15th ride

Today's was significant in that it enabled me to pass 100 total miles for the year -- the first of many such achievements, I hope and expect. I waited until after the Detroit Tigers lost their game to the Yankees, dropping in 7-0 in rather listless fashion, and then rode (with heavy heart) along a route that replicated a good portion of a 10-mile route that I ran numerous times. Poignantly, it was the last "longer" run on which I was ever to set out. I cannot say "to do," because about halfway through it, I began to experience severe back pain and the inability to remain straight upright, and I ended up having to take out the emergency bus fare I always brought with me, climb on the Ann Arbor bus, and ride home. That was on Saturday, July 2, 2011. A little over a year later, I was finally diagnosed with arthritic inflammation affecting one of my vertebrae, and a few months later the knee surgeon I consulted told me it was affecting my knee, too, and I had to accept that running was now a thing of the past for me.

Ironically, the problem on 7/2/11 occurred right near the office of the chiropractor who treated me during the spring of 2012, when I was still seeking an answer to what was happening, and with whom I became friends (as well as his daughter, who worked there, and his receptionist - all of them Christians, I was happy to find).

Anyway, today's ride was 9.1 miles, and took me 53 minutes of riding time, plus a journey down to my church to do the weekly attendance data input work that I do for them. Included in this 53-minute ride were some significant downhill stretches on which, as previously noted, I had to coast along -- but the flipside of that is that, of course, I first had to pedal up the other side of them.