2 Jan 2012: Withdrawal!

All is lost; life is meaningless; life has no purpose.  Okay, maybe it's not that extreme but there is definitely a withdrawal process as I try to assimilate back into "normal" life.  The urge to abandon all other plans and obligations for today and just hop on the bike and ride was rather great today, even if temperature barely reached 40 and the wind reached the mid teens.  Hmm.  Not a bad idea.  I'll be grumpy and irritable and Carol will insist that I need to go for a bike ride.

Ah.  I do have one picture.  This was taken on my way in to St Paul's as I was doing the produce run.  I like the way that the crane transforms Old Main, the landmark building on the University of Arkansas campus, especially in the early morning sun.

Is there awe in how much I get done around the house?  I put together a new bed for David who is coming tomorrow, followed by repairing...never mind.   

So.  This is the new challenge.  Finding my new balance, my new direction. 

Oh, yes.  An article came out in the paper today regarding my biking.  This is the one that covers bikers and bloggers and included two other bike riders from the Little Rock area.  A well written article by Tracy Rodgers.  Below is the portion on moi.

Where the blog hits the road

Bicyclists’ online logs roll up the miles as they win followers

TRACY M. ROGERS
ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE

    Keeping a workout journal’s a scientifically proven good way to help yourself stick to an exercise plan.
    When your log’s online, readers have a chance to witness your progress, and that also can be motivating ... if they keep reading. How can you make them keep reading?
    Web logs — blogs — tend to degenerate into boring minutiae, reports of somebody’s mileage for the day, what he ate and which way the wind was blowing, lovingly illustrated by some little Google Maps scribble of the route he took through town.
    Fascinating for him, but really, who else cares?
    It is possible to write a blog that is at once your pet project, useful for your own fitness motivation and of genuine interest to other people. Here, for instance, are three Arkansas bloggers — all enthusiastic about bicycling — whose exercise-related blogs rise to that challenge.

      MY LIFE AS A BIKE
    Philip Zweig of Fayetteville put more than 10,000 miles on his bicycle in 2011. He didn’t intend to cover that much ground when he began the year with the goal to ride 60 minutes a day, every day. He figured he’d do 5,000 or 6,000 miles, tops.
    A self-described “house husband,” he conceived this plan while walking with his daughter Rachel in November 2010.
    “I’ve done a lot of longdistance biking trips — short ones of about five days or so — and I did a longer one from here to Georgia that took 18 days,” Zweig begins. “When I was walking with Rachel, I said, ‘Well, maybe I need a different kind of journey. Maybe I’ll bike ride every day of the year — no matter the circumstance or the weather.’”
    Writing wasn’t part of the plan until after he was under way. A friend at the Community Meals program at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, where Zweig cooks every Wednesday, suggested it.
    “I’m not really computerignorant, but I’m not very tech savvy, either,” he says. “It took me a little while to get started.”
    In late January 2011, he posted his first item on the blog My Life as a Bike (mylifeasabike4.blogspot.com). The blog features photos taken during his daily rides, anecdotes about the people and places he has seen and notes about the path he took.
    “I started falling in love with blogging as much as the bike riding,” he says. “I was updating the blog almost every day, and I was trying to take pictures.”
    In fact, Zweig was taking so many photos and uploading so many posts that he maxed out three blogspot addresses. “My Life as a Bike” appears in fragments at four different URLs as a result.
    Zweig even biked while traveling overseas. “It’s been a really interesting challenge because we went to London and Paris, and I managed to bike ride there as well,” he says. “I wasn’t able to update the blog every day, but I would still take pictures and update it in retro.”
    “We also went down to Panama, and I got to bike ride in the rain forest,” he says. “That was an exciting entry into the blog as well.”
    Perhaps the most challenging rides came in Northwest Arkansas as the weather shifted from a record 20-inch snowfall and a record minus 16 low in January to triple digits in the summertime.
    “I actually had studded tires to try to ride in the snow, but, with that much snow, they weren’t working,” Zweig says. “So, I cleared out my driveway, which is about 60 feet long, and rode back and forth for about an hour.”
    In the subzero winter, he made it a point to ride first thing in the morning. In the summer, he rode at the hottest time of day — just so that he could say he’d done it.
    Zweig challenged himself to do other feats along the way. “I did a 24-hour ride,” he says. “Where I get the idea to do these things I don’t know.”
    During the year, he also began riding for a cause — the Community Meals program. “I wasn’t doing the ride for donation purposes, but then I thought, ‘Well, let’s try to make some money.’”
    Friends, parishioners and even strangers have made one-time donations or sponsored him for a few cents a mile. By year’s end, the four blogs were drawing 1,800 hits per month, and he’d raised more than $1,000 for the program, which feeds about 300 people on Mondays and Wednesdays at St. Paul’s.
    He’s not interested in riding daily this year, but he does plan to keep blogging. He also plans to create a DVD and a presentation for the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at the University of Arkansas about “My Life as a Bike.”