in the middle of nowhere–a place we hope to be quite often!

Also, there’s fun! We’re going to a show at the Boulder Theater tonight featuring Tuareg (North African) and West African musicians. Tomorrow we’re going to explore Mount Galbraith Park for some outside time. And tomorrow evening we’re going to a dinner fund raiser for the CU-Boulder chapter of Engineers Without Borders. Dave has joined that chapter and hopes to volunteer on a project when we bike tour in West Africa next fall. Dave’s brother and his family get back on Sunday from Hawaii, where he competed in the Xterra World Championships off-road triathlon. After fetching them from the airport we’ll eat pizza and watch the Packers game together. That all adds up to a pretty fun weekend.