Transmission maintenance

Everything is connected, especially in middle age. It seems you can't just ride a bicycle, like you can just walk. Or so it seemed last year when I was off the bike for three months with a sore knee.

It came on suddenly with no known event to cause it. The doctor offered no ideas about where it came from and gave me a month of prescription anti-inflammatory drugs plus a sheet of knee stretching and strengthening exercises. I followed the prescription, and the pain did go away, but still, a year later, the knee feels like it might want to "go out" in some way if I'm not careful. The pain is located below the kneecap on the inside. My Sister-in-law The Physical Therapist says that pain in that area can be related to tight hamstrings, and can be relieved by stretching the hamstrings.

So it appears that if one wants to lead a simpler life by driving less and getting around by bike more, one has to devote some time to the maintenance activities that make that possible for the long term. Those would be the exercise, proper diet, and so on.

That leads to the question of what is the best way to live. We get into our own habits, our own rhythms of life, and after a time think that they are perfectly fine and normal. We get up when the alarm clock goes off, we eat the same thing for breakfast, we drive to work, etc. But every one of those activities, and the whole daily routine, could be questioned as to whether or not it is the best or only way, and whether or not some other way might actually be better for us.

I'm questioning one of those "normal" activities by trying to get to the point where all my personal transportation (within reason) is done without a personal automobile. To support that quest, I have to make another change into a routine of regular maintenance of my physical self. I hope to accomlish that by two gradual habit changes. The first will be up to fifteen minutes of stretching as soon as I get home from work, while I am still warmed up. The second will be a fifteen-minute morning warmup using the exercises from a recently-purchased book called "Combat Conditioning."

The ruts carved and polished over the decades are hard to get out of. We will have to see how this goes.