John’s Ramblings

It was a solitary little ride last night.

Normally a Use It or Lose It ride will draw anywhere from 3 to 13 riders, no matter the weather. The “core” group here is pretty dedicated, and while I expected the total number of riders to be closer to 3 than 13, I did expect a couple of folks showing up to ride. The weather forecasts were looking rather dire, meteorologists dusting off their blinking snowflakes and hanging them up once more on their maps of the Puget Sound region. That may have been final pin-prick to whatever balloons of motivation were still inflated around 6 p.m., because at 6:30 p.m. I was still the only guy standing in the bike shop dressed for distress.

Having invested the time to dress, equip, inflate, and drive to the start location, I did not feel that I should just go home and call it a night. So despite the votes of my cycling brethren, I took off North, into the wind. The rain was steady, but I had my rain gear on so I figured that I would stay “dry enough” to do an hour. I ended up more than dry enough, although it really reinforced the notion I got last Sunday on Chilly Hilly that my winter gloves are completely inadequate when it comes to the rain. I bought a big name brand in the hopes that I’d be buying quality, but in this case I was dead-wrong. More fool me.

I slogged up the Interurban, and turned around in Tukwila and slogged back. I ended up the evening with about 13 miles. That’s not really significant mileage given my usual output, but given the conditions and my solitary confinement, I think I did pretty well. For the record, there was not even one other cyclist on the Interurban last night. That may be more a testimony to my lack of common sense than anything else.

I rode a little bit on Monday as well, despite my fatigue from the prior day’s Chilly Hilly hill climbing. I did some intervals for 45 minutes or so, but the concrete in my legs and the impending dark clouds sent me back to the car. I could have had similar notions of dryness last night, but I seemed to need to prove something to myself.

561 miles year-to-date.

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