#bionicoldguy

Our Winter rains showed up big time last Thursday. It rained all day so I rode indoors on my trainer. This was surprisingly relaxing because I treated at as a meditation, riding with my eyes closed, which is OK on a trainer. Since then the rain was on and off and I sneaked in outdoor rides as I could with my rain gear, which works fine if it’s only lightly raining. I try to avoid heavier rain as…

Specialized Bicycles has its headquarters in Morgan Hill and has a nice museum on-site. My Tuesday riding group had visited it before in spring 2020, right before the Covid pandemic took off. We went again last Tuesday, and this time our guide was Robert Egger, who has been their creative director for years. He designs their concept bikes, a lot of which are in the museum, and also guides future…

I enjoyed this book by David Ryan. He lives in New Mexico and does volunteer work finding archaeological sites for the US Bureau of Land Management. So it is not surprising the book starts out with tales of his wanderings in his local area, finding important sites and artifacts including a Folsom Man arrowhead dating back 10,000 years. By the end of the chapter I was convinced his ideas about…

I’ve been enjoying multiple long easy rides. After some more research I realized that a long ride is good for my heart as long as the pace is not hard, because it lowers diastolic blood pressure a bit compared to resting. Diastolic, the lower number on a reading like 120/80, is the more important for leaky aortic valves because that is the number when the valve is closed. I was doing one long…

My last strength workout went really well, I was able to go pretty hard without pushing my heart rate excessively. But afterwards it occurred to me that monitoring heart rate might not be enough. Strength training can cause a temporary spike in blood pressure which is probably not a good idea. I figured there must be a lot of research on this, because there are a lot of older people with cardiac…

One of the things that keeps my grey cells active is learning all I can about medical conditions I have. So I’ve continued to research paravalvular leakage of the aortic valve with Google’s Deep Research. So far I’ve asked it for an overview of the condition, for more details on treatment options, and for exercise recommendations. The resulting reports are all gathered here. The report “Aortic…

I mentioned in my last post that I decided to cut back my amount of exercise to what my Cardiologist actually thinks I’m doing. This works out to 90 minutes a day on average biking, with 3 upper body strength session of 30 minutes each per week. This still allows me to get in a few longer cruises of 2 to 2 1/2 hours. What’s mostly changed is that my longest days don;t exceed 2 1/2 hours, and hard…

A couple of years ago, my yearly echocardiogram showed a mild amount of leakage around the outside of my aortic valve replacement. This is a fairly common complication. (https://vivitrolabs.com/support/faqs/in-vitro-paravalvular-leakage-assessment-of-cardiac-valve-prostheses/) I have the condition shown in the middle, called paravalvular leakage, where blood flog leaks around the outside of the…