The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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So next on my list of "things I should have picked up twenty years ago, and now are vaguely embarrassing to learn" is bicycling. I found myself in possession of a 21 speed Pacific mountain bike, and I've been riding it a few miles as a warmup before climbing workouts on the moon board. The things is...I suck at bicycling. Like, badly. I can ride a bike, but even just keeping my balance while signaling a turn is a conscious effort, and I regularly get concerned I'm going to just fall over, which is deeply stupid. I feel like I should be more fluent in my motion, but I'm just not.
I learned to ride a bike at an appropriate age, but never really did it much after a few 15-20 mile bike trips in scouts in my early teens. My parents never really let me ride my bike anywhere interesting because I would have to cross "busy roads" and I was the kind of quiet submissive kid that listened to them and didn't push boundaries.
So here I am, 33 years old, and I'm bad at riding a bike. But it seems like something I "should" be able to do, and the novelty is making it a pretty fun workout.
How does one get better at riding a bike as an adult? What should I be doing to bike as a workout program? What should my goals be? I literally have no idea, so far I just ride a mile up the road and turn around and ride back, then climb.
I rode my bike a lot. It became my primary mode of transportation over COVID. I rode it to the store, for exercise, anywhere that was less than 3-5 miles away by roads that didn't completely freak me out. And I had a couple mile route that I did pretty much every day I didn't have an errand to run. I still wouldn't say I am comfortable in terms of riding in traffic or on unfamiliar roads (identifying and dodging road debris or potholes at speed makes me nervous) but I am comfortable with signaling and stopping and starting. I don't feel like I am constantly at risk of randomly falling off my bike. OTOH there is no way I would ride on a mountain bike trail or even do a more than 10 mile ride on a nicely paved surface, so you may be looking for different advice.
I have no idea what advice I'm looking for, so I appreciate you.
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