I need some naptime whenever I bike more than about twenty minutes,
preferably almost as long a nap as I spend riding. This is yet
another problem to face when spending much time each day biking. How
does Lance do it?
Not only do I feel tired after riding for a while without napping, but
in effect, the neurons are much more available after the nap.
E.g., I feel smarter, but only after the nap.
Sorry I haven’t been blogging so much.
There’s an interesting online Scientific American article.
It’s about neurogenesis adaptability research at Johns Hopkins.
. . . The team found that there is a two-week window, or critical
period, about a month after these new cells hatch during which they
act like the neurons of a newborn baby.
That’s pretty hopeful, though it does suggest that there’s also a
month-long pipeline for a neurogenesis program to reach its peak.
That could explain some of my starting troubles. It also explains
something else I feel.
Weirdly, although I clearly am far worse at plenty of skills than I
was before I developed my disease, the daily neurogenesis gives
my thinking a kind of immediate and adaptable feel that I used to have
only when I was a kid, and later, when I biked to class in college.
But that feeling is deceptive, since I clearly can’t do as much now.
It confuses other people, because I look more awake and aware
than most people, and even can be more energetic strictly at doing
simple things or things I do alot. People come to wrong conclusions
about my abilities or get confused trying to judge me.
I also have a comment about something else in the article:
“Unfortunately, adult neurogenesis is limited to very specific
structures of the brain and, therefore, the remainder of the brain is
left with reduced levels of plasticity typical of ‘old’ cells.”
This is true. You old cells will stay, more or less, and become more
and more swiss-cheese-like, especially for us HD patients. But
Properties of computer neural net simulations give me some hope that
that can avoid being too limiting. Neural nets are intrinsically very
adaptable to additions and subtractions. BUT, using long-term
neurogenesis deliberately to reverse HD and other neurodegenerative
diseases is utterly new; it’s only been done unwittingly, at most. We
don’t know how it will work out.
You do, I think, have to make sure and regularly practice skills that
you want back or want to have instead. I regularly practice my
pre-disease skills, though not as much as I would wish.
There is some evidence I see that long-term neurogenesis can be
successful. I have a hobby of reading biographies, especially
Presidential ones. Virtually every President has, at least exercised
more than usual at some point. All the ones in my lifetime have had
daily serious routines. The current one even shares my habit of
biking more or less first thing each day. For all we always like to
grumble about stupidity of Presidents in office, he did get there
somehow.
And I’ve seen a case or two of HD patients that exercise alot having
very slow onsets.
On these days, I think back to a line in one of LeGuin’s Earthsea books:
“On these days, all things done are ill-done.” Because it’s true. On
bad days, I’m likely to mess up anything I try. I’m likely to
hurt myself biking or doing repairs. Cooking is likely to fall on the
floor at some point (I lost TWO lasagna attempts this way). Blogposts
will be hopelessly messed up.
I have them about every two weeksish, but am not entirely sure, because
I haven’t been able to get myself to log them (yeah, I tried to do it
the day AFTER, but still no joy). Alot of the time, they come the
day after hard physical work or drinking, but not always.
This post is about various bike problems I’ve run into and summaries
of my solutions. I’ll probably be back to this topic.
Hard to pick up bike maintenance: Bike maintenance is
complicated and hard to get right. I used to ride in college, though.
When I was restarting, it was frustrating that this was so hard now
when it used to be so easy. Of course, much of this was because it
had been so long. But it’s the sort of thing that annoys because it’s
evidence of degradation; some of that degradation was real, some not,
I think. I think this made me too stubborn about taking my bike to
the shop for maintenance or taking classes.
My maintenance cycle:
weekly: chain oiling, tire check
biweekly: brakes (when using rim brakes)
monthly: derailleur oiling
biyearly: take to shop for cable fixup
High Impact and Rate of Bike Failure: ANY day I don’t get
exercise is a bad one. So, any period my bike doesn’t work I’m going
to be in bad shape unless I go to the gym every day. OR unless I have
a second bike. That was my choice, in the end. After a year of
starting the biking falling cycle and mismaintenance, my first bike
was already in bad shape, anyway….. The second bike is still fine.
Wheels: My irregularity in biking means I have to underinflate
my wheels somewhat.A
Brakes: If you bike with an irregular motion, or commute, your
brakes will need alot of adjustment. In the end, I shelled out for disc brakes
when I got my second bike, and became alot happier. Most bike brakes
are rim brakes – they live on the wheel rim. But rims inevitably go
out of true quickly if you bike daily, or have an irregular motion or
crash alot. When your rim goes out of true, you have to adjust your
brakes or see them rub. Or true the rims, which takes awhile, so you
don’t want to do it too often.
Dehydration: See my goop post, below.
I just compounded some of my special rehydration goop. In order
to bike much beyond half an hour a day, I’ve had to compound a
special rehydration compound. I drink a little over a bottle per hour
of vigorous biking. The recipe is enclosed at the end.
If I just have Gatorade, I have to drink over two bottles of it to
recover from an hour of biking outside, and chow down on a salted
banana and some other fruit. EVERY DAY, while tired, or face cramps.
Or I drink a bottle of goop, end of story.
I could just buy stuff that’d fill the need, but it’d get expensive
(>$5/day?). So I make it instead, needing to spend an hour and $4-5
per week. Plus, I can fiddle with it. And, maybe it’ll even work out
as a marinade (see post two previous).
Because it does take work to make it, I also drink alot of Gatorade
and other retail sports drinks as well.
Now that I do most of my biking indoors on a trainer setup, this isn’t
quite as necessary. I could conceivably live without it by drinking even
more Gatorade and eating more bananas. BUT it’s vital whenever
I bike outdoors. My neighborhood is hilly, and I live in a windy
region, though since bike-friendly, non-major, roads are usually
less level, I suspect lots of bikers face plenty of hills. It does
feel good to get to the top of them.
The Recipe:
This is a high-intensity rehydration mix. It’s basically a slightly over
double-strength hydration recipe, using pureed fruit as a base.
Because it’s a pain to make, I make a week’s worth at a time.Interestingly, I’ve found that I need to to add a little bit of oil to
the standard hydration recipe for it to work for me; well, it’s not
surprising that the fat-intolerant medical industry would ignore that
need. BUT I binge on much more and less healthy fat if it’s not in there.Even this isn’t quite complete for me. I also need a small amount of
meat afterward that I should try adding.Ingredients:
Because of allergies, I use a filtered water pitcher as the water
base. Allergies to things in water are worse when biking (though air
allergies are easier, go figure).TO MIX INTO 5 3/4L GATORADE BOTTLES)
==============================
5 cups fruit / whole bananas / whole apples
1 3/4 cups sugar
6 tbps salt
3 tbps canola oilTo make:
Get out blender
Get out liquid measure, w/filtered water
Add some fruit and blend in batches, dding enough water to blend completely
Once it’s all in, blend for 2 1/2 min
Add salt, oil, sugar, blend
Taste mixture for sugar/salt balance, add one if needed.
Divide mixture equally into bottles
Fill bottles w/filtered water, using liquid measure
Cap, shake, clean, and refrigerate each bottle.The original hydration recipe I started with:
TO MIX WITH 1 LITER
===================
1/3 cup + 1.5 TBPS sugar
1 tsp salt
1 cup fruit or banana
It looks like wearing a little more protection was the answer to making it.
This week, I’ve averaged about 63 min.
There were two parts to this. I now wear jeans whenever I bike, and
socks whenever I’m out of bed (otherwise they get bonked/cut too often).
P.S.: after reading a new Cool’s Illustrated Korean quick-BBQ recipe
(hint: the marinade isn’t instant), I’m speculating that a special
hydrating goop I make for riding could double as a marinade. The
recipe calls for pureed pear for its acid and helpful flavoring, and
soy sauce as a brining agent. My goop usually involves several
different pureed fruits, often including a probably-similar-in-effect
apple. It also includes salt and sugar and oil. About the only
common marinade ingredient that’s not there is garlic. Am I
marinating my interior? Good thing for gastric linings.
I’m having a big problem breaking an average of a little under an hour
a day. I’ve succeeded in making it pretty rare that I miss my
20-minute “minimum”. And more and more often, I can exercise for 40
minutes, which makes for a decidedly nicer day still.
BUT. Getting above a 50-60 min/day average is hard for me. I’ve been
pretty much around this threshold for almost a year and a half, with
some breaks (see travel problems, below). I’ve tried thing after thing
after thing.
I’ve tried an exercise bike, making it easier to bike, making my own
hydration goop, biking twice/day, etc. No good.
My current theory is that I’m getting too physically battered and need
to wear more protection. Certainly, my legs look battered beyond
belief most weeks when the biking’s good. So next I’m trying doubling my
socks and wearing jeans.
At first, I was going to get a huge post out the door on this subject,
including all my various calculations, but realized it’d take too long
and be too forbidding as a big chunk for reading, anyway. I’m just
going to start with the basics, and get more complicated later.
I’ve found it handy to think in a particular kind of unit for planning
purposes: time spent exercising.
The first thing I tried to do in neural exercise math was to decide
how much exercise I needed to roughly stay even. I found I was able
to decide whether or not I was positive or not by whether I felt
depressed and stupid. But it takes me a while after exercise to
decide. So I couldn’t just sit on the bike machine until a bell went
off, but had to try a bunch of different levels.
Every day, I do my best to get at least that amount of exercise,
though, of course, generally I try for alot more to move back toward
pre-disease neural levels.
More recently, using that as a base, I’ve used neural exercise math to
get a rough picture of how long it might take to get back my
pre-disease neuron levels. I’ll post on that later.
Starting is probably the hardest part, especially since enterprise is
one quality the disease robs us of.
I was able to use my stopping of driving as my driver to start. At
that point, to keep my job, I had to take some combination of bus,
bike, and foot to get places. My city’s Metro has a nice system that
lets you carry bikes on the fronts of buses, allowing for wide
flexibility and providing a solution to one intrinsic bus problem of
stops being not being close to most places.
I’ve since lost my job and gone on disability, hopefully temporarily
while I recover my neurons, but it was easy to stay with the pattern
of serious daily biking because I’d already started.
Another way that might help is if you announce your exercise plan to
some friend or family member, that may help tie the commitment to your
brain. Plus, it’ll probably help to to talk over the details of your
plan with somebody else. I did.
No matter how you start, you’ll have to start small and work up
annoyingly slowly from there. And prepare to start from near-scratch
again and again whenever you travel or the inevitable long-term
injuries to bike or human happen.
My plan involved a complicated combination of bus, bike, and walking.
The buses have a route that involves a single change of bus, have
a stop 1/8 mi away from home, and about 1.1 mi from where work was.
My plan was to start small and work up to biking to the closest bus
stops (“biking short”, I called that – it totalled to 20min, a bit
above what I feel to be my daily minimum to stay in rough place).
Then I worked slowly up to biking at least every once in a while the
whole distance to the spot where I changed buses – about halfway
(“biking long”). Then I did that more and more often. My hope was to
get to biking the whole distance, at least most days, but that turned
out to be impractical.
It turns out that almost as much naptime as biketime is needed
whenever I bike more than about twenty minutes (to absorb the
neurons somehow?). Thus, it was impractical to bike more than
halfway (biking and bus took the same amount of time). Unless I
wanted to spend even more than four hours a day effectively in
transit.
Even the short-term injuries and other problems will be annoying,
because it only takes one day of not exercising to start
establishing a brain cell deficit and starting to move toward
depression. I hate those days, but there’s no avoiding the occasional
one.
Trips are always annoying for me. I can never maintain any high
rate of exercise on them. In fact, there’s always at least one day
where I can’t even manage to get in even my minimum of 18ish aerobic
minutes. It takes some luck to be able to successfully exercise on
days when you travel.
Days like that are, as at home, somewhat depressing, and I tend to
lose things and generally feel stupider. But the impact is worse than
at home because you need to adapt more on trips and there are more new
things to appreciate.
I find it invaluable to stay at a place that has an exercise room of
some sort. So far, every exercise room I’ve seen has included a
bike. Once, that was the only working equipment…. A few times I’ve
let a higher hotel cost deter me, and always regretted it. It’s worth
every penny to worry less about losing things, and be able to fully
appreciate what you paid so much to see.
To keep at exercise on travel, I always have to either plan to go at
the start of the day or some other recurring, plausible part of the day.
The experience and problems are different enough that it took me a few
trips before I started really getting down the habit of getting in
daily exercise.
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