Pain is weakness leaving the soul, Challenge is not being dead

Sunday I went glacier dancing. Monday was ridge running.

Full disclosure -- the glaciers were simply frozen snow drifts and there was zero dancing. The ridges were ridges indeed, but there was zero running.

However, the two excursions were dedicated workouts -- my first in 197 days.

So I was fighting being out of condition and fat. I was also fighting nerve pain.

Just details.

Working the heart and lungs and legs felt great. The nerve pain did not feel great, but I was able to fight through it. Importantly the affected nerves seem to be 99+ percent sensory and only a very tiny bit motor. So lots of hurt, but no effect on how the musculoskeletal system is functioning. Well, just a transient touch of dropfoot on the left side. So far I can walk that off in 50 steps or so.

Sunday night when I went to bed my legs ached. Monday night they really ached. Sleep can be quite elusive when pain is present. Monday night was essentially sleepless.

It's all okay though. I know why the legs ached -- my body was rebuilding bone scaffolding. Osteoclasts were demolishing weak structure and osteoblasts were building a new, stronger bone scaffolding. It's a robust process and it can be a painful process, especially if the stresses applied sneak right up to the edge of injury. Gain comes with pain. Rapid gain can be pretty ouchy. Over the last 200 days of reduced use and stress my leg bones didn't need to be daily workout strong, so extra bone tissue was freed up. Now comes new stress and increased use and my body doesn't hesitate or wait for it to be convenient. It charges ahead with demolition and new construction. Pretty amazing. If you took all of Earth's doctors and scientists and put them to work on mastering this simple process, at the end of a million years they couldn't begin to make such a thing happen.

It's a form of embrace the suck. Hard challenges harden the body and harden the mind. It's a win-win.

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My plans for Tuesday did not include most of the stuff I actually found myself doing. I was able to get morning chores done and a three mile walking fence inspection out of the way early. It was more breezy than forecast, and the winds remained mostly southerly, but air temps warmed pretty quickly and it felt good to be out and working despite the pesky wind. I got a text about a problem late in the morning though and by 11 a.m. I was heading south on Highway 71 in Mom's Lincoln MXC.



I've grown to loathe Mom's car. For all its modernity and technology, for all the "Lincoln" name and associated high price, the thing is a morceau de merde. No one here speaks or reads g-French do they? Good.



As irritating as the unexpected chore was, it was a very pretty day for a drive. And the chore wasn't really that irritating. Just unexpected. But unexpected stuff is what makes you know it's not 10,000 years of groundhog day, right? Besides, I had the unexpected opportunity to show off another Minuteman III silo and make fun of the Air Force.



Before I knew it I was in reefer madness land. They got big wind turbines down there to blow the reefer smoke around.



I turned around in an olden rest area to avoid C-DOT reefer salesmen.



Another look at the reefer blowing machines.



And just like that, I cheated drug addiction once again. Whew!



At that point I put down the camera and got to work. I took the Lincoln in to the garage where they tested the battery and ran a diagnostic. The battery was fine. The other thing I found out was perhaps less fine, though there's not anything to be done about it. This particular morceau de merde mobile apparently does 37 separate self checks each day, and each check sucks down the battery. Theoretically it's got plenty of juice stored in the battery, however, as a practical matter if you don't drive it every day it's liable to piss away all of its onboard stored energy and leave you hanging. It's a real escroquerie de merde légalisée.

So I'll be driving it each day. Irritating. But it's just a thing.

Driving it home from the garage I noticed a couple of reefer-blowing windmill blades parked alongside the road. Interesting.



Then it was time to get stuck into generating a blog post.

Be well and enjoy the blessings of liberty.