Balancing Act

For the past two month, I have worked hard on gaining back the range of motion, on decreasing neuropathic symptoms through my right shoulder and arm - it is really weird what kind of sensations can a ruffled radial nerve cause- and also getting back some arm strength. It is not easy but two months of pretty intense physical therapy three times a week do show results. Lately, I have been thinking about what else to do, besides diligently practicing upper body exercises at home, to achieve a better balance and physical harmony.  The fact that my sports have been skiing (for 48 years now), biking (14 years) and running (6 years) has surely resulted in more strength in legs than arms.

After finding that there was a popular Bikram yoga studio in Pleasanton, we gave it a try last Saturday. Doing various poses in a heated room did not seem like such a big deal. Honestly, it was not too "difficult" by itself. Sure, the heat starts to be annoying after about 30 minutes, after an hour, you drip like a broken faucet and stand on a mat plus towel soaked with your own sweat, but the positions are not overly physically demanding. What did surprise me though was how much trouble I had keeping balance. Let's say standing on one leg and trying do move your arms and upper body into the right places was tricky: my legs were shaking and I had to jump from place to place in order not to roll down, while everybody around me seemed perfectly balanced in awkward positions, looking totally natural. We survived the 90 minute workout and actually felt awesome for the rest of the day. The heat allows for joints, tendons and muscles to stretch, otherwise not achievable at colder temperatures.

I rode at Skeggs on Sunday and here again, I felt great. Downhill singletracks were pure fun and I took at them aggressively, pumping the berms and jumping (some) water bars. I took some of the early fire road climbs cautiously, but after completing the "standard loop", I rode Blue Blossom and did not feel tired at all. Exiting onto Gordon Mill, I again made my usual mistake and went left (downhill) instead of right, a mistake for which one pays with a long and steep climb. I actually enjoyed the climbing!

Lots of things have changed at Skeggs: there is a new parking lot and staging area on Skyline close to Bear Gulch Road, a new section of Sienna Morena trail, some rutted sections have been smoothed out a bit to make them safer.
The Resolution trail has not been gentrified (thanks MROSD!) and is technical enough to keep one concentrated. After I rode the most technical part of Resolution, I saw two hikers coming up the singletrack. I hit the brakes well in advance to safely stop at least 30 feet above them, to give them enough room to walk by. For whatever unfathomable reason, I stopped on the canyon side of the trail. I unclipped my right shoe, put my foot down and was about to unclip the left, when the bike leaned just so ever slightly towards the canyon. I quickly unclipped the left shoe and put my foot down, just to find there was nothing underneath my shoe. The bike swung to the left but I really thought I was going to balance it. "It would be really stupid to fall down that canyon" I thought in that millisecond. The next thing I knew and saw in a very slow motion was the front end of my bike plunge down, followed by poor old myself, head first, landing on my hands, bike flipping over my heels. All this time thinking: "This simply cannot be happening". Yet there I was, tangled in branches and my bike. My first thought was "So here you go, this is the stupidest crash ever, the neck will go out and this was your last bike ride". The hikers checked if I was OK, then tried to help me pull my bike over the edge back onto the trail. With all my strength, I was able to lift the bike so that the man could grab the front tire and pull the bike up. It took me several more tries to somehow hang onto thin bush branches and dig my toes into the loose canyon wall to get up.

The rest of my ride was still fun, I even could not resist repeating a downhill section of Methuselah, even though it added another mile or so of climbing back to the car. The correlation between positive effects of Bikram yoga on riding performance, or losing balance and crashing cannot be proven by this single experiment. I need more yoga classes and more bike rides.