My neigbor Vivian texted me this morning wanting to know if I wanted to go on a bike ride. She is so encouraging. At the tim I was surfing the interent and looking at a bike rail trail in the New River Gorger area.
I haven’t been on my bike since before my cancer diagnosis. Some of my chemo medications make the bones more brittle and I’ve been a bit afraid of taking a fall while riding. The tires on both of my bikes were flat, but I asked her to give me 30 minutes and I was good to go on a short ride. So I pumped up the tires, changed into some comfortable shorts and got ready to ride. We agreed on a short ride to the Greenville Zoo which is about 1.5 miles away. From there we could stop and decide how I was feeling. We made to the zoo and Swamp Rabbit Trail with little effort and I decided I could go on further. We took a slight detour through the zoo parking lot and learned that the bridge we needed to cross to get back on the Swamp Rabbit Trail (SRT) was closed. We back tracked and road along the road and past the Cleveland Park tennis courts and pickle ball courts in order to get back on the SWT. We countinued on the SWt for a while and I deciece to turn back. Vivan decided to got a little furter before she was going to turn around. The ride back was fairly pleasant until the uphill pull to get back to my starting point. All in all it felt really good to get out and ride. I need to start taking short rides everyday and then build up to something bigger. I have great aspirations for doing a long ride along one of the many old railroads converted to bike trails.
The Strava recording below is from where we stopped and I turned back. I didn’t realize that I didn’t have cellular data turned on when I started the ride so it did not record that portion of what we had ridden. My Apple Workout indicated it was close to 5.7 miles total, including the detour through the zoo parking lot:
