Today was my first ride on the trike since surgery. I had been looking forward to it with a sense of trepidation. I want to get back to riding, especially since it is much nicer on my sore joints than walking, but not so sure about how it will work out with my abdomen. Of course I also had to stress over what to wear – cause normal cycling garb doesn’t work well with a compression binder.

Since we wanted to optimize space over Christmas, Scott had folded up the trike – so the first order of business was to reconstruct it. It is a ‘folding’ trike, but doesn’t fold nearly as elegantly as my Bike Friday. It took Scott at least 10 minutes to put it all back together, and we stopped several times for him to make adjustments so that it felt right.

I was happy to discover that I could easily get into and out of the trike. At first I got out by pushing off the seat (using my arms), but after the ride I actually got out just by standing up – mostly I didn’t over think it and subconsciously stood up.

Unfortunately, my Runkeeper failed me (it turned itself off after 18 seconds) so I don’t know how far our ride was – just over 5km according to Google maps. I have no idea how long it took us either – we certainly were not moving quickly, but also were not too slow (Scott was challenged as he usually rides a lot faster). At one point we even got a close up look at a white egret that didn’t fly away as we approached. They are usually so timid, we were a little surprised that he didn’t move.

Scott was goofing around with the camera. He actually got a few good backwards shots of me, but I had to laugh at this one …

So it was a fun but short ride. I’m not yet sure what my body thinks of it, but so far so good. Tomorrow I will talk to one of my surgeons about my upper body and if I can ride my folding bike. If I get the go-ahead, I’ll try it out on Monday or Tuesday. Again, with the same short 5km path ride to see how my body handles it. One step at a time!