Progress is going but updates paused.
I have still be doing the journey and taking keeping in a diet of tracking my caloires. I slowed down a bit on the exercise but I have not stopped and I do not plan on stopping anytime soon. I had the knee pain a few weeks ago that has mostly gone away for now unless I stand for too long then it starts to feel off again.
I also do not plan on stopping the blog either I just had to focus on other things in life and I did not want to put much thought into making anythig for the blog. Not that my process here is difficult persay but I do head out with my camera and think about what I am going to write while on my rides. Instead of making really awful updates with half thought out updates I just did not bother updating.
With all this being said I noticed after logging back in to make this update that blogger has a new beta feature for "creating more engaging content". I am not ever going to use AI to write anything on this blog or use it to generate images. Not that my blog is suited to AI it all about my personal journey with exercise and if I were to use AI for cleaning up my writing it would take all my tone out of the words. These features to add search links or what ever they are pushing would be pointless too. If I wanted links I would put them in the post and I would hope that any readers would make sure the link goes to a valid site and not some bad site. I would not click any links on a blog I stubled across. I am also a little over the top with internet security and if someone I know texts me a link to something or other I am copying the link and running it through virustotal before even thinking about going to the site. Anyway this was not the point of this update just a side thought on my dislike for AI and some insight into not clicking links with out at least checking them first.
What does the progress look like so far.
I started this blog a little before joining Strava but I have been using Strava almost since the start so its a good way to show progress and stats. I have been on an 86 week streak and I want to keep that going. You can see i have not been cycling everyday and there are a lot of walks in there. That is because of my knee pain and not wanting to have it flair up again. I want to get back to riding everyday and not that it has been a few weeks I think next week is going to be the first full week cycling everyday in a while. This week has been a bit of a low week because of Thanksgiving and some other life things that made it just hard to get out and exercise.
I was talking about cycling with the family last night and they all thought I was going to stop becuase it is cold in the morning. They all seemed to have forgotten last year when I was cycling in the snow and ice every day. I reminded them of this and they all looked at me like I was crazy. It is funny to me that the cold seems to be something that would stop people from thinking about going outside. Yet if you dress properly like a jacket and maybe a base layer if its really cold out then its not a problem at all. My current cold set up is lighter than you might think it would be too. For the coldest days around here it can get below 0 fahrenheit with negative wind chill. My set up for those days is sweatpants, windproof pants, t-shirt, fleece hoodie, windbreaker, cycling hat, fleece neckwarmer ( covers my neck and face), wool socks, winter boots, and ski gloves. This seems like a lot typing it out but that is for the very coldest days and I will still get home covered in sweat and the whole ride is nice and warm. My family thinks I am lying about this or something because they would not be warm at all in that how could I be. If I were just standing there out in the cold with the wind and not moving my body sure that might not be enough but exercising with that is perfect. The other thing that they did not understand is how could I cycle on ice wouldn't my bike just slip on the ice and fall? I talked about my fat tire bike and no amount of explaining got them to understand that no it does not slip much on ice and yes I have falled on ice before but knowing how to fall helps. They all think I am crazy and that is just fine with me.
As for the fat tire bike I took it out the other day to make sure that everything was still working on it. I went exploring a little with it because its the perfect bike to ride over anything. I ended up in an area with deep puddles, mud, and other awful ground. The fat tire bike rode right through all of it with no issues. I even took it over through a trail that is very rocky and I would not take my gravel bike on it becuase it would just slip off the rocks and not ride up them. I was able to ride this right up them and ride the whole trail. I came across one problem with the bike as I was riding, the lowest gear was not shifting very quickly at all. The derailleur was covered in all sorts of stuff and cleaning it off helped but its still not 100 percent. Either way it still shifts to the gear it just might need a little tuning. While I was cleaning things I noticed my back tire was low... So that rocky trail is also covered in thorn bushes and well silly me running low pressure and riding up rocks caused more than one thorn to push its way through the tire and into the innertube. I already patched this innertube once so it was time to replace it anyway.
At the point of replacing the tire I came to another problem with my fat tire bike. I am used to riding my gravel bike with quick release and the fat bike does not have quick release. No problem I have all the tools to take a tire and rim off. Except that the nuts were very stuck on the threads. As I was trying to turn the nut off it started to strip a little. Well that is a problem when you get a cheap bike and don't really baby it but how was I going to get the nut off? Simple its a cheap bike and worse comes to worse I can replace things and cut it off but I was not going to try that first. First step WD40, second step heat gun, last step breaker bar. Now if this was a bike that I could not replace parts a cheaply on I might have thought about that a bit more but I thought even if the nut becomes a full circle I could use a nut cutter to get it off. So I sprayed the threads with WD40 which I made mostly sure not to get on the breaks or rotor. After a few minutes I gave another quick spray and then sat there with the heat gun. I ran it on low and that is still much hotter than a hair drier but if it damaged the paint or anything I would just spray paint that part. After the threads were hot I put the breaker bar with the attachments for the nut and put my weight down on it. It did not come loose right away but after about 10 seconds it loosened up and I was able to twist it right off. I caused no more damage to the nut or any damage to the bike or threads. I replaced the whole tube becuase I am not going to put 5 patches on a tube and I can use the bad tube for making new patches so new innertube placed in. I double checked the tire for more thorns and washed it down to confirm nothing was left then put everything back together. The bike ir running perfectly and I did not get any WD40 in the breaks so all is fine. I would not recommend my method for getting this done becuase there are a lot of things that could go wrong but I did not care if they did.
Next Part of the journey
Things are getting a litle more normal again so for the next part of the journey I am going to try to keep the blog updated. I know that this seems like a low bar to pass but when things in life are hard passing a low bar is fine. I will be on this journey for a long time and bumps along the way are not going to stop me. Taking little wins or making small achivable goals is sometimes the perfect thing.
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