Reflections in the Mirror

At first it was low impact

Sat Nov 16, 2024
AML 3.0 UCSF stem-cell transplant - Day +86
Blogging tunes: SomaFM: Synphaera Radio

By now, everyone knows my blog titles (and subtitles) are song lyrics. Some are well known… others more obscure. But this one is in a class of its own. I can count on one hand (ok, maaaaybe two) the number of people on the planet that will have a clue about this one.

As I decided on this title — I’ll explain below — I realized that I’ve lost touch with the guy who authored these wonderful lyrics. I reached out to him via the last known email I had, so we’ll see if he turns up. Right, Beavis?

Ok… so why this line? Actually it’s about the subtitle. I started riding the Peloton this week: two low impact rides: one with Jenn and one with Emma. I got the exact same output on both: 131 kj. Not bad for just getting back into it, but only about half of my PR (253 kj) for a 30 minute ride so lots of conditioning to do. Some dude on the leaderboard had over 500 on this ride. WTF, guy? Why are you doing a “low impact” ride if you can get 500 kj output in 30 mins?

“Reflections in the Mirror” precedes “At first it was low impact” in the song and is also relevant as I snapped a couple cool pics during my ride where you can see my reflection on the screen. Here’s one. Congratulations, Emma!

So nice to get back to riding. My goal: alternate between rides and jetty walks every day — though yesterday I did both. Rides will be followed by stretching, and on jetty walk days, I’ll do light arms. I’l post this, get a power nap, and then do arms.

Haven’t done much Pelo so far, but one step at a time.

So what happened on the 12th and 13th? Well, I had bone marrow biopsy on the 12th, so my lower back was really sore — had to take a couple days off from biking and walking, but it’s better now.

I loved that this “steps” chart increased every week since discharge… alas, this week (intentionally not pictured) will be lower than last week because of the biopsy.

“I don’t care about the effing steps,” you say, “WTF happened with the BmBx?!” Glad you asked. Here are the prelim results. I guess I buried the lede.

Not that there was any doubt… I wouldn’t be able to do all this walking and biking if there was any leukemia present… but it was nice to see this in writing.

Anyway, back to the jetty walks for a moment. I did a sunset walk last night and a sunrise walk this morning. Here are a couple pics from each walk. I posted many more here on Facebook.

This is Mount Tam just after sunset.

And a zoom in of the moon rising with a cool reflection in the water a bit later. Need a much better camera for these kinds of shots.

The moon about 13 hours later (on the Saturday sunrise walk)

Saturday sunrise.

The Loch Lomond marina is (one of) my happy place(s). Who wants to walk with me?

Here’s your favorite chart with the counts continuing to rise. Fewer data points now that I’m only going once a week. And come December, it’s gonna be every two weeks. Normalcy, here we come!

What else? The kids and I have been getting into making homemade hoagies. The first time, the sandos kinda fell apart so this time we rolled them in parchment paper… made all the difference.

Gotta use more meat next time — just kinda ran out of everything except the salami. That’s what happens when you have two teenage boys, I guess. We also ordered this hoagie pepper spread to go along with the special oil we’ve been using. The spread is coming tomorrow. We’ll see if it’s better than cutting up the Mozzetta’s “sweets and hots.”.

OK, I think that’s it for now. I’ve been trying to post weekly, but unclear if I’l be able to keep that up. With work hours increasing, all the exercise, the music re-focus — ya know, normal stuff — that’s when the bloggie sometimes falls off. We’ll see. GO BIRDS!

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