Fun & Fitness over 50

I try to keep it light here but I have briefly touched on being depressed before. I like to put a positive spin on it: "I'm not depressed, I'm just highly un-motivated!"
I was thinking that I was depressed on Monday but later in the day as I thought more about it, if you're sad and there are reasons to be sad, that's not depression. Depression is a mental state that is all out of proportion to the reasons for it, if any.

I had specific reasons to be sad, which I won't go into here, not that they're too personal but like I said, I don't want to get too heavy. Anyhow as you may know when you are depressed or sad it's hard to get motivated to do anything. After work on Monday, all I wanted to do was lie down and go to sleep. But I know from experience that won't help. In fact, it most likely will make things worse. The last thing I wanted to do was go for a bike ride but I knew I needed to do it and that in fact, it might help. It did, of course. I had a good ride and it changed my mood. Then I had dinner and mowed the lawn, did the dishes and the laundry ... and then I was angry. Is there a moral here? Not really. Except I thought later that if doing the chores made me angry maybe I should've taken a break, nobody was making me do them except myself.

Today was an "eventful" ride. When I got the bike out, the rear tire was flat. I pumped it up and it held and I hit the road. After a few minutes, I stopped to check it and I thought it was going soft already so I went back, changed the tube out and set out again. But then I thought "no spare". So I headed up to "Mad Dog Bicycles" and picked up a spare tube and chatted with Matt for a few minutes.

I thought I would then be going home and forget about the ride but I really hated to do that especially since I didn't get to ride yesterday. It was 5 and I needed to be home by 5:30 for dinner so I set out to at least get that 1/2 hour in.

And that was it. I'm glad I rode even that little bit.

As an aside, I'm getting better at changing tubes. At the Ride4Love benefit ride last year, I watched my friend Brad replace my rear wheel with a smooth and elegant one-handed move. I was impressed because I hated taking the rear wheel off and on, I always got all greasy fiddling with the chain and derailleurs. Brad never touched the chain. Once I saw it done, I got the idea and I'm able to do it now. Not as gracefully as Brad did it yet but I'm still keeping my hands clean. And then actually changing the tube is not too bad. On my 27 x 1-1/8" wheel, the hole for the schraeder valve with the rubber strip is too tight to push the valve through. I have to lift the strip out of the wheel with a screw driver, insert the valve through the strip first and then through the hole in the rim. Then it goes in. Also I use a Crank Brothers speed lever instead of multiple tire levers and that makes things simpler. Getting the tube and tire back on the rim is much easier too. I don't know if it's because of the tire being broken in or the fact that I douse the tube in talcum powder. When I first got the tire I could not get it on the rim. I had to take it to the shop to have Matt do it. Embarrassing! Now I can do it easily with my hands without having to resort to using levers which can puncture the new tube if I'm not careful. (I've done it).

That's the upside of flats: I'm getting practice and it's not so much of a big deal.

As Walter Cronkite would say "And that's the way it is!"