We had an unusually gorgeous weekend here in Portland, Oregon — blue skies and sunshine for two glorious days in a row! For some time now I’ve been asking my husband to go on a bike ride with me, and we finally went on Saturday. We went riding on the portion of the Springwater Corridor that goes from the Sellwood Bridge to just beyond the Ross Island Bridge along the Willamette River.
We drove to the Sellwood Bridge (bottom of the map) and then went north on the path for 3.8 miles and turned around and went back, so nearly 8 miles total. It was so exciting! Riding my bike out in the real world, just like a real person! (My neighborhood bike rides include traffic and occasional pedestrians, but they don’t feel like The Real World.) The path is mostly level and goes through a beautiful wildlife preserve. It was good practice for me to be around other bikers and walkers and dogs and such, to learn how to maneuver and pass and look behind me without falling off my bike.
I did feel a bit guilty about driving there, because it is only 3.2 miles from our house, according to Google Maps (that’s $1 in gas roundtrip, at $4.19/gal and 26 mpg). But the first part of that route goes down a scary steep hill, and then through some trafficky bits of Milwaukie and Sellwood. I don’t know if I’m ready to handle that hill (not to mention return back up it) or the cars! It can’t be that bad, though, because my husband rode his bike to work today for the first time, along the same path we would have taken if we hadn’t driven on Saturday. And he did it on a fixed gear bike! Surely I can handle it on my 21-speed cruiser. I have to keep reminding myself if I use my brakes properly, hills will be just fine. It’s only if I panic that hills become a problem — sometimes I envision grabbing the front brake by accident and flipping over the handlebars (my brother earned some face gravel doing this when he was young), or slowing down so much that I wobble and fall over. I know, I know, I need to confront this fear! It’s really irrational. (Though I want to say, have you seeeeeen that hill? Ohmigawd it is so steep the sheer g-forces of descent will shatter my bike into tiny bits!)
Aside from the awesome bike ride on Saturday, I spent a lot of time this weekend in the garden. I needed to transfer all my tomato seedlings into one-gallon pots (Hey Amy! Great minds think alike!), which was nice mild exercise for a Sunday. Now my plants are all happily assembled in their sun room on new shelves, and my garden is looking beautiful. Here are my shelves of newly transplanted tomatoes:
As a very, very nice coda to my weekend, this morning after my ten-minute cardio + abs circuit, I weighed in with a three pound loss. Some of this is dehydration, from a brief bout of stomach trouble last night, but some of it is hopefully a real loss and normalization, getting me closer to my weight from before the Chicago Work Travel Food Freakout. So I was very happy this morning! I have really felt the difference of carrying around those three tiny extra pounds during the last week — if i want to be fit, I need to do a lot more exercise (I’m averaging 3-4 times per week right now), and right now my heart and muscles are just not up to the task. Aside from everything good I’ve got going on, I haven’t maintained consistent exercise, which makes it harder to work on self-acceptance. I don’t want to accept myself as a lazy person! I want to love myself so fiercely that I will go on a walk even if I’m too scared to show myself to the world. So it feels good to have this small gain as proof that change is possible, and I hope it will help me as I pursue my fitness and nutrition goals this week.
