February 11, 2023 to February 13, 2023
Rehab Rides
Minor hazards of RV life in the desert
One of the things I love about this park is the 3 days-a-week yoga class. Christine, one of the gals here, brings her iPad and a screen and fires up a session of Yoga with Kassandra on YouTube. I always enjoy a friendly community practice, and got a little too excited with the group thing last Friday. I managed to overstretch my adductors and have been walking funny ever since. I’d been off the yoga mat for months before we got here and have apparently lost sense of how much is too much, especially when following the herd.
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For the rest of the day I lurched about, stiff-legged, grabbing hold of the furniture, feeling completely ridiculous. The injury was very likely made worse by sitting at the laptop for a few hours on our crappy low grade RV cushions. Whatever the cause, clearly any big ride ambitions will have to wait for awhile. I took a couple days off the blog, just catching up here on what little cycling we did do.
Saturday was a slow and easy 23 miles on the Santa Cruz Loop path, to the Mercado San Agustin for a beer. Pedaling in the upright position of my recumbent doesn't demand so much of the inner thighs; it recruits more of the glutes, core and hamstrings. Moving the blood around felt good but I was still walking kinda funny.
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Sunday we made a brief attempt at a mountain bike ride. Turns out that I really need all of my thigh muscles to be fully functional for all the moving on and off the saddle, this way and that, down and up the washes. We turned back after a mile or so.
The cold rainy weather today convinced us to just take the day off already. Barry had a dentist appointment just over the border in Nogales that would take up a chunk of the afternoon. We took extra time on the drive south to scout the bike routes between Tubac and Patagonia for a two-day trip planned for early March. Somewhere south of Tubac, we drove next to a lovely bike path that I hadn't noticed on any maps. It kept going into Rio Rico. Everything we've seen so far about that route looks fun, getting excited.
Tomorrow we hope to go for a longer ride on the Loop. In the meantime, as a public service I'll share my encounter with the Cholla bush under the Palo Verde tree at the top of this entry. On Sunday before the mountain bike ride that wasn't, while I was unloading the car, my hand swung back too close to the bush and snagged a chunk of it. A dozen or so of the spines immediately burrowed their little barbs well into my epidermis, a disturbing experience.
What to do? My friend Hank advises using a comb to pull the whole thing off at once, like ripping off the band-aid, but next level. I prefer to cut it off with scissors and pull the spines out with tweezers one-by-one, extending the shrieking time.
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I feel for ya!
1 year ago
While I hope never to have occasion to try Hank's method, the experience motivated me to put a small pair of folding scissors and tweezers in my mtb repair kit bag. If you're hiking or pedaling on the trails out here with a lot of cactus, you might considering adding these to your kit.
Today's ride: 25 miles (40 km)
Total: 244 miles (393 km)
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