First Surprise

slow start New Year’s ride

stiffness passes sunset nears

fun suprise people cheer

If you’ll be gone in 60 seconds, make it those last three paragraphs that you read.

My last post was a year and five days ago. I’ve had longer absences from my blog, but that was when it had a different name and I had other priorities. 2025 was quite a year, and I’ve written in other places when I did write. Mom died this year, and I’ve put on about 10 pounds since that happened. A lot of other challenging things happened too, but now it’s time to get back into my equilibrium and with it, better habits.

I’m starting fresh, again, by sharing my 2025 New Year’s Day with you, beginning with the Haiku above. My Haiku a day writing goal has also lapsed. Haiku are generally supposed to have a natural theme and while that’s a fit for my heart, it’s not something that I always get to emerse in for daily inspiration. Some days I have to get creative and look at something in the yard, or try to pull up a different part of a good memory.

Over the holidays we had some good times, traditional activities, family time, some travel, some stress and Russ had surgery. He was in recovery. I’d spent 3 days helping him and he was going back to work the next day. His need was shrinking and I had the weather, which is not guaranteed in north Georgia winters. I cooked some traditional food and left it to be ready for the evening meal and headed out to the Silver Comet Trail to ride alone.

Winters are a fitness challenge for me. Yoga does the strength and balance, but regular cardio is the problem. The winter high temps, when it’s most likely to be warm enough for me to ride, conflict with the time I pick up a granddaughter after school and the days are short so I can’t go later. I have a stationary indoor bike, and I’m on it now as I write. My grandson built me a computer platform for it. I peddle hard enough on the bike to ward off the sedentary chill that comes from sitting in front of the computer, but not hard enough to sweat. I don’t feel like it does anything really, except that I do notice using the bike evens out of the endorphin drop that I experience when it’s been too long between more challenging outdoor rides. It’s a subtle difference so the challenge is to remember to do enough on the stationary bike before I feel the lack of endorphins pressing down.

My last ride and this one were slow, stiff starts because the missed winter rides take their toll. When I start like this it’s easy for me to wonder if the ride will justify the drive out to the trail, but I’ve had some negative experiences with horrible humans behind the wheel. The average driver is fine, but it only takes a single bad one to end or permanently change your life, so I ride trails. It was gettin late. I set a timer for half way between my start time and sunset. No buffer for distractions or rest figured in. I only had an hour and a half.

As I turned back, I found my stride and was going at a better pace, pretty average really, but this was a maintenance ride and some days average is good enough. After a bit, I saw 6 or 8 Latino men on the side of the trail. I’m mentioning specifically that they were Latinos because they are among several groups of people not getting a deserved level of good press lately, and good press is exactly what this is.

I kind of sensed they were waiting on something, but guessed they just wanted to cross the trail. When I passed them they started to cheer and wave with excitement, as though I had just crossed the finish line first. What unexpected fun! Today is the next day, and I’m still feeling good about it. I wasn’t doing anything I haven’t done thousands of times, but the cheering made it extraordinary, unique.

I had a squeezy toy I got while supporting someone at an event for alcoholics. It was a funny little white haired person and when you pushed on it it had these voices that say “Hooray! Yea! Congratulations! I marvel at how that made me feel, not even a real compliment, but a recording. I took a video of it doing its thing and posted it. Every single time I see it in my memories I click play and it still surprises me how a recorded toy can make me feel good. I wish I had a video of these guys choosing to spread the same kind of random cheer in the real world. I’ll have to associate the two and run the memory in my head next time I see my little white haired cheerleader pop up.

I hope your year brings unexpected fun.

Happy New Year!