Sunday was another blessed day of sleeping in before the school year REALLY starts in earnest this Tuesday. Yeah, sure, B started back last Monday, but it all seemed like educational masturbation. This week will be the real start, PLUS two soccer practices, and a tournament come the weekend. It will be a real test for B, AND for us! But let’s not put the shitty, school year cart before the summertime horse. We still have another day!
Friday morning, just before Wifey and B took off for PA to visit her family, Wifey gave me a hug goodbye, I copped a feel, and she told me to have a good weekend, but not to do that thing where I ride singletrack, experience back and hip pain the whole time, get depressed, and come home and drink to kill the mental and physical pain of being old and shit. My mind and mouth said “yes dear,” but my heart and legs said “Fffffuckkk off! You don’t own me woman! I can do what I want, yo!” (not really, not even one tiny little bit).
And with that I was good. I ate some breakfast, drank coffee, looked at the inter-web-o-sphere, and then went for a 31 mile dirt road ride south of town.
From my best guesstimate I rode twice this week–Tuesday and Thursday thus far, with high hopes for some sort of crap riding over the next three or four days.
I seriously had to consult a calendar to see when the last time I rode was, it was Thursday. I rode dirt roads on the Boone, it was OK. I took some photos of birds along the way. They were pretty OK too.
There was rain in the forecast again for Wednesday, and I really didn’t feel like getting caught out in the gritty mud and rain on the bike again, so I opted for a post-chiropractor trip to Deerfield Park for a four to five mile hike with my camera.
After Sunday’s muddy, rain-soaked, dirt road slog on the Fatterson, I was off the bike on Monday to let things dry out, go to the chiropractor, get some things done, and take advantage of the cooler, dryer conditions to get the lawn mowed, thus freeing up more time for later in the week for outdoor hijinks.
After three months of hot, dusty, dry weather, we finally had some heavy on/off again rains Saturday evening. Because of that I had resound myself to not riding on Sunday, or riding the fatty to plow through the soft sand and mud on the dirt roads. While the first the first option was extremely appealing, I opted for the latter.
My Garmin 500 shit the bed like Spud from Trainspotting last week, and no longer mounts up on my Mac. Despite hours of Googling, scouring bike forums, multiple resets, bitching, moaning, and nearly smashing it to pieces with a meat hammer, it just refuses to cooperate. Since then I’ve felt completely lost on the where’s, when’s, and what’s of my riding. Yes, those rides could probably be summed up with words like crap, crapper, and crappier, but I like to actually see the multiple layers of statistical crap on my computer screen.
After last Thursday’s OK-ish short and quick double loop on Sally’s Trail, I returned to dirt roads on the Fatterson on Friday. My chiropractor recommended limiting myself to shorter rides, but since it’s hard for a fat, crap, cyclist to make his short rides even shorter, I somehow managed to ride nearly thirty miles of dirt roads on the fatty. Not sure that qualifies as “long” in any world other than the one in which the person in charge of my spine lives; I rode it nonetheless, and it felt OK.
Towards the end of my Tuesday dirt road ride, I found that I was getting some of the hip pain that I usually get when mountain biking. It wasn’t enough to make the ride painful, or get me all pissed off, but I knew it was there. I put it out of my mind and made some plans to ride the Fatterson on Sally’s Trail on Wednesday, since I had to go down the shop to get my Superfly that was getting some love from Napper who was fixed the pedal threads one of my crank arms. Yeah, only I could jack up the threads on the crank installing/uninstalling pedals. I shouldn’t be allowed to touch tools.
