How We Learned to Enjoy Being Sore

I wrote this in response to someone else's post and it sort of stretched from a reply into something more deserving of it's own conversation. The biggest obstacle a lot of people face in sticking to a fitness plan is a pretty obvious one: Working out leaves you aching, if not in outright pain. Sore muscles, sore joints, and noticeable wear and tear on knees and feet. Take up running or hiking and, no matter how much you spend on shoes, you're going to have to deal with blisters. You start working out because you want to be in better shape, but after a few weeks or working out you feel ten years older and are almost always dealing with some sort of new pain. Why keep pushing if it involves so much misery?

Cheryl and I went from complete couch potatoes seven years ago to biking between 50 and 100 miles a week routinely. The thing to keep in mind is that the pain you feel when you start exercising isn't really from the exercise, it's from the time you spent not exercising all those years before. Eventually your body will catch up to your new routine and it won't be so bad. We can look back on early Facebook posts and see how we talked about being wiped out after a 7 mile bike ride, or a 3 mile hike. Now these distances don't strain us at all. Yes, there are diet and hydration and rest strategies you can use to make the soreness more tolerable, but the important thing to know when you take up serious exercise is that you will get stronger and tougher and more resilient. It's just not going to happen after a few weeks or months. It might be a year from now before you realize the difference. But if you stick with it, a few years from now workouts that wipe you out today won't even phase you. Cheryl and I use tracking software to keep up with the miles we log for our outdoor activity, and there's nothing as encouraging as looking back and seeing how much further and faster we can go today than we did even last year. It's sort of a video game effect. Can we beat our high score from last June by getting more miles logged this June? It also moves our fitness out of the subjective realm (it's tough to compare todays aches and pains to aches and pains we might have felt a few years ago), and into the objective realm of documenting what we can actually do today that we couldn't do seven years ago.

So, if you're just starting to work out and are feeling kind of sore, excellent. You're on the right path to feeling less sore in the future. But, even more, you can train yourself to be sore. If you aren't used to the pain of stressing your body with exercise, it can feel like something's going wrong. But, eventually you start to view all the little aches and pains not as evidence that you're doing something wrong, but as proof that you're doing something right.

Tips and Tricks for Longer Bike Rides

 Cheryl and I are heading into our busiest season of the year for biking. Most of our biking is done in after work rides on local greenways, like the American Tobacco Trail, but we also like to get out of town to ride in some less familiar locations. Often these are pretty long rides, over thirty miles, and occasionally more than 50 miles. But, even for shorter rides, we're usually far from home, and often out in remote locations where we're pretty far from any sort of assistance if we run into problems. So, I thought I'd share a few tips for how we prepare for rides.

First up is the physical training. Maybe you've heard about the C&O Canal route, which offers over 200 miles of biking and you would like to tackle it. Or even the more modest Neuse River Trail in Raleigh, a little over 30 miles of biking. Both are great destinations, but will probably be fairly daunting if you aren't used to riding long distances. The biggest tool we used to train ourselves for these longer rides is an exercise tracking program called Endomondo. There are plenty of similar programs, but we've had good luck with this one. It's got a simple interface that keeps track of the time you've been riding, the distance, and the pace, and several other metrics. You can tweak the interface to show any of about a dozen stats. It keeps a database of every ride you make using the program, and once you get started it's kind of addictive. We used to be pleased to ride 10 miles, then we pushed to 20, then we'd aim for 30, etc. Physically, a 30 mile bike ride is probably no more demanding of endurance than a six or seven mile hike, except for the saddle issues. It takes a lot of practice to get used to sitting on a bike seat for several hours in a row. Once you can survive a full day on a bike seat, the bikeable universe expands dramatically.

As for the bikes themselves, Cheryl now has a nice bike manufactured by Specialized, but I'm still riding a Schwinn I purchased at Walmart. You don't need to spend a fortune on your bike to get something that's reliable. Basic bike technology is pretty well established, and the high dollar stuff might make some difference if you're racing, where every ounce you can trim off a bike might boost your speed, but for the sort of casually paced touring riding we like to do I can't believe it would make any real difference. If you're only going to invest in one bike, look for one labeled as a hybrid. This will have elements of both a mountain bike and a street bike, and will open up a lot of territory for  you. With our bikes we can ride on beaches (which requires wide tires), off road trails (where wide tires and good shock absorption helps), and still switch back to paved greenways or roads. We also sit more or less upright on our bikes, which is important for comfort over a long distance ride.

Once a year, we take our bikes in for tune ups. Wear and tear on the cables, chains and gears will throw things out of adjustment and tires will get a little out of true. These are things you can in theory take care of yourself, but it doesn't cost a fortune to have a pro do it right. A pro will also be able to spot things like small cracks in a frame you might overlook.

For more routine maintenance, the important things to do are to regularly oil your chain, and to regularly head to a car wash to hose down your gears. Grit and grime accumulate on the rear gears, so cleaning them off after any ride on a sandy surface will prolong the life of your gears.

Of course, if you go seeking a lot of long rides, a lot of them are in rural locations that will leave you far from your car and even further from any bike shop. So, you should always be prepared for minor repairs and adjustments when you're in the middle of nowhere. We always carry a small bike pump, a standard multitool, a bike multitool (since most bikes need hex wrenches for adjustments), and a spare inner tube for each of us on any ride that's going to take us more than ten miles from our car. I used to just carry a patch kit, but never had any long term success with a patch. I might be able to patch an inner tube and have it hold air long enough to get me back to my car, but the patched tire almost always has a slow leak that will require me to swap out the inner tube anyway. Now I just carry a spare inner tube and skip the patching part. You can, of course, invest in tubeless tires. It might save money in the long term. Inner tubes have very variable life spans. I've had two rides this year that required inner tube replacements, so it's definitely the most common repair I make on a long ride. But it's definitely not the only repair you're likely to need. On one fifty mile ride I did in May, I was riding through a state park when suddenly my handlebars slipped down. Luckily, with my multitool, it took less than a minute to fix. We've also had to make seat adjustments and brake adjustments while we're out on a trail. 99% of our rides go smoothly, but it's best to be prepared for the few that don't.

Moving back to software, we spend a lot of time outdoors, and are perhaps a bit more obsessed with weather than the average person. We aren't afraid of a little rain during a ride, but we also don't mind delaying the start of a ride or cutting a ride a little short to avoid a storm. We've used a few different weather apps, but the one that really works for us is AccuWeather. It has a forecast tool called the MinuteCast that predicts weather for the next two hours and is on target more often than not. During the summer, we spend a lot of time staring at the Minutecast and rushing out to get in short rides during gaps between storm cells. The MinuteCast displays as a two hour "wheel," and it's saved us from drenching storms on more than one occasion.

The last bit of software we rely on during long rides, and for planning them, is Google Maps. Google has a "bike" layer you can place over the map that will cause bike trails to be easily visible. It's also easy to see which trails link with which other trails to give you a long ride. On our 54 mile ride on Memorial Day, we were on at least six different trails that linked together into a more or less continuous path. In addition to planning, having Google maps available on your ride is also helpful, because a lot of greenways have terrible signage. Especially for older urban greenways, they are often built in short segments linked together by a few blocks of street riding. Sometimes the path is clearly marked, but sometimes you just hit a road and are left guessing if you need to go right or left to find the next segment. It's also common for the signs to be obsolete. All the American Tobacco Trail signs still show the connection with the White Oak Greenway as a "future route," despite it having been open for several months. Another common situation is that you'll find a portion of the greenway closed. This happened on our Memorial Day ride, when the Rocky Branch Trail we were following was closed off for construction a mile before we reached the end of it. Google Maps came to the rescue by helping us find an alternate path.

To be honest, we sort of like the challenge of a few obstacles in our planned route. Part of the fun of these longer rides is a sense of exploration. We get to see places we haven't seen before, and are often pretty far off the beaten path. We are sometimes on routes where we see very few other people, like the Awendaw Passage in South Carolina. It's good for the soul to occasionally get out where the world isn't quite so filled up.