Some days you're the windshield

You get the idea.

This weekend's [attempts at] training have been a bit of a mixed bag. My master plan for Saturday was to go out on one of my usual club rides, a 32-mile jaunt through the rolling hills of Collin and Dallas Counties at about a mid-16 mph pace. Then, on Sunday morning, just as the sun had come up, Dawn Patrol with my MS 150 teammates for an easy 60 miles. Neither turned out as I'd expected.

Saturday

I rolled in to the parking lot about half an hour early and immediately sensed that something different was going on. Half the parking lot was filled with mountain bikes and hybrids, and the folks excitedly milling around didn't look like the grizzled veterans who usually attended the ride. Shortly, the ride leader arrived and told me that the PBA had agreed to shepherd some folks along with our group to train for the Lone Star Ride. The time for the ride to start came and went, but we eventually got underway at what felt to me like a snail's pace.*

The good side of all this was that it was kind of fun to see how excited these folks were about finishing 32 miles, a distance that many of us view so mattter-of-factly. And it was such an easy pace that I got a nice 40% fat burn out of the deal.

An amusing anecdote from the ride: We were pulling out from the filling station where we usually stop for a break, and several pre-teen boys were playing around with their skateboards on a side street. As the group approached them, I saw one of the boys pointing my way and telling his buddies, "Whoa! Look at that bike!" One of the others called out to me, "Dude! That bike is pimp!"

That's a good thing. Isn't it?


* I ended the ride with a 13.8 mph average, but only because the group eventually split and some of us dropped the hammer for the rest of the ride.

Sunday

This week's fun level was inversely proportional to last week's. Another way of putting it would be... well, I try to keep this to language I wouldn't mind my mother reading, don't I?

First off, we hadn't made it half a mile down the trail toward the lake when we discovered that part of the trail was covered in gooey silt left in the wake of this past week's heavy rains. Now, this wasn't my first trip down this road. I should have known that mud under one overpass meant there'd be more of the same, further along. But I was pretty cold at the time, and maybe my brain wasn't quite awake. The bottom line? We made it a mile or two down the trail and came to a 20-yard stretch of 4 inch deep mud completely blocking our way.

We'll turn around and just find a way around, we thought.

That's when my chain fell off, and while I was off the bike rehanging the chain... PFSSSSSSSSS! I "had a puncture", as the British say. Fifteen or twenty minutes later, I'd fixed the flat—but by then, we'd come to the realization that we'd probably hit more mudslides all the way down the trail. So we rode back to the cars, loaded up, and drove down to the lake to salvage what we could of the time we had left.

When we got to the lake, we noticed an unusual level of activity and discovered that there was a marathon going on. Still not ready to admit defeat, we unloaded our bikes and started out on our first lap of the lake. Between the marathon runners/joggers/walkers/shufflers and the usual crowd of wobblies, stroller pushers, and cloud gazers, we were lucky to roll along at 11 or 12 mph. It wasn't long before Squirrel Bait and I had lost our happy thoughts and decided to finish one lap before conceding defeat and calling it a day.

By the time we eventually made it back to the cars, we'd narrowly missed colliding with three different runners and bystanders who just... stepped out in front of us. Squirrel Bait had some... some... wingnut in a white Caddy pull right up on her tail and lay on his horn, nearly scaring her out of her skin and into the middle of the road. But we survived.

St. Bob considered trying to talk us into doing another lap but was overruled. It was time to go to La Madeleine for some sort of self-indulgent breakfast and coffees.

There's always next week.