easing my way back into regular exercise with a long and relaxed bike ride

After that grueling hill race that took over 6 hours to complete and drained me like I don't think I ever have been before, I took about a week off before I started to look around and realize that I was getting a bit too complacent with doing nothing all day long. I didn't really want to get out there and push it, but soon our Chicago weather is going to turn nasty again and I figured I should take advantage of the last remaining good weather we are likely to get this year.

I had no objective, I had plenty of water, a few dollars in my pocket and the tools necessary to change a tire if I broke one and just headed out.

I don't normally believe the caloric burn when cycling, but since this wasn't a difficult ride at all and for the most part I wasn't pushing it. At times I did really leg it and go for it, at one point during one of the only hills we have getting up to nearly 60km/hour

This was an easygoing ride and it was in the middle of the afternoon on a weekday so that was why I was able to get up to high speeds because nearly nobody else was around. On these bike paths you can actually get in trouble for going that fast because it is rightfully considered to be quite dangerous.

My heart rate stayed high and that was the objective.

I was aiming to stay in the yellow or orange zones and you'll have to forgive my ignorance but I think those are zones 2 and 3 with zone 4 being what is potentially dangerous for someone my age. I normally will try to stay out of there if I can even though I was in it a great deal during the hill climb race that was more than 2 weeks ago.

When I returned home after 3 hours I felt like I am still fit because this didn't really even wind me. I was relaxed for most of the rides except during the times that I felt like a rush of adrenaline and really wanted to conquer.

So this was kind of a reminder to my body that it is not time to sit on the sofa scarfing down Popeyes chicken all the time, we still have work to do. I lost a bit of weight mysteriously after the big race and now I am going to see if I can keep it off. There were a lot of theories as to why it went away in the first place and one of them was muscle loss as well as water loss from muscles. We will see if this exercise causes me to gain weight. If that is the case I think I will know what the issue was.

I think now that I have done this I will return to regular running of 5k's and we'll have to see if that crazy amount of exercise that I did on race-day will have some sort of impact on my ability to run longer distances without suffering. As the weather turns here, it will become easier to not have heat be a factor and at least for autumn, I am looking forward to that. Winter? not so much.