REFRESHED!

For whatever reason, last night's sleep was wonderful. Almost ten hours, and although it was interrupted at least twice, it left me refreshed, restored, and feeling far better than I dared to hope, yesterday.

My leg muscles are a little stiff, but using them does not drain my vitality the way it did for the past couple of days. Moving around the house, taking the trash out, going up and down stairs -- nothing has caused the alarming sense of acute fatigue I've been experiencing recently.

I'm groping, here, but I think I know how to explain the past few days.

The onset of this recent bout of fatigue/frailty was triggered, I believe, by too much exertion on a rest day. I rode on Tuesday, and on Friday I was still not fully recovered from it, but pushed myself anyway in our grocery hike. I think I was in effect "re-injuring" myself, which made the task of repairing my muscle fibres a lot more demanding on my system than it would have been.

I think my age makes all of this more extreme than it would be for someone 20 years younger. At 60 I would have been recovered by Friday -- and if I had exerted myself before complete recovery, the demands on my system would have been less severe.

I don't know how to explain the quality of last night's sleep (maybe part of the explanation is what I was reading -- Wells' History of the World, which I was lapping up with great contentment -- but I feel certain that the quality of that sleep is the main reason I feel so good today. (11:45 am)

4:15 pm -- Felt alert all afternoon. But I was ON MY FEET TOO LONG when talking to a garage mechanic around 3-3:30. Couldn't have been more than half an hour, but legs were shaky tired -- to the point of unreliability -- and I had to cut the conversation short. Going back to my car, I was lterally staggering, taking Tim Conway steps.