Early AM

Four am and I'm wide awake. Try to roll over for half an hour and give up, why fight it? I'm certainly not lacking rest. My wonderful wife loves her sleep and holidays are all about catching up for her so I've been getting plenty of zzz's. It's a good thing too, sleep helps the healing. So I made a cup of tea, started a killer breakfast and sat down at the good old iBook.

Yesterday was a pretty darn good day. Lots of sleep, some great breakfast and a few hours of climbing in the gym with Marni feeling really strong and really solid on all the 5.10's. I've been doing my PT exercises with the theraband a few times a day since Friday (thanks Jenn!) and by last night I could actually do them all, at least briefly (ie stand on one leg). My walk still has a good hitch to it since I'm not yet able and strong enough to roll through the ball of my foot properly but it's improving with the exercises and I'm psyched about that. It will be good to leave the cane behind, if only so I don't have to hear "my grandpa has that same cane from the little children." The ankle itself feels really really good and once I fix the messed up bio-mechanics I feel like I might actually be closer to normal than not.

Last night I snuck in a bit over an hour on the singlespeed at dusk. Marni had lots of reading to do so I chased the dropping sun before procuring dinner and making desert muffins. The ride was really magical not to be too cheesy. Before I was even a half mile from home, doing a quick lap around the gravel path, I saw two beautiful coyotes. On several different occasions hawks watched and followed me as I made my way to the dog park, all the way to the back and around the singletrack loop for the first time. The sky was far too clear to be the day the weather men predicted and the alpenglow on the Front Range was well worth the rapidly falling temperatures. My ankle continued to show riding improvement and while it's weak still, I'm happy it just keeps getting better. As dark settled in fully I flipped on my headlamp, made a mental note to get the booties out of the closet and spun home. Just the freedom of being able to ride my bike outside again makes a huge difference.