Brown Moments

I'm finally starting to feel better. It has taken much longer than I anticipated, getting back to this point, after finishing the antibiotics nearly a month ago. The weird thing was, I went to work last Friday hurting and fatigued already just after crawling out of bed. I struggled to make it through another 12 hour work day, then went home and crawled back into bed. When I woke to the shrill beeping of the alarm clock, at 5:15 Saturday morning, I did not want to face another work day. I shut the alarm clock off, rolled over and tried to stand up, and to my surprise, everything worked reasonably well. I shaved, showered, made my lunch and was out the door. I actually felt like going to work. There was no gradual improvement into feeling better, just like someone flipped a light switch and BAM ... I'm better. For me, that's one thing that is extremely frustrating about RA, just when I think I am starting to understand this disease a little bit, the rules change again!

I geared my bike up so I should be able to get another 10-12 mph out of it. This should allow it to cruise comfortably at 70-75 mph without over revving the engine. Funny thing, after I quit racing, I thought my brown moments were behind me. Brown moments now occur when you realize you're running 20 mph faster than you thought you were and you don't have enough room to get the bike slowed down before the turn.  So far, Randall and I have escaped bodily damage, but you're heart is pumping about a million beats per minute and you have that nauseous feeling in your stomach that you get with a broken bone.  Then we laugh about it and go on.

I changed the rear sprocket, cleaned and greased the rear wheel bearings and cut 2 links out of my chain to accommodate the smaller sprocket today. It hurt my hands breaking the bolts loose, but they will feel ok for my test ride with the new gearing in the morning.

I sold my woods race bike Sunday afternoon. Bittersweet, the thing was built for the tight, nasty woods and it would literally carve through the nastiest, tightest sections imaginable ... as fast as you felt comfortable. Of course, I was no longer able to ride the rough, tight stuff, so it sadly sat in my garage, content to make a trip up and down the road once a month or so.