Another report on cycling and my urticaria
Only now that my week off is over am I writing a new entry. This break was really necessary — my energy reserves felt completely drained.
During my days off, I was as lazy as possible. I’m feeling better now, even though it was hard to get up early this morning.
I actually wanted to make some progress on the card-illustrations for my JavaScript game, but that didn’t really happen. Maybe I’ll write about that next time. Today, I want to talk about my bike ride.
Well, actually I did two small bike rides, but it makes more sense to write about yesterday’s.
Yesterday, I didn’t take my usual route for a change. I had planned to go for a longer ride before the daily routine of classes starts again, but something came up and I couldn’t stay out as long as I’d originally hoped. At least it was still longer than my regular loop.
I took a route I hadn’t ridden in quite a while. Despite the greenery, there’s a highway (not huge, but still…) running alongside it, which isn’t great. But the big advantage of this route is that the bike path is usually pretty empty. My standard route has lovely scenery, but it’s also the most popular cycling route in the city, and besides other cyclists of all kinds, there are walkers, inline skaters, drivers, and more who you share the road with. Meeting other cyclists is nice too, but yesterday I really appreciated the peace and (relative) quiet. And the fact that I barely had to dodge anyone or anything, and could just ride and be alone with myself.
The path — at least up to the point I reached — goes straight for quite a while, and on Strava I saw that the segment is called “langer Jammer” (which can be translated as “long moan”). Sometimes there are funny names or comments like “great for dying of thirst when windy.”
At the end of the “long moan”, I turned around and headed back home. The ground was wet from rain — whenever that happened — and it smelled like it too. On the way, I saw two alpacas, cows with calves, sheep with little lambs, and horses.
I’m quite happy that my urticaria seems to have improved a bit lately. I still get the rash, but it usually doesn’t itch as terribly anymore. The worst itching sems to happen when I walk in the sun. But especially while cycling, I find the situation more manageable at the moment. On recent rides, I was able to enjoy the ride itself because the symptoms only started toward the end or even after I got home. As long as I warm up slowly (even if I freeze in my cycling gear at first).
That’s why I tried pushing myself a bit on the way back yesterday and breaking a sweat. I noticed the rash because I saw it, but it didn’t really itch. I’d taken my medicine in the morning. When I got home, the rash kept spreading. That wasn’t great, but still — it didn’t really itch. However, I was unusually tired and just wanted to lie down and sleep.
Anyway, I’m glad that cycling is becoming fun again and that I went on this ride. 33 kilometers — I'll increase the distance again sometime, but this time it just didn’t work out. At least I’ve regained a bit of hope that I might get this urticaria under control. I’ll keep experimenting.