Body-Wide Systems Shut Down

I've been feeling a tad down lately, as in body-wide systems shutting down...I've been totally unmotivated and have had to force myself onto a bike (never been a problem before), plus pedalling started a whole new pain scenario screaming from my legs and the muscle pains continued after my rides. One side of my brain said, "Let's go for another Spring ride and look at the flowers" while another part of my brain was saying, "Oh no, we're not going anywhere, can't you feel the pain from those stupidly fast daily 5000-ft climbs you do on, of all things, a Single-Speed bike!" Oh but the flowers...


I even tried my geared bike to see if it would ease the pain issues while pedaling...didn't help at all and in fact I felt like it was more of a struggle pedaling the geared bike vs. the single-speed (yes, weird).



Then a few nights ago the pain in my stiff, heavy-feeling, useless, aching leg muscles woke me up and got me thinking about this dilemma...it seems to have started the previous week when I started hacking up lung crud, but that's essentially cleared up except for the occasional, spontaneous monster-crud-yuk-boogy-thing that seems to come from no where deep in the lungs. Then for some reason during this middle-of-the-night self debating session I had an instant hunger for a hamburger...that's weird I thought. But wait, maybe there's something to this, which got me thinking about my diet lately which was mostly non-meat meals. Hmmmm...sore legs, hard workouts climbing hell-hills on a single-speed, and very little to no protein intake for several days...can you say duh! So the next morning I started focusing on better protein intake, which brought about an amazingly fast recovery from the sore legs.



Today I got on the SS bike, felt awesome, climbed over 6000-ft and was ready for more except I had run into snow and I had some time constraints. Lesson learned...schools out!