Turning Inward

Today’s 25-mile ride was just my 4th outdoor ride in the last 10 days.

More than a month has passed since my former coworker announced his plans to retire. He worked his last day on September 29 and still has not been replaced, though this week there are signs that someone is in the hiring pipeline. It might take another week or two before the new worker is on the schedule, and in the meantime I will continue to work a lot of extra hours. Overtime has fattened my wallet but has hollowed out my cyclocross season. Grafton and Sun Prairie are no longer in my plans. The state championships are off my calendar too, as I will be in Pennsylvania on November 18. My employer has promised me a few days off, whatever may happen with the new worker, and I arranged those days in a way that ensures I can travel to Mom’s house for another extended stay. I expect to be in PA from November 13 until December 1. That leaves only Kern Park Kross in Milwaukee on November 4 and CamRock & Roll in Cambridge on November 11 as potential races for me. Neither is very realistic. It will take far nicer than average weather to entice me.

Even with my overnight work schedule, which makes the warmest hours of every afternoon available to me, I’m feeling the effects of falling temperatures and waning daylight. Tomorrow will be the last day this year with a 6 p.m. sunset. Two weekends later we will “fall back” out of Daylight Saving Time: sunset on November 5 will be 4:39 p.m. Ouch! If I weren’t chasing a couple of mileage goals, then I would be content to abandon my outdoor season right now.

I can’t say that I’m enthusiastic about spending lots of time riding indoors; it’s still kind of a necessary evil. But I do want to get back into the home gym for more structured strength training. Yesterday I began a new routine that adds grip strength exercises to the upper body program I have been following. And I continue to explore my options for a new treadmill, which I think would be a great addition to the home gym. The last year in which treadmill workouts were a significant part of my overall fitness plan was 2013. At that time, my old treadmill was almost ready for the scrapheap and was not much fun to use. A new, feature-rich treadmill would give me an indoor aerobic exercise option other than the smart trainer. It’s still just an idea right now, though, and one on which I will take no action until I return from my upcoming trip to Pennsylvania.

Mom’s house won’t need much to be ready for winter. I’ll do a little landscaping, change the furnace filter, check for drafts around the windows and doors … that sort of thing. When I return to my own home in December, the outdoor cycling season will be done. I will have plenty of time for projects, the biggest of which is to replace the faucets in my bathrooms and kitchen. All four of those have gone bad in one way or another, and I never really liked them anyway.