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