Morning Cruise to Beat the Heat – BionicOldGuy

The cooling trend I mentioned last week that made it feel fall-like here has been replaced by another hot spell. Several days in a row of triple-digit (F) temperatures, or more than 38 C. But it still is cool in the morning so I sneaky my rides in early. I went on what I thought was going to be a nice 90 minute cruise to the Southeast of Morgan Hill. It was pleasant, but I cut it short because I’ve had an orthopedic backslide.

I think I overdid it on my strength training recently. For my upper body I mostly do resistance training with bands in my garage. I also do “heavyhands” walking with 3 or 4 # weights (about 1.4 or 1.8 kg), and some Nordic walking with poles. It is a pretty minimal percentage of my training compared to the large amount I spent riding. So I decided to balance it out by bumping up the work with resistance bands. I usually do 1 set of 4 different compound movements that cover a lot of upper body muscles. This isn’t enough for the core muscles so I work those separately at night. This resistance training session, aside from warm up and cool down, takes less than 10 minutes. And it has worked well for me fighting off muscle loss for years now, in fact I’m stronger than I was a few years ago because I’ve had to add more bands to up the resistance.

Nevertheless I was enthused about doing more (my wife would point out “this probably means he’s read another book” and would not be wrong). Especially for us older folks, when you do more you should gradually ramp it up. I of course ignored that advice and starting doing over 30 minutes of strength work instead of 10, and doing it 3 times a week instead of 2. It felt fine while I was doing it. But Tuesday after my group ride I noticed pain in the area of the top of my pelvis in the back on the left side. So yesterday I decided to still do my strength training and hard ride, but back off or stop if I felt any discomfort. The problem with that idea is that I often feel great while exercising and don’t notice any problems till later. That’s what happened yesterday. The resistance session felt fine, I did the hard part of my ride including some fast intervals, and then I wanted to spend the rest of the ride at a nice cruising pace. Only then did I notice discomfort, so I headed home, with the discomfort growing on the way.

So that was my wake-up call. I need to go back to what has been working, and if I decide to add more in the future do it gradually. The pain seems to be in the vicinity of my left sacroiliac joint. I talked about severe problems in my right SI joint in the past in this post. Hopefully it will not get that bad on the left, and a few days of rest, ice, and anti inflammatories will calm it back down.