Exercise Log: Around the block

Rob goaded me. It's not my fault. He wanted to go for a walk while it was nice out.

So I went down the driveway (DOWN!! wheeeee!), with Rob walking alongside me. We turned left and kept taking left turns until we got back home. This is about a third of a mile, I remember from my running days, and I had to stop and rest several times. One of those times I found a cute kitty to scritch. :-)

I never realized before, even when running, that the sidewalk is tilted toward the street. I suppose that makes sense for drainage. I also noticed for the first time that some corners have no curb-cuts for getting on and off the sidewalk. If I ever wheel down the main street near my house for any distance, crossing side streets will mean taking detours down those side streets to use people's driveways. This presumes of course that the driveway owners haven't parked a large pickup truck out across the sidewalk or something like that. (That part isn't theoretical. I earned my halo for today by failing to collide with some guy's truck. I'm sure the fact that there was JUST enough room for a wheelchair on each side -- so I could get off the sidewalk, around the truck's ass end, and back on the sidewalk again -- was very deliberately planned by the owner. I'm positive. He even judged my skill level perfectly.)

I'm trying to figure out which muscles get used when I'm propelling the wheelchair. Biceps, for sure, a bit of deltoid, all the gripping muscles in the hand, and then I get puzzled. There's whatever goes from the outside edge of the elbow to the thumb side of the wrist, and there's SOMEthing in the upper back but that doesn't make sense to me yet.