Hill Climbing

As mentioned previously and in keeping with Marion & Kay, I'm tired. It's the most annoying kind of tiredness: I can't read for very long or at all, I can't keep my concentration on even simple work, but equally I don't feel like sleeping. In fact I keep waking up at 6am no matter how tired I am or where I'm sleeping. This means that I'm pretty damned bored, frankly. I'm using my laptop at lot, browsing around looking at various things, tidying up my disk, cataloging my 18,000 big digital photo library (Lightroom is a wonderful program!) and watching TV via the Slingbox. All "make work" jobs or things that have been lying around waiting for me to have an idle moment.

My usual cure for this kind of tiredness is exercise, I get on my bike and burn up some kilometres. Today I had planned to cycle from Nijmegen to Teuge to have lunch with Frank and do the pilot talk thing for a while. But when I woke up this morning and contemplated the 110km round trip I just couldn't find the energy. In fact it was worse, I didn't feel like cycling at all, just lying in bed and dozing instead. Now I know that this is more or less the worse thing I can do, so I got up, put my cycle gear on and ate breakfast thinking this would help. After breakfast I went back to the McD room and flopped on the bed again. I took me about 30 mins of winding myself up before I got out of the door.

The area around Nijmegen is very beautiful and surprisingly the countryside is rather rolling with some nice hills. I had previously downloaded a GPS cycle route of 53km which covers most of the interesting hill climbs in the area. Now, I'm used to cycling around our house in France where we have real hills, mountains even, so the "bumps" covered by the aforementioned GPS route didn't phase me at all. I thought that I was in for a nice easy ride with some gentle climbs here and there. Such was my confidence that I decided to push the route out a little further to 60km since it was a nice day and I wanted to enjoy the sun for a bit longer.

For the largest part of the route my assumption held, but on the initial gentle climbs I could feel tiredness in my legs and I was glad not to have attempted the ride to Teuge. After about 45km I climbed up to a village called "Berg en Dal". I noticed that the GPS track became quite twisty at this point and wondered why. The name of the village should have warned me, it's "Mountain and Valley" in English. The twisty bits of the track turned out to be a series of steep climbs and drops that seemed to cover the "Berg" from every angle. I gather that while relatively short, some of the climbs go over 10%, though I have yet to check this on my GPS.  

I have been practicing hill climbing on my bike simulator during the winter and have been putting in some quite good times. Recently I even did the Alp d'Huez on the simulator and put in a reasonable time, all things considered. But I have to say that I struggled with these piddling little Nijmegen hills today.  I just didn't have the strength. This is pretty upsetting because it means that my hard won fitness is fading rapidly as a result of all these hospital hours and I will have to do a hell of a lot of work to get it back again. Also, I can feel that I'm dragging around way to many Kgs (again) and that will also have to go - I suspect that I'm carrying a weight penalty of 8-10 Kgs, which is rather a lot of excess weight drag up these hills unnecessarily.

So I guess that as a result of Kay's treatment each of us now has their own metaphorical hill to climb on the road to recovery. Kay, her health. Marion & I bone numbing tiredness, excess weight and decreased fitness.

This is going to take a while.