Hoping, not mad!

After my neck surgery on the first of November last year, Dr Oh, who received high praise from everyone with experience, told me the biggest nerve recovery will come in the first year, which ended on Saturday, and then some recovery can continue for another year. Does my left arm now respond as though it was never injured? No, but I definitely swing both arms while running, and I am starting to use it more automatically. I'm even up to a fairly strong blue resistance band for bicep curls!

Yesterday, I attended to some well and truly due tweaks to what I still think of as my "race bike". I'm pretty sure I'm not making another attempt at diving back into mountain bike racing, but it is the bike I did race, and I still haven't drilled out the pesta valve rims to accept my generally preffered schrader valves (fewer failures at the valve/tube junction), which I avoided in case I needed to fix race flat repairs with CO2. While, for now, the drill did stay in it's case, I learned that while a 27.5x2.6 tire without a lot of tread can fit in the 29" frame, the clearance is too tight for the real world of imperfectly true rims or even a little dirt stuck to the tire. I also, gulp, switched to riser bars, which made up for the fact that I cut the fork's steerer before vertebrae in my neck were fused, on two occasions.

Then I went mountain biking! I like mountain biking, and the response and increasing strength in my left arm is making it feel a lot more like i remember. I rode the Canal Trails in Belchertown, which are mostly smooth and twisty, and the higher bar position felt good, and my mind was wandering to the possibility of swapping the front wheel once the impending bigger 32 inch wheel revolution arrives. It'd be an easy way to go rigid from the ever longer hardtail suspension forks. Mega mullet? 

The trails by the canal are well maintained, and even after last weekend's big blow (I did lever the tree trunk off my driveway with a section of bed frame angle iron), they were free of log crossings, so it wasn't until I arrived home to the trunk I placed thirty feet from the house as a car blocker that I could more fully test my arm response. I was feeling confident, so my approach was near 10mph, and while my tires did skim the nine inch diameter log, it seems I can at least kind of bunny hop a bike again. I've nothing to feel mad about there!

Yes, I used to demonstrate 

on 2 foot diameter logs for teaching clinics, 

(1. It's easier for students to see the big motion; 2. After seeing me skim over a big obstacle, 

they figure I might know a thing or twelve

and listen more intently.)

but this still feels like a victory!