Umair Yasin

Adventure Sports Journal, Feb/March 2023 This issue of Adventure Sports Journal had the inspiring story of Shawn Cheshire, an Army Vet and EMT. This is a free journal available in various places, my local bagel shop had it. In 2009 Shawn got a traumatic brain injury while treating a combative patient, and ended up going blind. This led her into severe depression. In her words “I had a choice to make, I could either choose to see the possibilities, make the possibilities, discover the possibilities, or I was going to kill myself”. Fortunately, she chose the former, and with help from the Veteran’s Administration Palo Alto Polytrauma Rehabilitation center , turned herself into a world-class adventure and endurance athlete. She has raced for Team USA in the Paralympics on a tandem bike and also runs competitively. Even more astonishingly, she has trained herself to ride solo on a bike, and has ridden across the US from Oregon to Virginia, as well as completing the off-road 2700-mil...

I created my own segment on Strava, so I thought that made me the “king of the mountain” until someone else rides it faster. But it turns out Strava found others in the 70-74 age group who had done it so I’m now number 5. As I believe I’ve previously mentioned, there are a lot of fast old folks in this area! Getting up to number three would require increasing my average speed from 21.1 kph to 22.9 which is a reasonable short-term goal to shoot for. I would need to knock off 13 minutes to get to the top of the leaderboard, that’s more challenging. I went out and back on Coyote Creek trail on my recumbent, from the Anderson Visitor center to the Bailey underpass and back, a total of 20.69 km (12.9 miles) in a time of 58:43 at an average speed of 21.1 km/hr(13.2 mph). My average heart rate was 124, right around the 120 I was shooting for. This ride felt great so I will keep repeating it as a challenge. I would really call this “king of the flat” rather than “king of the mountain” because...

I did some hard rides Sunday and Tuesday with two different groups so yesterday was an easy local recovery spin. I still got in some nice scenery, and my legs felt great afterward. This is the view from a rural road about a half mile from home This is on the way to the base of Anderson dam from BionicOldGuy https://ift.tt/OwTvdF8 via IFTTT

This is a fascinating book by evolutionary biologist Herman Pontzer on how our basic metabolic needs and activity add up to our total daily energy expenditure. http://www.Amazon.com/books It caught my eye because something about calories in/calories out has never seemed to add up for me. The conventional wisdom is that to determine your daily caloric needs, first go to a bmr calculator . This tells you your basal metabolic rate, or the number of calories your body will consume if you lay in bed all day. Then estimate your activity level, and a multiplier calculates your energy consumption for a typical day. The activity level tables are a little too vague for me. So alternatively, what I’ve always done is tell the calculator I’m sedentary to get my sedentary calories, then explicitly add in estimates of calories I burned exercising (say, in a two-hour bike ride). Now if I’m trying to lose weight, I just eat fewer calories than my estimate of what I’m burning. This works, but it n...

I like exercises that allow me to get an aerobic workout with upper-body muscles. My favorite upper-body workout, walking with hand weights is impaired somewhat currently because my sore SI joint limits the length of my walks. My PT facility had a machine that allowed me to arm-cycle which I enjoyed, and I thought it would be nice to reproduce this at home. My recumbent exercise bike puts the pedals in a pretty ideal position when it is laid on its back. I tried it out and got a good workout, but gripping the pedals by hand wasn’t too comfortable. This was easily fixed with a dowel, as shown in the pictures. Unfortunately, the pedals aren’t too comfortable to grip by hand Easy Fix: I just bolted a dowel to the bottom of the pedal which sticks out past the end so the dowel becomes the hand grip. The only problem is that it is not mounted concentrically with the axis of the pedal. So if you grip tightly this would be torquing the wrist back and forth a bit while pedaling. This i...

Near Anderson Lake county park and the Southern end of the Coyote creek path there are some easy off-road trails I enjoy riding on so I went over there yesterday. The sun was just starting to peek out of the morning fog. This made for a fun 90-minute ride on my e-bike. I didn’t really need the assist on this ride but this bike also has fatter (38 mm) tires so is more comfortable off road. The trail had been muddy from the recent rains but has dried now. Santa Cruz Mountains in the background This is the farmhouse from an abandoned farm. There had once been vineyards, orchards, and greenhouses. from BionicOldGuy https://ift.tt/g8DHB6p via IFTTT

When I was undergoing PT for my SI joint!!, one of my therapists, LeAnn, mentioned she does a local group ride on Sundays, so I decided to tag along. I did make sure they didn’t mind me bringing my e-bike because they do a lot of hills and I wanted to be sure I could keep up. I’m glad I did because they were fast. We did a two-and-a-half-hour ride in the big hills east of Gilroy, with some variations I’d not been on before. Even with some assist it was a brisk pace for me. It was fairly cold but otherwise a nice day Green Fields Off Roop Road CalFire station on Canada Road Great View From the Top of Estate Drive. Santa Cruz Mountains in the background. The little pointy bump straight in front is El Toro. from BionicOldGuy https://ift.tt/E3D2MjJ via IFTTT

Yesterday I was feeling my oats so decided to do a shot at my first KOM attempt since turning 70. I tried a short steep climb on West Main on my lightweight Sirrus upright. It was very unpleasant, going that hard uphill causes me to go into severe oxygen debt, and today it also caused a temporary bad headache. I think that is because my sinuses were already congested due to allergy season- the orchards are starting to bloom in these parts, which is beautiful but unfortunately can also be allergy-inducing. So I decided to abandon the attempt. Future KOM attempts need to be less steep and longer. I like the feeling of a bit of burn in my legs during hard efforts, but most decidedly don’t like the lung-searing feeling from steep climbs. Fortunately, the headache cleared up when I switched back to cruise mode. I then went home and switched bikes to my recumbent, and went on a two-and-a-half-hour cruise to the Southeast along the foothills east of San Marin and Gilroy. I threw some interv...

My group did our normal “Taco Tuesday” ride, which involves taking the Coyote Creek Path out beyond where it is still flooded out from the recent rains. We worked around the bad spot by going over to Monterey highway on the way out, then took Malech road in the east foothills on the way back, ending up at Coyote creek golf course for lunch. It was pretty cold when we started out but warmed up enough that we were able to enjoy the patio at the golf course restaurant. I took the long way to the start of the ride so this totaled a bit over three hours of pleasant riding for me. On the way out, we saw the water gushing out of the bottom of Anderson dam into Coyote Creek, two weeks after the severe rain ended. The reservoir behind the dam is still about 50% full and it is being drained as fast as possible because it’s not supposed to have any water in it until the upcoming seismic retrofit is complete. It will be a while before this all drains enough so the trail is no longer floode d ...

Life in the Fast Lane: The Chris Stoddart Story is the interesting autobiographical account of Chris Stoddart, who was a Canadian wheelchair racer for about 20 years starting in the late 1960s. It was inspiring to read how Chris overcame the congenital condition Spina Bifida to become a world-class wheelchair athlete. This required a lot of hard work and skills development. www.Amazon.com/books It was also fascinating to read how the technology of racing chairs evolved from that era to the present. They started with heavy cumbersome chairs like the ones I’ve ridden in when being discharged from the hospital, and ended with the current lightweight and high-tech ones. The combination of better chair technology and enhanced training has led to phenomenal performance improvements. For example, in the earliest days when wheelchair racers participated in marathons, it was rare for the first wheelchair finisher to be faster than the first runner. Now the running world record for the ...

Yesterday my group headed down Santa Teresa Boulevard south towards Gilroy, then headed up Day road into the hills to the west. Then the beautiful Burchell ave, to pick up the Gilroy bike path at Hecker Pass highway, which we followed to its end at the Gilroy sports complex. Then it was Santa Teresa back home for lunch. A nice ride on a sunny but cold day. Santa Clara county wine country. Not as famous as Napa, perhaps View of the Gavilans near Hecker Pass to the Southwest On the Bike Path which runs next to the Uvas Creek preserve from BionicOldGuy https://ift.tt/eDHSf5Z via IFTTT

I just read the inspiring story of Gertrude (Trudy) Ederle’s historic swim of the English Channel in 1926, becoming the first woman to do so and breaking the existing record by two hours. It is Young Woman And The Sea: How Trudy Ederle Conquered The English Channel And Inspired The World by Glenn Stout. www.Amazon.com/books Glenn is an excellent historical writer. He went into detail about the geology of the channel and how that led to its tricky tides, currents, and weather. He also covered the history of channel swimming, leading to five successful attempts, all by men, and many unsuccessful, both male and female, by the 1920s. There is also excellent background on the history of prevailing attitudes towards women, the so-called “weaker sex”. When it came to swimming, this was exacerbated by prudish attitudes toward attire, making it difficult to come up with practical swimwear. He covers a key event that led to change, the General Slocum Disaster . Hundreds of people were ki...