My left arm continued to hurt as the week got underway, especially the biceps area. I woke up in the early hours of Tuesday morning and found it particularly painful and throbbing.
Once I was up later that morning, I did a gym session and was very mindful of how the ailing area responded. The main exercise I'm doing that engages the biceps muscle is the bent-over rows, and I did that slowly with a moderate amount of weight. I could feel some soreness in the muscle but the pain wasn't unbearable.
After that I went down to the river and paddled for 60 minutes. As I've said before, I can feel the soreness while I paddle but the affected area isn't directly involved in paddling. I actually pushed the intensity a bit for the first time in months: I did three long surges of some 1500 meters each; I kept the stroke rate low and just tried to put a lot of power into each stroke. I didn't time myself. Though I got a bit winded in each piece, I otherwise felt great. The sun was shining and the temperature was rising toward 50 degrees Fahrenheit, and that added to the positive feelings of the session.
It was a reminder that for all the recent muscular woes I've been dealing with, I generally seem to have a lot more "giddy-up" these days than I had over the last couple of years. I mentioned a while back that my weight is back up near 160 pounds, and I think that has something to do with my overall energy level.
With a Fahrenheit high in the low 50s, yesterday was the warmest day of the week, so I went out for a bike ride in the afternoon. I did my usual 34-kilometer ride out the Greenline to Shelby Farms, around the lake there, and back home on the Greenline. I spent the evening in a pleasantly-tired state.
Today Winter Storm Elliott and its dreaded "bomb cyclone" is exploding upon the entire nation, bringing blizzards and extreme cold to almost every state. This morning the deep freeze hadn't arrived yet, and I took the opportunity to get in a paddle while the temperature was in the mid 40s. There was a fine drizzle and a somewhat strong south wind, but it wasn't really a bad morning to paddle.
It's now mid afternoon and it still isn't so bad outside, but any time now the wind will be shifting to the north and the temperature will go into free fall. By early tomorrow morning it's supposed to be about 4 degrees out there.
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