Till you change your mind

Regular readers (both of you) will know that I pride myself on being the living embodiment of KBO. Well today I feel like the embodiment of Poets' day. Only tomorrow is Monday, but you get the idea.

Today was supposed to look like this challenge. A good long ride over a fairly challenging course, designed to strengthen my endurance base in the early Spring. As I look out of the window now, I could almost believe it is Spring, as white fluffy clouds scud across the pale blue sky, and the sun beams down on my ever-growing garden's grass. Only those clouds are also being blown around by a north-easterly breeze and it's a bit chilly out there, more akin to March than May.

So what happened?

Last Thursday I got into a really dangerous and physically demanding situation. Yes, that's right I had a conversation at my desk with someone and turned my head suddenly to the left, which was bound to cause a muscle spasm. Something to do with the hyper-flexibility of certain parts of my spinal column compared to the rigidity of others, and the brain sending signal to some of these muscles:

The next 18 hours were agony, and the osteopath I saw on Friday morning was non-committal about my chances of riding today. Yesterday morning I still needed painkillers so I decided to officially bail from the event. But it's a bit like that moment when you make an appointment to see the Doctor, your symptoms diminish and you know you are going to feel a bit fraudulent at the point when they say, "now how can I help you today?" Then they do the "look". The one that says "shirker". Paranoid? Me? Doesn't mean they are not out to get me.

I digress.

I started to feel slightly less pain, downgraded from co-codamol to paracetamol plus, sometime during yesterday's cup final, about the point where Chelski got the benefit of yet another dodgy decision. Still at least that prevented Steven Gerard getting another winner's medal. Yes, still bitter, 6 years' later.

So I decided to give it a go, and met Mendip Mackem and Skip in Axbridge, rode to the HQ in Cheddar, signed on and set off.

And it hurt. As it quite often does on a sportive, only this time I was hurting at a level that I normally get after about 80 miles, not 8. My legs were fine, I ambled up Cheddar gorge and across the levels to Wedmore, but by then I was starting to get new pain in shoulder and back, so decided, for once, to be sensible. I cycled back to Cheddar, dropped off my timing chip and came home. I think MM and Skip thought I was mad for even starting, but I would have wondered about it all day if I had never given it a go.

This is my sportive which is slightly truncated as you can see. I still managed over 1500 feet of climbing in my 26 miles, and I have probably done more exercise today than 95% of the UK population. And I am planning to compensate next week, honest. But I made the right decision, so I don't have to justify it, do I?

I think the moderate amount of exercise was probably about right as the osteopath did say that I needed to keep moving it and stretching the neck. And I do feel a lot better, if for no other reason than at least I know I wasn't up to it today. And I didn't cause a longer term injury to find out either.