Getting on my bike after a few years not riding

 

The weather this weekend was perfect. There were some drizzles of rain but for the most part the sun was shinning and it was time to get out of the house for a bike ride. Before I go on about the bike ride itself I want to address the body composition results from today. I am still the same weight and basically everything else. I don't exactly know how it is possible to go on the treadmill 5 days a week at least and still be the same weight. This includes dieting which I have been scaling out my food and i was over estimating the calories before so with out the scale I was saying my breakfast was say 500 caloires when in reality it was 350. That leads to more confusion from me as I would have assumed I would have lost 1 LB at least by now but it seems to be holding out 174-177 depending on if I drink a lot of water overnight when I wake up to pee. With this confusion of weight my pants fit the exact same they have not changed much since the start of this journey. The one thing that has drastically improved is my staminia for exercising. I still can not run on the treadmill for the whole time but doing running intervals through the time on the treadmill is just about there. It is only the last 15 minutes I can not do the intervals. 

For the bike riding this weekend I did the same ride twice and I found out that I was wrong with how to use samsung and starva together. I thought there was some issues syncing but I did not read properly you can not sync non-GPS data to strava from Samsung health so treadmill activity does not sync when logging with samsung health but bike ride or outdoor run would update to Strava with no problems. This means I will be doing treadmill runs with Strava and everything else with Samsung health which does get the information from strava on treadmill so everything is in sync. The image above is Strava VS the image below which is from Samsung health they are the same work out I just get a bit different information. Now I left the one thing in the strava image "Subscribe to view your Fitness trend" I am not a paid subscriber. I was trying to see if the cost was worth it but at the cost I saw a month and year I don't know just yet. It is cheaper than a gym membership by far but I think I have all that info in Samsung health for free so what else do I get out of Strava that might make me want to subscribe? I will continue to look into it and see but the work outs both track and log with the same information so I am happy for today with how things are. If you are reading this and think Strava paid is worth it let me know. 

To get to the ride, I went on two this weekend I ended up doing the first one with a friend and we did the ride in 1:30:00 it was finding the route I wanted to take and just messing around a bit while I was biking. The route is a trail system in my area that goes for around 15 miles but I could not find part of the connector to the last leg of it and my friend was all out of gas to keep on biking as she has not biked since she was a kid. One of the things we found on the ride was a skate park in the middle of the trail near a school feild that the trail goes behind. The access is from the trail so I thought it would be funny to ride down to the skate park and make it like we were going to do some tricks... there were two skateboarders there and my friend went to ride up one of the boxes and then down it. Nothing big but the skateboarder looked at me and said "Now you have to jump it if she went up it, you cant let her show you up!" So I went up one of the ramps an rode down it as fast as I could to hit the box and try and jump it. I used to do things like that when I was younger you see so its all fine. It was the best outcome possible! I got about 1 foot of air landed sadly on the box and rode off like I did I a good job. I did not fall or bust my head open so it was awesome. The rest of the ride was mainly just getting to know the trail and seeing where it lead us. The ending of it there is a bit of a hill to get back to my house and my friend was fully out of juice so we walked it back to the house no big deal it was to get out of the house enjoy the weather and spend some time with a friend outside. It was a lot of fun and I got to go on a bike ride for the journey. 

The second ride was just me alone trying to see how fast I could do the ride. Having the same ride and one that is a a fairly good loop is perfect for knowing how much I improve each time I go out on that ride. I was able to get out and back home in 53:17 so its a perfect loop to ride over lunch. I was fine with the ride for the most part legs good, lungs  fine, back less pain than runing, butt.... my saddle caused so much pain after the second ride. The inside of the cheeks near the front where the saddle of the bike puts the most pressure is in pain. I learned from my prior issue to not have anything that would chaffe but just the pressure of sitting on the bike seat caused pain. I never had this issue as a kid and I would sit on seats that were not designed like the are today if my seat was plywood when I was younger it would have been fine to me. I read a lot of forums about people with similar issues to see how I can resolve it and if a pad for it would fix the problem and most everyone said just let it be and you will not have that issue once you ride more often on the same saddle. Now I am going to trust this info from random people on the internet because of how many times I read it and normally I would exepct people to tell you how this or that product saved them but that was not the case so it passed the sniff test of BS online problem of someone trying to sell you a product. So I am not going to change a thing about my bike and just let it heal up and get back to it and it should get better and I should not have this problem soon. 

One last thing about the rides I noticed something awesome after my rides. I had no knee pain at all on the rides and no back pain either. This is not the case with treadmill runs. My knee does not have a ton of pain but it not comfortable and my back is similar just always slightly uncomfortable and slight slight pain. Bike riding not giving me any of that is awesome and I think that it is going to be my defualt exercise going forward.  

I am off to rest up a bit and then continue the journey! Have a wonderful day and thank you for reading!