After a piss-poor, windy and cold ride on Saturday I was in need of a good ride. I had hoped that would have come on Sunday but waking up to an inch of so of heavy, wet, sloppy snow changed my mind and had me hunkering down to watch football and make a VERY nontraditional Easter supper of meatball sandwiches and oven fries. Thankfully I was able to make up for weekend’s lack of quality enjoyable riding with a semi-good ride today.
Ever since I started this blog I have always erred on the side of miserableness in my writing. There are a few reasons for this.
Over the past couple of weeks, we have had more than our share of sunny days and blue skies here in Michiganderburgh. I have no idea why, but I’ll take it. Granted we’ve yet to see temperatures above 60˚, but bright sun and blue sky at least 95% of the time is pretty sweet for this transplant who was raised on Joe DeNardo predicted Western Pennsylvania “partly cloudy skies with a chance of showers.” However, today was NOT one of those days. It was damp and chilly and everything–and I mean EVERYTHING–was various shades of fecal matter brown, baby vomit, and slate gray.
After three days of failed ride attempts (the trainer doesn’t count), I was able to get out for a shortish ride that was mostly pavement with a five mile stretch of dirt roads thrown in (mostly due to the fact that the pavement changed to dirt and I had no other choice).
In a post earlier this month I mentioned how happy I was to be back on skinny (40c) tires and off of the Farley for a while. That time off of the Farley lasted about two weeks. It’s not that I found myself longing to ride slow, soft, heavy, four-inch tires on dry dirt roads or anything, but with Saturday’s ride time temps hovering around 30˚ I figured I might as well roll fat and slow, work harder and thus stay warmer.
Part I (Friday & Saturday)
After two cold, windy days of riding out on the roads of Michiganderburgh last week I decided to skip riding on Friday and take shelter from the cool winds with a hike in the woods of Deerfield Park. It was nice to be out and enjoying the sunshine and crisp spring temps without having to be layered up in several moisture wicking layers of Lycra and wool. Still, it wasn’t riding.
There are plenty of things I should have been doing today instead of riding. We all know what those things are (probably what you did all day). I’m not happy about that, but there’s no use getting too worked up about it since I can’t do much about it.
So I rode my bike for a bit.
After two three days of poop [literally], gusting winds, falling temperatures and local streets littered with drunk college kids dressed in various shades of dumb ass, green and vomit, I was finally able to pinch off [no poop pun intended] a short, hour and forty minute ride today: the Better Than The Trainer Ride (North Dirt Version)™.
After a lazy Saturday of not much riding, I made the executive, and oh so correct, decision to NOT watch my (adopted) Spurs get their asses handed to them by the dreaded Man U. today. Instead I opted to get out on the Jake (The Snake) with its newly re-mounted WTB Nano 40c tires to get my first true dirt road ride of 2015 in. I gotta tell you, it felt goooood.
I stayed up late Thursday night to greet Wifey when she arrived home from her week of dropping knowledge on work peeps in D.C.. After a brief meet and greet where we tried to catch each other up on the week’s events, it was off to bed so as to be up early for B’s parent/teacher conferences in the morning. Thankfully his school is literally right across the street and his conferences are usually a breeze. We were happy to get a good report from his teacher and even happier with word of continued straight A’s (pardon my proud dad moment, but straight A’s is something I NEVER saw in school. Hell, I’m not sure I ever got an A in anything besides my art classes).
Once home, B and Wifey headed out for the 6.5 hour drive back to western PA for a quick visit with family and I set about getting my bike ready for the day’s road ride.