As I mentioned during yesterday’s short post, I was able to log another 200 mile week last week. All 200 miles were on local pavement, dirt and gravel roads and all were completed atop my new Trek Boone 5 Disc with a smile on my face (except for the times that I was dealing with a craptastic headwind.
When my alarm went off at 6:05 AM this morning I drug myself out of bed in a manner that suggested I’d been out until 4 AM, pounding Jägerbombs with a gaggle of strippers fresh off their shift and looking for free drinks from a desperate, creepy old dude, rather than home, sober and in bed reading at 9 PM with lights out and sound asleep by 9:30. Maybe I’m growing older faster than I think, or maybe my renewed efforts on the bike are making me crave sleep more than usual… Either way, I had made up my mind to ditch riding today before I even had my first cup of coffee. A decision that was confirmed when I walked upstairs to wake B-Man twenty minutes later and my legs felt like I was carrying a fat dwarf on my back.
Today called for a more “normal for me” type of ride: a 35 mile ride north of town that was roughly a 50/50 split of paved and dirt roads. Because it’s late, I’m lazy and in an attempt to avoid this site being a blog that recounts every nuance of even the most mundane of the rides I do (like today’s ride), I will just post a few pics and move on. The three pics pretty much represent a few of the many things that are business as usual when riding in rural Michigan.
After Saturday’s debacle of a ride where I limped home a bonked, wind hammered, shell of a would-be cyclist, I took Sunday and Monday off the bike. Sunday I went to B’s soccer match, watched footy on TV, drank a few beers and cooked burgers on the grill. Monday I made sure to hydrate, got back to eating good, quality foods and hoped that the bonk I experienced on Saturday was just the result of poor post-ride recovery and Friday night hijinks. I hoped, prayed and fretted that I had not become so fat, slovenly and crap that I could do, 40, 45, 48 and 49.5 mile rides fine, but the mere idea of cresting 50 miles would turn me to a heap of human suck clad in lycra.
I realized today that I haven’t ridden a mountain bike on singletrack (dirt) in roughly six months. I rode some snow packed fat bike trails on the Farley this winter, but I haven’t been on dry, woodsy singletrack in six freaking months! That’s sort of unacceptable… except when it is.
I had an excellent ride on Friday and felt good almost the entire 49.3 miles. The only downfall of the ride was popping a spoke and NOT breaking the elusive 50 mile mark. A mark that one time was no big deal to me, but as I become older and fatter has become the benchmark for a “long ride.”
In hindsight, Saturday was pretty good too. But before I get to Saturday’s ride I need to go further into Friday’s post ride, which laid the groundwork for how amazingly bad Saturday would eventually be.
Today I finally broke the fifty mile mark. I know, that’s not even a big deal, but for some reason not “officially” breaking fifty miles for a ride was a thorn in my love handled side for weeks. But I did it today with 51.5 miles. And Christ did I earn it.
As previously discussed, this week will not got down amongst the finer ones of the year. But that is all, pretty much, sort of, kinda behind me. The important things is that after four days of nothingness and crap trainer rides, I finally got my cottage cheese-like ass cheeks in the saddle for a ride atop the Boone today .
This week has been kind of crap, and not just because last week was so freaking awesome! It’s been crap because of the weather (snow, seriously?), not riding outside thus far, annoying, dirt bag student neighbors (who will hopefully be leaving when the semester ends), poor sleep, and varying degrees of self-inflicted, random acts of stupidity from me (of which there were many).
On the brighter side of the week: no one died (yet), I haven’t gained the weight–which I’ve been working hard to lose over the past two weeks–back (yet), Wifey hasn’t left me (yet), B-Man doesn’t hate me (yet), and my various Trek bikes (how did that happen??) were not part of the galaxy wide skewer recall (yet).
As they predicted things have been windy and rainy so far this week, so after one of my biggest weeks of riding in some time and a day off the bike on Monday I was back inside spinning and going nowhere in the Stankment today. Since there is little to no interest (from me or you) in a post about riding the stationary trainer, I figured I would post something else of little to no interest– my ongoing dabbles back into shooting photos with film. In particular with the new to me Olympus [mju II], also known as the Stylus Epic.