So today I went out for a nice bike ride. Took about four hours altogether, including a couple breaks. It was a bit windy on the way back along the lake, but generally it was quite nice.
Until I got home, at which point I began to feel like I’d just smoked a carton of cigarettes. Every time I took a halfway deep breath, I started coughing. Not even a regular cough – I felt like I was going to start losing pieces of my lung. Now, about four hours later, it feels like it’s gone away.
There is, I suppose, the possibility that I just came down with asthma today. But I suspect that would have shown itself while I was pedalling hard, not a couple hours after the fact. (The ride home, in fact, was quite slow.) So I’m going to go with “breathing in chemical crap” as the reason for my discomfort.
This isn’t the first time I’ve experienced this, but I don’t remember it ever happening as early as May. A couple times, going out riding was probably pretty stupid – I went out once in August when it was about 35 degrees, and regretted it. But the weather today wasn’t even that hot, and I spent less than half my time on actual roads.
Really, that’s disgusting. And as the weather gets worse, we’ll get the same drill: Stay inside. Don’t exercise strenuously. Turn the air conditioners and fans on. Perhaps there’ll be one of those idling blitzes – ticket people who leave their car running, unless it’s really hot, in which case it’s okay to leave your car running so you can keep the air conditioning on.
Fucking people with their cars.
It disturbs me that I’m now seriously considering buying a filter mask to wear while riding in the city. But it’s rather less disturbing than having my chest sliced open during an autopsy and hearing (from the afterlife) the doctor talk about how many cigars I must have smoked.