Physical activity!

All of a sudden, I'm getting exercise. In the long run, I suppose it should make me feel better, but for now it mostly just makes me sore.

Tuesday night was our first softball game. I'm on the "just for fun" team from the office, as opposed to the "play to win" team, which meant that we got plenty of people (like me) who clearly hadn't played in a while or had never played much at all. I was impressed that I was still able to catch the ball (and even caught a pop-up in the game), but let's just say that my hitting hasn't improved at all in the N years since I last played. I also apparently haven't used the swing-a-bat muscles at all in that time. Oops.

Thursday I finally bought my new bike, to replace the one that was stolen about a year ago. It's a decent dark red hybrid, which wouldn't have been my first choice in color except that it was what they had in stock. (Also, the only other color it came in was a kind of ugly pale green.) It's light (about 26 pounds, according to my bathroom scale), which means I can carry it up/down the stairs with one hand and still have the other to hold the railing and not fall down the stairs.

This afternoon was my first chance to go riding, aside from the trip back from the store. I went over and did a lap around the park, which took about twenty minutes, and was apparently over 3 miles. Adding in the trip to and from my apartment, including detours to avoid going the the wrong way down one-way streets, and it came to over 4 miles. In comparison, the trip to my office would only be a little over 6 miles. I'd like to be able to do that comfortably by some time in the summer.

The loop around the park is a generally nice ride with lots of greenery and lakes and horses and such. The roads around/through the park are closed to traffic except during rush hour, so it's just joggers and bikers--a lot of joggers and bikers, but that's still nicer than having to deal with cars. My only complaint was the far half of the loop being continuously uphill, but I should be able to handle that fine once I get closer to in shape and I figure out which gears I should be using. In an ideal world I'd get over there before or after work semi-regularly, but that would probably mean competing with cars during rush hour, so we'll see.

Cars still make me nervous. There are more cars on my quiet residential avenue on a Saturday afternoon than there were on Broadway in Cambridge at 10:00 weekday mornings, which probably says something about either the two times or the two places. There seem to be enough bike lanes around (about as many as in Cambridge--not many, but enough to find one if you're going a reasonable distance) that maybe I'll be able to mostly avoid the cars.

I still need to get a printed bike map. I also need a new lock. The fact that the 5-star lock Kryptonite makes is called a "New York Lock" makes me worry about trusting my measly 3.5-star lock in, y'know, New York.