overcoming adversity? or at least a hill

Before I launch into my story for the day I would like to welcome Beth Pollard the City Administrator to our City of Albany Car-Free Challenge team.  Beth and I both rode our bikes to the City Council meeting last night.

Since I live part way up the bay side of Albany Hill, almost everything I want to go to is on the other side of the hill, which means that every bike trip starts with the dilema of whether to go over or around the hill.  If I try to go around to the south, I hit Buchanan which does not (yet) have a bike path or official bike lane.  Even worse where the nearest cross street dead ends into Buchanan there is a raised median and one side of the street is higher than the other side , so I can't get across.  So either I would have to ride two blocks the wrong direction, make a u-turn and then make an uphill merge from a stop sign with speeding traffic coming off an overpass from the freeway (I'm not that brave, foolish, or inhumanly fast on my bike) or I would have to ride (illegally) the wrong way on the street or sidewalk for four block deciding at each intersection if there is a big enough gap in the westbound stream of traffic accelerating towards the freeway for me to dash across the street and merge into the correct direction of traffic on the other side as drivers gradually begin to realize they are no longer on the freeway.  Since none of that actually appeals to me, the only logical choice remaining is to go up over the hill.  Until the school year ended my daily commute started by walking my son and my bike up over the hill and down to his school before I actually started my ride on the level ground beyond the hill.  The advantage to that is that the walk to school and starting on level ground actually serve as a decent warm up in lieu of any stretching exercises which I tend not to do.  So after making the trip over the hill and across town (slight uphill the whole way) without warmup a couple times the prior weekend, including one run with two kids in a bike trailer weighing well over 100 pounds, I apparently managed to sustain the equivalent of serious engine damage by straining a muscle in my right thigh.  After a few more days of trying to just ride through the injury and hoping it would fade I realized that it was just getting worse instead of better, so I decided to take it easy by splitting my Thursday and Friday commute trips into one direction by bike and one by bus.  On Saturday I drove the car on the 2.8 mile (call it 3 miles) round trip for the kids to visit my parents.  Sunday was my first planned day exempt from mileage tracking.  Although I had contemplated cramming lots of car based errands into that one "free" day  that seemed like cheating, so I just took the boys to Lawrence Hall of Science for the day (11 miles) and to the grocery store (2) miles, which I could probably have done by bus except that I was still trying to take it easy and heal my leg.  So that was 13 carpool miles on Sunday that  I theoretically get to zero out as one of my "free" days. 

So that's 2 miles June 5th, 3 miles June 11, 3 miles June 13, and 14 "free" miles June 14, all with a minimum of three people in a hybrid car for an official monthly total  of 0 miles driving alone, and 8 miles by carpool.  I've got more miles by bike, and some by transit, but I'm not tracking the distance of those trips.  So in spite of my little injury, I'm still on track to meet my goal of 30 miles by car.