Monday, January 4, 2010

Happy New Year

Happy New Year to all of my two wheeled friends!

In a recent post, I referred to
geocaching. I meant to make the word geocaching a link to a geocaching website so that anyone who didn’t know what geocaching was could visit the geocaching website to learn about geocaching.

But I forgot. Sorry about that. I think I may have rectified that now. And now, back to our blog about cycling.

If your first ride of the year is an omen of things to come, I don’t know if I should be happy or sad, because my first ride went both badly and well.

It went badly because I intended to join the group ride this morning, but circumstances beyond my control (really!) kept me up too late and I didn’t get up and out of the house in time. When I did get out, I headed toward the start point. After all, it was possible that they would ride in my direction. (Hey, there are only 360 degrees on the compass, so it might have happened. It might have, but it didn’t.)

So I ended up riding alone. I don’t know about you, but I find riding alone when you were expecting to ride with a group to be demoralizing, so, demoralized, I still decided to do thirty miles (which was the length of the expected group ride.)

My ride ended up being 37 miles, mostly because I got lost. Just as I was calling my Lovely Lovely to let her know that I had absolutely no idea where I was, I noticed a sign for a school crossing ahead. Figuring that a school was a pretty good landmark, I pedaled over to it and found that it was a school I had heard of. It was also a school that I had never known the location of. Well, I knew the location now – it was where I was, after all – but that knowledge didn’t help me get anywhere that I knew. All of which is a very complicated way of saying that I was still lost.

Then the universe began to play tricks with me.

I saw a sign for a town I knew. Three miles that way. (There was an arrow pointing. The sign didn’t actually have the words “that way” on it.) I followed the sign. A mile later there was a sign saying that the town was now two miles away. Excellent. I kept pedaling. A mile later there was another sign saying that the town was two miles away in the direction I had just come from.

What?

Well, going back didn’t seem to make much sense, and, somehow I didn’t feel like continuing in the same direction, so I took the first turn I came to. About ten minutes later I found a sign for the same town and it was – did you guess it? – two miles away, this time in a totally different direction.

It was at this point that I decided to ignore all the signs and simply ride until I spotted something I knew. The something I knew finally turned up in the form of a church that I had ridden past with Scott on previous rides. I was on firm footing once again (so to speak, since I was still riding my bike) and could actually point my bike toward home.

I called my Lovely Lovely who was relieved to find that I now knew where I was. I didn’t have any idea how I had gotten there, mind you, but I knew where I was. I was rather farther from home than I had intended to be by that time, but that’s life on the bike.

I was pursued by dogs every direction I went. It was definitely a dog day morning, but, since none of them actually caught me, that was okay. There’s nothing like a large slavering dog, by the way, to make you realize that you weren’t as tired as you thought you were. All of sudden, you do indeed have the energy to go faster than you were going.

So, anyway, I got a nice long ride in to start the year, which is always good, even though the ride didn't turn out to be much like I had expected it to be.

I hope we all have a great year and get lots of miles.

See you on the road.

2 comments:

  1. I know what you mean about always being able to go faster than we think. When the hubby and I work out at the gym, I always start a nice, steady ride on the exercise bike. Then he taunts me into a higher resistance level that I always hate but realize I really can do after all. It's good to push beyond what we think we can do sometimes.

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  2. We all need a good taunting now and then :-) I know I ride harder when I have someone with me to push me.

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