Back in the Game

I’m back! Tonight is my first shift since the surgery, and today was the first real exercise. I had been hoping to take part in the Myra Canyon to Penticton bike tour today, but missed the registration deadline, what with being in the hospital and all. In lieu of the railbed I took the newly rehabilitated mountain bike up to Oyama Lake for a backcountry loop.

This loop, to be precise.

There’s a few differences between this sort of road and a railbed. First of all, you need to have brakes, and right around the first big hill I realized I probably should have reconnected those.

I fell around the 10km mark, which you might recognize from that map as almost the worst possible place to fall. At least the view was good.

Banged up my elbow and hip a little, nothing too serious. I decided to keep going because I’m a complete imbecile.

At 13km the route turned into more of a cliff, dropping very quickly towards the lake, and I was biking slower than a walking pace through what is a road 11 months of a year but becomes some kind of waterfall in April.

At 16km I decided to get out and walk. This is where the route changed from abandoned logging roads to the High Rim Trail, which is about four inches wide and more vertical than horizontal. It was a tough slog up about half a kilometer of hill, before getting to the monolith.

You can already hear the Strauss just looking at that thing, can’t you?

I decided to run the rest of that trail, carrying my bike. Also probably not my wisest move but I was getting a little fed up with the slow going. Over the river, through the woods, leaping and clambering and swearing across endless fields of deadfall.

Despite breaking into a run that 3km took me nearly an hour. That’s what bushwhacking does to you, I guess. I finished the final 4km of biking in a comparative blink of an eye… finally some flats to deal with. I think I might have even got out of second gear once.

Anyway, I would have written a more intellectual blog post but that’s how I spent most of my day, and now I’m spending the night working. So there you have it.