A reset in unit style.

9 units so far.

Blog post – April.

Last week I was being a bit verbally salty about the driving rule which says that I can’t drive for a month following my stroke ; today, after a whole set of bad experiences with other drivers while I was walking I was quite glad because I would have had so much road rage as to cause a second stroke. As it is, when I am in the car as passenger, my partner Jackie must think that she’s driving somebody with a severe case of Tourettes syndrome.

I’m at about 2 weeks in terms of being home, post stroke, and one thing I have been working on beside working on the boat and the trike is a complete reset of my exercise and diet strategy. Just before the stroke readers will probably be aware that I was getting near the end of my first exercise goal – which was to complete 100 exercise sessions and then have a think about what to do next : my somewhat inappropriate answer is to go out for a hard rucking session and then have a stroke !

Note to readers…..this was not a great idea.

Last week I reset the count to zero and headed out for my first walk around the local lanes and predictably I was a bit all over the place with my walking gait and balance, riding the trike was a lot easier except for when I try to get up and off with wobbly post ride legs. This week i’m back to being able to do 2 exercise walk sessions in a day and one of the odd things to have happened is that I seem to benefit from walking with a longer stride but slower cadence – the longer stride seems to help me get up to a higher cardiac/respiratory workload on the hills.

Obviously the exercise is just one part of my overall goal towards better health and weight management – even the latter was going well at the time of the stroke as I was within (probably) just a few weeks from my first milestone. Things went a bit sideways because then I had to spend a few days in hospital but luckily with very little in the way of appetite but then, when I came home, I had a couple of odd body-weight ‘blips’ with unaccountable weight gains. One, entertainingly just came down to constipation – sorry to those who are embarrassed by this kind of thing but the result of ‘grunting out a big one’ was a 600Gm loss in weight. Just this week I had a similar kind of experience in that the Monday morning weigh-in put me as some 1.2 Kg heavier than just the week before – I didn’t believe it because iv’e generally been very disciplined about eating and what it came down to was simply fluid retention caused by single very salty snack !

What’s with the unit thing ?

In a recent post I recounted an experience from when I worked in the Endoscopy unit of our local hospital, out of all the NHS jobs I have worked in that department was the most work efficient and one of it’s slightly odd features is that we didn’t think in terms of patients as numbers but patients as units of work : a basic gastroscopy we thought of as 1 unit of work and a normal colonoscopy as 2 units of work ……a double-ender – our way of describing a gastroscopy followed by a colonoscopy in the same room on the same day was regarded as 3 units of work. We knew that we had to get through so many units of work per session to get through the huge caseload that the department had.

Anyway, units are a quite useful way of thinking about my exercise sessions as one basic walk around the lanes I can regard as one unit of exercise while a longer trike ride out to the next but one village over (to the excellent cafe there) could be thought of as 2 units. What I am thinking of now is combining my walking exercise and riding exercise as units with an aim of getting to 100 units before, once again, having a rethink about what I do then (and without having a stroke this time !)

At some time in my near future I know that i’m going to have to work towards doing both harder (higher VO2) exercise and longer (long and slow) exercise. Once I get my blood pressure under control and my balance/gait a bit more sorted I can go back to rucking as harder exercise and once I have the trike sorted for longer days on the road that should fulfill me need for longer (and slightly easier) exercise.

What’s happening with the trike ?

The trike is off the road again at the moment because it still needs mudguards and mirrors to cope with the rain/surface water and secondly the appalling drivers around here…..several close calls experienced in just a few days. The main change that the trike needs right now is higher gearing to allow me to continue pedaling on the longer downhill sections rather than just sitting back and freewheeling. The electric assist really helps with the steep uphill sections – it’s really the only way I can get out of the village – but does nothing once the trike reaches a certain speed which is easy to achieve even on a flat road…..not that we have much of that around here.

I had 2 main choices when it comes to the gearing – the trike basically has the one chainring which is attached to the Bafang drive and then the internally geared Rohloff unit at the back wheel. To change the gearing I would either have to change the entire back end to take a larger back wheel (he trike has 20 inch wheels all round) or just try a larger chainring…..given that a new ring will cost maybe £30 and about the same to pay someone to change it and adjust the chain, rather than several hundred for a new section of frame (essentially it’s swinging arm, mudguard, and cables), a new back wheel and someone who is good at lacing in the Rohloff unit, i’m going to try the cheap option first.

I hope that my future with the trike will be much longer local rides, they I hope will be microadventures in their own right – I can imagine right now going out with a stove and bivvi pack and spending nights out.

End note to readers……

A couple of weeks back I had several weeks worth of posts already written, edited and scheduled for publication but then the stroke happened and most of those posts either needed a huge update and edit or simply a post delete – in the end I deleted several week loads of new posts. Now, obviously I am somewhat back on the job but feel like I need a break from the keyboard and internet so this will be my last scheduled post for a while – in the meantime I will be working on my next video segment, especially as even quite poor video’s get at least 10 times the views that written posts do. In the next video I will be working on the placement of the battery isolator switch, fastening the battery down and also working out what to do with the switch panel…..exciting stuff eh ?