Long Ride

It has been well over a week since my last post. I wish I could say I had a real reason for not posting, but not much happened. I've done some work on my papers (even finished one and turned it in). I've wasted some time. And on Tuesday I got dropped on the group ride.

My biggest paper is due tomorrow afternoon. I unsuccessfully worked on it Saturday; I got distracted helping Robin put some new, and very pretty, fenders on her town bike. She also gave me one of her old computers to put on my cross bike, so I did that too. After bike stuff going back to writing just didn't seem like fun, so Robin and I had some adult beverages and conquered some mean alien races in a little computer game called Starcraft.

Despite getting very little work done yesterday I had already decided that for my health it was best that I go on a long gravel road ride with Steve. He is doing some nice rides to get ready for the Dirty Kanza, a 200 mile gravel road race across Eastern Kansas, and I wanted to tag along.

We met at the park at 7 in the morning. It was cool and cloudy and the Iowa winds were already blowing 20-some mph from the east. Steve had mentally mapped out a number of loops that would minimize our direct headwind time. This pleased me.

We started going south and then weaved our way over to the town of Hills for an early stop. The clerk was enjoying an early morning smoke outside and greeted us with a puzzling, but not necessarily cold, look. When she asked how far we were going Steve said that we weren't really sure but hoped to get in six hours. She promptly told us that we would be riding six hours too many. When we sat outside to consume our iced coffee drinks and breakfast pizza she came out to inform us about a bench around the building. That was nice. Or perhaps she didn't want us sitting in front of the convenient store scaring all the locals with their rumbling one-ton pickups.

Either way, it was only a few moments before we were riding into the wind to do a big loop over the Tri-County Bridge and ride some nice rolling and partially wooded roads that I have never been on before. The loop worked out great in terms of wind too. Only a small amount of direct head wind in the beginning and then a bunch of crosswind that was surprisingly easy to ride in. And the loop sent us back to the same convenient store we had visited only a couple hours before. Steve got more pizza and I was content to just fill up my water bottles and eat the plain, dry bars that I had in my pockets.

The remainder of the ride was nice. It stayed cool and cloudy all morning with the western sky looking very dark and ominous, but we didn't have any problems. My legs started to get pretty tired when we hit the five hour mark. I haven't been doing any long rides, so I was pretty happy that I felt good that long. Tomorrow I'll spend the whole day recovering, which means sitting in the brown chair finishing my paper that's due at 4.