Weekly Review March 30th – April 6th 2020

This week only consisted of a single ride. And in hindsight, maybe that was a really bad idea anyway.

I admit to desperately wanting to finish the Tour of Watopia 2020, and in doing so I believe I put that goal before my own well being.

After finishing the ride on Thursday, I felt alright but not great. Given how I was feeling overall, I didn’t think much of it.

However, on Friday morning I really paid the price. Lung pain back in full force.

I decided to take it very easy – obviously no riding on Friday – and had planned to maybe do a light ride on Saturday. However, I ended up having to do a major firefighting operation for another of my personal (yet essentially work) projects. Total fail. I worked 8-4 on Saturday, and felt like garbage after it.

Then, strangely (or not that strangely, as we may soon see), I felt pretty good yesterday / Sunday.

Calling the Doctor

Given it’s now been over 14 days since I first started with the various symptoms I’ve experienced, I my wife decided it was best I call this doctor this morning.

Here’s the embarrassing part.

After describing my symptoms, the good doctor informed me it sounded a lot like … acid reflux.

Initially I was very dismissive, but after having read the symptoms, it could very well be it. Well, aside from the bad breath. Bloody cheek.

It’s mighty odd that my wife has suffered similar symptoms over the past few weeks, along with my sister-in-law and her fiance. But given that my problems have persisted way beyond all of theirs, I’m fully open to suggestions.

Anyway, the interesting thing is that quite recently I have changed my diet, somewhat.

At night time I have been eating a bowl of fruit. Typically this is a handful of grapes, a whole orange, and a tin of pineapples. I must stress, the single portion tin, not the big bugger:

I’m talking about the little baby bear tin off to the left. If I have a bigger tin – mummy bear tin – in the middle, that would last me two days.

I bloody love pineapples.

But I think it might be these that’s doing it.

I’ve had issues with pineapples in the past. And also regular apples, but not like this.

Super disappointing. Yet another small bit of joy ruthlessly removed from my life.

Maybe I’ve had the Covid and recovered, and then suffered from this as a carry over? I mean, does Acid Reflux give you conjunctivitis? It certainly doesn’t say that on the NHS website.

What Lies Ahead

As crappy as these last two weeks have been, I really did enjoy getting back on the bike for my only session. Even if it left me dead afterwards.

I’m going to take it easy, listen to the medical advice, and then – hopefully – get back into it later this week, if the lung pain buggers off with this extra bit of medication that the good doctor has prescribed me.

Definitely my next ride will be in ERG mode. My mistake, for what it’s worth, was definitely in doing a “free ride” as part of the final leg of the Tour. I over did it. I know that. I knew it whilst I was doing it. Silly me.

I’m going to take a couple of shorter and lighter rides just to get back into the swing of things.

During my down time I have been making various changes. One of which is to move my cycling setup into a new room in the house. That’s going to happen once I’m feeling a bit better as it involves moving the kids bedrooms. But it will also mean I can switch to Zwifting on my proper desktop PC. That means I can use my 4k monitor, so that will be cool. Although I’m not 100% sold on how all this will work just yet. I do quite like having my big dedicated TV screen which is 10 inches bigger than my monitor.

I’ve also treated myself to a bunch of new goodies:

and:

I’m not 100% sure on the cycling jersey situation. I chose the cheapest ones I could find that didn’t look ridiculous. Maybe dressed solely in black is a stupid idea, so I might buy an extremely bright jacket to make up for it. I have no idea what I’ll need outdoors, honestly, so it’s a bit of a guess.

For the helmet I’ve gone for the Giro Synthe MIPS which seemed to rate highly in my bluffers guide to helmet searching. At over a hundred quid it wasn’t cheap, but I once heard some good advice regarding helmets: why would you buy the budget model when it comes to protecting your head? So I went for a good one. And by good, I mean expensive. Logic.

In terms of power meter (gotta have them stats), I’ve bought the Favero Assioma DUOs. At £639, these were 9 quid more than my entire bike. Ridiculous.

For the cycling computer I have opted for the Garmin Edge 530.

I’m yet to discover many of the features of this device – all in good time – but the one I am most looking forward to is the live Strava segements. I can’t wait to get out there and set some times on the various hills and routes I used to do as a kid.

Comparatively, this was a bargain at just over £200.

I say comparatively as I was going to buy the Garmin Edge 1030 which is about 3x the cost, but was given some great advice – thanks Phil!

I also bought a little bumper protector thing, which frankly should be included in the cost in my opinion. But whatever. It’s not.

And lastly I figured I needed a water bottle holder, so grabbed a Tacx Deva.

All in all, a very expensive week.

At this point I don’t know what else I might need. I think a cycling jacket is the last thing I can thing of. Maybe a puncture repair kit. But frankly I wouldn’t know how to use that even if I did get a flat. My great plan there is to ring my wife and wait for her to come and collect me in the car 😀

Wrapping up, hopefully this medication promptly solves my problems, and aside from not getting to eat pineapples anymore, I can get back to the fun things in my life.