Like a bad penny

That's what one of the women called me when I showed up for yesterday's club ride.

"I thought we'd chased you off, since you haven't come around for, like, a couple months."

Her tone didn't register "curses, foiled again" between the lines, so I decided to take her overestimation of the time as meaning that the regulars on the ride had noted my absence and that I'd been missed.

"Actually, it's only been five weeks," I said, mentally counting back to the weekend before this year's Hotter Than Hell. "I was off growing new skin, doing a few rides I hadn't been on for a while. Had a great time fighting the wind on the Cotton Patch Classic, last weekend."

"Oh, you mean like today," she said. The wind whipped her hair across her face and she paused to pick a strand out of her mouth.

"Sort of." I watched the heavy black clouds zooming along at a pace that suggested Mother Nature had her thumb on the fast forward button. "Not so much threat of a Biblical downpour, last weekend."

The clouds had a silver lining, of course. Only about a dozen people had shown up for the ride, either fearing rain or not relishing the thought of battling the 18-29 mph wind. This was good, because it meant I wouldn't have to hang off the back to keep from getting caught up in a tightly-packed mob again.

The trip north was big fun with the wind at our backs. As we came through Allen along one of the highway frontage roads, I glanced at my computer ("digital speedometer thingy" to you non-cyclists) and saw that we were doing 25+ mph—and I was soft-pedaling!

In McKinney, we were warned by a police officer in an unmarked car after doing a rolling stop at one empty intersection. On the other side of McKinney, we were cursed energetically by a motorist unhappy with having to wait behind the group as we came to a full stop at an intersection, waited our turn, and crossed two at a time.

Heading south into Plano again, we enjoyed the challenge of climbing some of the steepest hills in the area into the same wind that made for such a quick trip out. I came within two bpm of my maximum heart rate in that section but still out-climbed three quarters of the group.

We ended up cutting the route to about 30 miles when the temperature started to drop and we started hearing some rumbling, so we made it back before the brief downpour started. It was a good ride, making up in fun what it lacked in distance.

I was waiting in line at Einstein's, afterward, and the two 20-something men in front of me started asking questions: Were we just getting back, or heading out? How far did we ride? Were we training for some kind of event? I explained that we'd just gotten back from a 30-mile ride, that we usually rode 45-50 miles, and that we weren't training for anything specific.

"Really?" he said. "You're riding just for the heck of it? That's wild."

They then explained that they'd just finished a training run in preparation for a marathon in December. I grinned, as this provided 100% of my minimum adult daily requirement for irony.

"Sounds like a lot of work," I said.


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