Cycling as therapy

First I want to send commiserations to my friend Shai who had a bad accident while cycling in the Santa Monica mountains earlier this month. I don't know the details, but his list of injuries sounds awful. Even worse, his $12,000,000 bicycle was scratched. Hope to see you when all the crazy is over.

I came across an article on news.bbc.com about a new scheme to encourage Brits to ride bicycles. To quote...

GPs in areas of England with poor health will be encouraged to prescribe cycling, with patients able to access bikes through their local surgery. 

The idea is that GP surgeries will have a stock of bicycles to lend, with training, access to cycling groups and peer support. 

In some cases, if they used them enough, patients would be allowed to keep them.

The government is also handing out fifty pound (about $70) vouchers so people can get their beat-up old bikes into rideable condition and go get healthy again. Can you imagine your government or healthcare provider doing this for you? Maybe one day. Right now they're probably too worried about you getting hit by a car and suing them.

I also came across an interesting article about boredom and how people deal with it. When I tell people I regularly cycle hundreds of miles they often ask me if I get bored. I don't. Not at all.

“I think everybody gets the boredom signal,” says James Danckert, who heads a boredom lab at the University of Waterloo, Ontario. “Some people are really, really good at dealing with it though.”

Seriously, there's a boredom lab? There's more than one? Can you imagine that first date?
What do you do for a living?
I work in a boredom lab.
Oh..... that's nice
It's more interesting than it sounds
It couldn't be less interesting

What do you do to avoid getting bored? Do you sing or calculate your arrival time at the next control? Do you listen to music or chat with imaginary friends? Do you play music in your head to the beat of your freewheel?

Amber and I have a new eatery to recommend. We've eaten on Main Street in Seal Beach hundreds of times but we always thought the Bistro St. Germain looked a bit pretentious. It isn't. It's superb service, french food prepared correctly, and very reasonable prices.

It has quite a bit of outdoor seating so they're still quite busy despite the current crisis. They are open until 9pm so it's an ideal place to eat during an evening ride. I'm planning on riding down there next Friday evening starting from the SART at 7pm.

It's now our backup for La Crema and our go-to for evening rides. There are so many things on their menu I want to try. Here is the lasagna which was amazing.