{"id":11318,"date":"2010-06-23T11:59:48","date_gmt":"2010-06-23T16:59:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=11318"},"modified":"2010-06-23T21:14:20","modified_gmt":"2010-06-24T02:14:20","slug":"i-want-to-ride-my-bicycle-season-4-month-4-mental-health-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=11318","title":{"rendered":"I Want To Ride My Bicycle: Season 4, Month 4; Mental Health Day"},"content":{"rendered":"

I hate hot weather, especially hot and humid <\/em>weather like yesterday – unless I can be biking constantly and intensely.<\/p>\n

Oddly enough, being up and on the road inverts things completely; that same overheated\/drenched with sweat feeling that’s so miserable when you’re cooking dinner, for example, is just wonderful when you’re out on the bike, working up a good productive lather.<\/p>\n

I took a well-deserved and much-needed mental health day yesterday.\u00a0 I did some puttering around the house, and then got on the road a little after lunchtime for a long hard ride.\u00a0 I rode down the U of M Busway trail to the University, then across the Stone Arch Bridge over the Mississippi into downtown Minneapolis.<\/p>\n

You know how they say having a life-threatening illness makes you appreciate life more?\u00a0 Riding through downtown Minneapolis does about the same thing; the threats to your life – car doors opening, idiots texting, truckers misjudging their clearances – give one that keen focus on staying alive that cancer survivors and combat veterans talk about.\u00a0 It also made me very <\/em>happy to find the entrance to the Kenilworth Trail, close by Target Field.<\/p>\n

The Kenilworth took me down to Lake Calhoun; a brisk lap around Calhoun and Harriett, and then back up the east side of Calhoun and back to Lake of the Isles, led me to the Midtown Greenway, a long bicycle superhighway across South Minneapolis built in a long-abandoned railbed.\u00a0 The riding got very easy; the path is sunk well below ground level, which shields you from wind that’s coming from the north and south, but channels it if it’s from the east or west; I was getting blasted eastbound like a dart from a blowgun.\u00a0 That <\/em>felt good, after a hard ride out.<\/p>\n

Running low on water, I stopped at Freewheel Bike Shop, a repair\/coffee shop attached to the Midtown Commons development, down on the trail level.\u00a0 I had an iced coffee and a lemon cookie and topped up my water.\u00a0 And drained it (1.5 liters), and topped it up again for the road; I’d forgotten how much hot air and a howling wind will dry you out.<\/p>\n

I rode down the Greenway back to the river, for the worst part of the trip – the punishing climb from the Marshall-Lake bridge up to Fairview Avenue.\u00a0 It’s not an absurdly steep hill, but it’s just loooooooong.\u00a0 Actually, it’s not even so much that it’s long – it just taxes my patience; “get done, already”, I practically mutter to myself, as if anger can re-mold geography.<\/p>\n

But once I got to the top of the hill, it was a nice two mile coast home (not that I coasted; bad idea for the legs).\u00a0 And I sat on my porch steps and polished off my water, drenched in sweat, and I felt…<\/p>\n

…good.\u00a0 Cleaner – on the inside, anyway; a shower was pretty much mandatory for the outside – and just plain happy.<\/p>\n

Gotta do that again someday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I hate hot weather, especially hot and humid weather like yesterday – unless I can be biking constantly and intensely. Oddly enough, being up and on the road inverts things completely; that same overheated\/drenched with sweat feeling that’s so miserable when you’re cooking dinner, for example, is just wonderful when you’re out on the bike, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[75],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11318","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biking"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11318","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11318"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11318\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11567,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11318\/revisions\/11567"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11318"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11318"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11318"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}