Category: cycling

Passionately unmotivated, yet optimistic.

~ Lkvy ~ 2 Comments

I wasted away Sunday with naps and YouTube videos, including one of a guy with a riot shield warding off a cassowary’s attacks. (More on that later.) I compensated for yesterday’s laziness today, starting at 8 am with a 1.5-hour session at the bouldering gym. Then, I decided to head to the seaside for a sprint on the bike, except I left the house with too much skin exposed. It was only 11° C, but it’s June*: I was almost more insulted than I was cold.

I drew a small success out of that failed ride with a QOM on Strava. I figured I’d do a celebratory strut downtown to drop off some homemade baked goods for the bike shop. (Snacking is their #2 passion after bikes). I continued my quest downtown, making quick stops for goods such as a bottle of titanium white paint to replace the one I wasted when I turned my bedside table into an eyesore. I also decided to liven up my place with some life with the purchase of two new plants.

Before 3pm, I’d gone climbing, walked a total of 14.5km, and cycled 4km. I could have stopped and declared it a productive day, but no! I also did laundry and made hummus! I had an important email I’d been putting off that got sent! Then, I decided to take a 24km spin around London on Zwift and got a QOM on that too! And broke 800 watts for the first time! Then I wrote this post! Next, I might bake and decorate a three-tiered cake tonight!

Maybe I’ll never sleep again.

Ah, the ups and downs of being Bipolar. It’s not just feeling intensely sad or happy: it’s often about feeling devoid of motivation one week and bursting with energy the next. I find it easier to accept that it is how my brain operates than to fight it, but sometimes I have commitments to meet; other people’s expectations to meet; laundry to do, and hummus to make. It’s inconvenient.

Now, let’s go back to that cassowary video, which I can’t find because the Reddit post I saw it under has since been deleted. Still, this leads to what I am about to reveal.

I’ve been to Australia!

When this comes up in a conversation in person, 4 out of 5 people (who haven’t been anywhere in Oceania) responds with variations of this:

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Recreational creation.

~ Lkvy ~ Leave a comment

Okay, I think I’m getting the hang of the GPS (Garmin Edge 1030) I’ve owned for three years. Since it’s spent much of its existence mounted on Yann’s bike, I didn’t bother learning the function of its three buttons or how the interface worked. To my chagrin, it took about an hour of impatient fiddling and button-mashing before I finally got it to sync with my phone, a success marked by the creation of my Strava account. (I’d already written about this here.)

One of Strava’s appeals is the stalking functionality. This could be me:

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More venerable than even an award-winning trophy designer.

~ Lkvy ~ 1 Comment

More things than just my hair are now yellow. I realized yesterday morning that my hair had stained my grey-blue pillowcase.

Hard to see, but clearly not pee.

I’ve included a picture in case you were imagining something resembling a piss stain.

So, this is a definite drawback to having bright-coloured hair. Randomly staining things isn’t supposed to be a part of the regular human experience.

The best thing about having yellow hair has been the attention. I’ve mainly been in a good mood lately, enabling me to receive attention well. People drop what they’re doing to stare, including children during recess. Two weeks ago, as I walked by an elementary school, a group of kids ran up to the fence and collectively gawked. A girl with her two front teeth missing jumped up and down, waved at me, and said, “I like your hair!”

Had she not said that, though, I’d have assumed they were star-struck; after all, I am the Local Legend for the Strava segment that ends in front of that school. That means I have the most efforts on the given segment over the past 90 days. Hardly an impressive feat when the segment happens to lie along your daily commute, but the kids definitely don’t know this.

“When were you going to tell us about your secret Strava?!” –Zack

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Riding the Horse on the Goose.

~ Lkvy ~ 10 Comments

My latest carrot acquisition:

Chode.

Its girthiness is typical of that carrot variety (Kuroda, maybe?), but I’m easily impressed these days. With the latest travel restrictions, my world is limited to eating, sleeping, and playing on the island. But my interest in oversized vegetables started when Zoée shared with me a video featuring her friend’s butternut squash. Zoée did an artful slow pan of the seemingly never-ending squash, which was at least five feet long…. maybe ten? I was already shocked by its length when I realized that I was only halfway through the video. I was inspired to look up vegetable world records.

There, I found my new dad:

Continue reading “Riding the Horse on the Goose.” →