A Whole Lot of Nothing

This weekend I did something I haven’t done in many, many years - nothing!!!  No riding.  No household chores.  Nada.  Just a whole of sitting around and resting.  The reason?  A week ago I managed to strain a muscle around my right hip so I spent the better part of the week limping around in pain.  

This was not good and not just because it kept me off the bike on a gorgeous winter weekend.  You see, Sherry and I are off to Italy next week and I really don't want to spend 10-days limping around Florence.  Now, if I have to choose between limping around the Florence or limping around the office you know what wins.  Still, my preference would be full mobility and zero pain so I am babying this injury like no other.

On a quick side note, it’s amazing what a little pain can do to change your daily routine (besides messing up your weekend rides).  In this case, it really hurt to raise my leg without support.  It also hurt to bend over.  Therefore, putting on my socks each day has been quite the comical sight.  Also, did you know you use your hip muscles when you sneeze?  Neither did I until I sneezed one day and sent a shooting pain down my leg.  The human body is amazingly interconnected.

What did I miss?  Well, my cycling team was doing one of our famous social rides.  This was a recovery ride for a teammate. It started at a little B&B he owns and afterwards everyone enjoyed a potluck brunch.  The pictures looked pretty awesome and I'm sure everyone had a great time.  I probably could have made it to the brunch but to be honest I didn’t feel like explaining why I wasn't on the ride over and over.  Plus, getting in and out of the car is one of my most painful activities.  So, I stayed home.

What did I do?  Well, I started a couple of books that I want to read.  That was fun.  I spent time playing Spider Solitaire on the iPad.  I lost a lot so that wasn’t as much fun.  I completed a professional certification (it was online) and it felt good to get that out of the way. 

Mostly, I felt bored and restless.  I’m contemplating retiring in 3-5 years and Sherry was joking that I needed a hobby.  But cycling is my hobby!  My problem wasn’t that I don’t have something that I really love to do.  My issue this weekend was that I wasn’t physically able to do that thing I really love to do.  Perhaps what I need for retirement is a backup hobby.

Fortunately, all this babying is working.  On Friday afternoon I was still in a decent amount of pain and my mobility was pretty limited.  By Monday morning (when I wrote this post), the pain had subsided greatly.  I also have much better mobility and felt like I was returning to normal.  I’m guessing my weekend of nothingness help quite a bit.  At this point, I am not anticipating any problems walking around Florence. 

I can also tell you that there will not be any more weekends of nothingness in the near future.  I have some big events coming up and now my training is behind schedule.  This means I have many big rides with big climbs in my immediate future as I push really hard to get ready.

Of course, all of that hard training means I’ll be moving around the office very slowly on Mondays for a totally different reason.

Ciao!