Biking as Exercise Shortcut

So I have to be at the doc’s office for a blood draw at  7:30 this morning. That doesn’t leave enough time to jog around the park and get cleaned up, so I decided to ride my bicycle instead. Four times around the park = four miles. Left the house at 5:10 a.m.

Bad idea. Too many morons with dogs off the leash. What IS it with these people? If you want to let your dog run loose, take it to a dog park! How hard is that? Several residents here have been bitten by large loose dogs as they (the residents) were jogging or running around the park. Dogs chase prey. That is their nature. When they see someone trotting along, they think the person is something to eat, and no amount of calling your overindulged “baby” pooch will call it off.

Also, at this hour the workmen laying train tracks up Nineteenth Avenue are arriving to park in the vacant lot the city has rented for them. This means you have loose dogs to the left of you and smelly cars driven by guys texting while drinking coffee to the right of you. Lovely.

And four miles of biking on the flat is really not enough exercise. It hardly raised a sweat.

At any rate, the other fauna are pretty interesting to watch. There’s a gaggle of older women who gather around 5:00. They don’t jog around the park. They don’t walk around the park. They amble. Very slowly. And they chat. Very busily. One of them, who must be having her aches and pains, appears on a motocross-type bicycle, but because she can’t go slow enough to keep pace with them, she pushes herself along with her feet on the ground. It’s a hoot.

There’s a walrus-shaped nerd — pure nerd, for sure — who seems to be walking for his health. He wears a bright orange T-shirt every day, and he, too, ambles along very, very slowly. He plugs himself into earphones from which tinny music emanates, loud enough to catch your attention way across the street. Must be blowing out his hearing.

Harriet walked by with her dog, who’s getting on in years now. She was surprised that I wasn’t on foot this morning. 😀

Several rather handsome, immaculately groomed middle-aged men, the types who look like they can afford those houses around the park, also jog at that hour. Scenic.

It’s supposed to reach 111 today, and so waiting until I get back from this morning’s moment of grand fun would not do. By 8:00 it will be too hot to throw oneself around outdoors.

And at 11:30 some friends are coming over for lunch and to lounge in the pool. I still have to vacuum the floors and clean the bathrooms and shock-treat the pool with a non-chlorine oxidizer and water all the outdoor plants before they get here.

In an Arizona summer, it’s too hot in the evenings, too, to charge around outside. I’ve been trying to do the roadwork in the early morning and then swim at sunset. Last night, got 30 laps in. One lap is only 80 feet…but according to my English-major math calculations, 33 laps would be half a mile. My goal is to get to 50 laps a day, by adding five laps every day or two. Very, very boring activity, but at least you don’t make yourself sick trying to exercise in the heat.

Made some bean soup last night with one of Sprouts’s 10-bean mixes. Result: less than optimal. Most of the beans are actually lentils, which is nice, except that lentils cook in a fraction of the time it takes for the pinto beans and black beans they’ve mixed in there. So by the time you get the larger legumes cooked, the lentils have melted into a thick, unappetizing mush. Also, without salt, it’s pretty bland. You’d need to dump a fair amount of salt in there to make it at all palatable. I added half a can of tomato sauce for flavor, but that stuff is way too full of salt. One-quarter cup socks you with 12% of your sodium RDA, a figure which itself is probably high. So that was disappointing.

Gotta get going! Have a tolerable Friday and a great weekend…