getting back to it

 I've fallen off writing about these rides. It's probably part of a general malaise about cycling: I like working on the bikes (and I'm getting more opportunities to do so), and I like teaching about them (I teach the Basic Bicycle Maintenance course at the Princeton Adult School, and, as usual, the course is full for this semester)... but I'm less taken with actually riding the bike, probably because I'm not as strong or as fast as I was a couple of years ago (and I was never very fast, although I used to be good going up a hill).

Other responsibilities, illness, and cataract surgery led to my not riding much over the past year or so, but I've gotten back to it (less because I really enjoyed it, and more because I want to get back into better physical shape). As I've ridden more, I've gotten better (now, there's a surprise), and as I've gotten better, I've gotten more interested in riding more.

 

 All this to say that I went out on one of the weekday club rides this past Wednesday. Since it's a weekday ride, most of the folks who come are retired. The regulars who used to do this ride called it "Team Social Security", although that seems to have fallen out of use.

As you can see from some of the pictures, the "Team Social Security" moniker would still apply.

 

The rides are usually about 30-35 miles, and while they advertise C, C-plus, and B-minus paces, they tend to go faster; riders go off the front, and sometimes wait at turns or stops (and sometimes don't). This ride was advertised as having B-minus and C-plus rides doing the same route (so that riders who tired after starting with the faster group, could get "picked up" by the slower group  when we came along). There was a certain amount of self-reflection and reassessment of personal abilities as some of the riders looked at the fast folks who came for the B-minus ride... and it may be that one decided to roll with the slower group, instead.

That said, though, one of the things I like about this group, is that they look out for one another, and don't let people just fall of in the back. I'm an occasional drop-in, but the regulars know one another's abilities, and consider whether someone may be having an off day. They know that some don't climb well, for example, but will keep up handily on flats and descents. They keep a brisk pace, but they care for one another.

 

My current schedule doesn't allow for me to come out on all of their rides, but I think I need to join them more frequently than I do.

 

You can see how we did on the ride page. 

 

I've got a couple of interesting rides planned for the upcoming weekend, and I plan to do posts about them, as well. And now that I've written that, perhaps I'll feel responsible enough to actually do it.

 

uh... rapture?

 So today's September 25, after the Rapture was supposed to happen on the 23^rd or 24^th.

 It looks like everybody's still here, at least in this neighborhood.

The only possible explanation is that it happened, but none of my fellow-citizens qualified to be taken up. 

old man completes sourland spectacular ride

For weeks, The Excellent Wife (TEW) and I have been chatting about doing the Sourland Spectacular.

 

 On one side, it's just the kind of cycling event I like: LOTS of people come out*; it supports a cause that's both local and credible; it's close to home; it's not too expensive (and while they would be grateful for fundraising, they don't require it).

 

(*For some of my associates, the fact that lots of people come out is a detractor. They say it's because a huge ride like this, with so many people whose riding styles you can't predict, is dangerous. I don't deny that, but I suspect that a certain amount of "I'd really rather just be with friends" and "too many people overwhelm me" flavors are also in the mélange.)

 

 But then there are all those hills. And there's no guarantee that the weather will cooperate. Last year, the weather did NOT cooperate.

 

 This year, however, predictions were for a good day. A week or so before the event, emails started going around among my usual riding associates; one suggested doing the metric century (100km; the route was 63-plus miles, over the hilly terrain of the Sourlands); another suggested the 42-mile ride, and that was what they agreed on. As the week progressed, I decided to go along with 'em.

 

 During the week, I had lunch with another regular rider of about my age, and the topic came up. He expressed surprise that I had agreed to the 42-mile ride, when a 28-mile alternative was also on offer. "Don't you know you're going up Poor Farm?", he said, mentioning a hill where some strong riders have gotten off and walked the last bit of the climb. "And Goat Hill?", which is a climb not demanding for the steepness, but for the length.

 

 I'd decided to do it, though, and arranged to be at the start to meet the guys. TEW came along, too - she'd do the 28-mile route, which was more demanding that the rides she usually does, but she decided (and I agreed) that she didn't have to impress anybody, and if a hill was too steep, she'd just join the others who were walking.

 

There were others at the ride from my club, the Princeton Free Wheelers. 

 

I did pretty well, especially for a septuagenarian. The ride page shows I finished with an average of  13.3mph. I mostly kept up with the guys I rode with, and we all had a good time slandering the younger, lighter folks that whipped by us fairly regularly.

 

I DID have a bit of a scare, though. I'm not a great descender, and somehow, I got out in front of the group going quickly downhill on Covered Bridge Road. That takes a few tight turns just before Lower Creek Road. I was trying to keep my speed up so as not to be in anybody's way, and as I came around one of the turns, I barely missed the grill of a car coming up the other way. No harm, no foul, of course... but I'm not the first of my group to have had (ahem) unpleasant experiences on a fast downhill. I would do better to get out of the way, and regulate my velocity.

 

Enough of that. Many thanks to the volunteers. You can do these roads on your own, of course, but having the stops and support available makes it a different experience.

 

 One of the volunteers was kind enough to take this one of friend Bob N, me in the middle, and TEW. (Sorry, folks, it's not the best picture of any of us...)

 

 And one of the routes is a shorter one for kids and families. I saw a family where the child on his own bike was between mom and dad (didn't get a picture), and this one of the daughter in the trailer was too good to miss.

 

 Lunch is provided, of course, offering the opportunity for exaggerated complaints and shameless bragging. I thanked my riding companions for not having dropped me at ever opportunity (one admitted he thought I might drag behind when I first signed on, but said I'd done well on the hills). 

 

(The Excellent Wife also completed. There's a certain amount of pride in the air about the house today.) 

 

I keep saying I need to do more of these. Perhaps I will, next season. 

cataract surgery

I had cataract surgery on the second eye yesterday.

For years, my ophthalmologist has been telling me that I'd got cataracts, and they may affect my night vision, but they weren't enough to work on yet. Finally, at my routine annual visit in March (and how privileged am I, in this benighted and broken US healthcare system, to be able to have routine annual eye and vision visits!), I complained about night driving, and the doc agreed to set me up for surgery.

There was a five-month lead time (the doc is, apparently, busy). I improved upon the time by allowing my anxiety to take over (regular readers will know that I have anxiety in various strengths and industrial quantities). I can fall into the anxiety hole over a multitude of topics, including midnight rehashes of occurrences from decades ago with people who likely could never find me again (and completely don't care, I'm sure), but eyes are special. I have a grotesque fascination with eyes in general. For my own eyes, I have a combination of gross-out and fear of losing vision (I've said for decades that the reason I never used contact lenses, is that there are not enough drugs in the world to get me to put something into my open eye). 

When not stuck in that anxiety hole, I did research on the types of lenses available. A cataract is a discoloration of the natural lens that you grew yourself, and it can get bad enough that the lens is opaque (and you go blind). During WWII, a physician treating pilots discovered that, when pilots got shards of the plastic from which the cockpit windows were made into their eyes, the pilots did not have an immune system response; they body did not treat these as infections. Thus, lenses made of this plastic could be used to replace your natural lens. You can't flex these lenses, as your body does with your natural lens to change the focal distance and see both near and far away... but you are able to see, and can use glasses to compensate for the distance vision needs.

But the lenses are plastic, right? So the shape of the insertable lenses can be made to allow for the same problems that are managed by your glasses, including astigmatism and presbyopia (presbyopia is the loss of close-up vision due to aging, and astigmatism has something to do with the angle that the light comes into your eye, and I admit I don't really understand astigmatism). So (for additional cost, of course) you can get lenses that allow for either distance or close vision, that manage astigmatism... and now, that give you vision at every range, or at some limited set of ranges rather than just distance. You don't get nothin' for nothin', of course, so you make your choice based on what's important to you.

To me, night driving was (is?) the most important, and the lenses that completely free you from any dependence on glasses, have effects around bight lights that might interfere with driving. The lens that gave me one range of vision is also available to fix my astigmatism... but there was another choice, that gives some intermediate vision, without the glare effects of the all-vision lenses. They have a reputation for giving less contrast than the single-vision lenses... but I'm not comparing to single vision lenses; I'm comparing to the lens-with-cataract I had.

The ophthalmologist said I was a good candidate for these intermediate vision lenses, so I went with those. 

After the first surgery, I wrote this too-long report to a friend:

Eyes: well, for the first time in 50 years or more, I see 20/20 out of my right eye. I popped for an extended depth-of-field lens, and that hasn't improved yet, but the doc says to give it a few days. I've taken the right lens out of an older pair of glasses, and, while I feel a right fool with them on, I was able to drive in them. I know I'll need reading glasses, and OTC (over-the-counter, for those who didn't spend decades up to their knees in drug-talk) "cheaters" at 2.5 seem to be working. They're too much for the computer, but some 1.5's seem to be ok for that, for now (and if the extended depth-of-field lenses kick in, I may not need even those). I've got sunglasses with 2.5 and 2.0 bifocal sections so that I can read the GPS, but both of those may be too strong... it's too soon to tell. In other news, the surgery site is irritated, but responds well to the prescribed eye drops. As far as the night vision goes, I'll have to check that later (it was too soon post-surgery last night). I CAN see a color-shift; the image in the untreated eye is yellower, and the image through the new lens is whiter and bluer.

(Those one-lens-in glasses got to be a particular bête noir; I have enough eccentricities and weirdnesses without walking around the Stop&Shop with glasses with one lens missing...)

In the weeks between the surgeries, I didn't have enough varieties of night driving experience to notice whether the vision had improved much. (Driving just after the beginning of a nighttime heavy rain was the worst trouble I had, and the weather has been dry...)

Now it's the morning after the second surgery. I still haven't had enough night driving experience to see if that has changed, and vision improvements after cataract surgery sometimes take a few weeks to develop, anyway. But I have been working on the computer this morning (including composing this post) without glasses. I still need glasses for tiny text, and for the phone... but for my mid-range vision, this is a remarkable improvement. Contrast appears improved. And the blue shift in my color vision, noted above, is even more evident (cataracts tend to give things a yellow cast, changing the way we see color). So early reports of the cataract surgery results are not only positive, but impressive.

I need to write also about the experience of the surgery itself. I have made a real bore of myself, complaining to all who would stand still long enough to listen about my worries. I had visions (did I intend that pun?) of surgeons coming after my open eye with scalpels, shovels, and backhoes. It wasn't like that at all. First, of course, I was anaesthetized... but also, they put so much gel (anaesthetic and antiseptic) in my eyes that I couldn't focus much anyway, and then, the surgeon comes at the eye from the side, out of the regular line of sight. While I was awake for the process, and could hear what was supposed to be happening, the process of the surgery was far less gruesome than I'd feared.

I'm writing this at stupid:30 in the morning before my post-surgery visit. I expect to hear good news about the surgery outcome. I'm certainly happy with it, right now.