Cycling

I slept in a bit this morning and we then headed back to Frederick for the Day Zero Freewheel ride to the Red River and back while Hollis and Grace went out for a little bird bothering. It should have been a piece of cake ride with nothing resembling a hill to be seen, however a stiff headwind made it slow going down to the Red River.

Up really early to drive back to Frederick one last time before heading back out towards Elgin. It started out nice and flat with a great tailwind, but we all knew that once we got into the Wichita Mountains, things would get tougher. However, the ride in was beautiful with the prairie, wild flowers and the mountains all around.

Woke up to a grey, crisp morning eager to get on the road. After a nice oatmeal breakfast, I hit the road. It misted all morning, but it never really rained on me and with the temperatures under 70 degrees I made really good time without any worry of overheating.

After a few hills coming out of the mountains, the land really opened up back into flat farm land and not much else.

I woke up to a beautiful dawn over the lake and enjoyed a great breakfast of oatmeal and tea. I left the camp refreshed for the very short and very flat ride into Frederick. With almost no wind, I covered the distance in a couple of hours and arrived in Frederick before 10 AM. It was obvious that the rumors about the effort Frederick had made in anticipation of Freewheel were true. Various businesses had decorated bicycles and scattered them around town.

I got a really early start this morning. My mother drove us into Elk City for a fast food breakfast and then she gave me a bit of a head start by getting me through some busy highway driving first. But now it was time to see if I could really make this happen.

Well, it was like Sunday had never happened. My legs felt great and I started eating into the miles. Then, the gods really smiled upon me and granted me the rarest of favors, a north wind in June. I was half way through by 9:30 in the morning. With my confidence restored I was really able to start enjoying the ride.

Today was my first scheduled day off, and I wasn’t going to pass up the chance to be extremely lazy. Woke up to a beautiful sunrise and had some nice oatmeal for breakfast. Then, I went back to bed.:)

I repeated this system of getting up, eating a bit and going back to sleep for most of the day. Which is about the perfect way to spend a vacation day.

Or Where Our Intrepid Hero Questions His Choices Or Do I Really Need That?

So after a long night of cramping and hydrating, I woke up with at least enough confidence to continue the ride but now I had to figure out how to make that happen. Grace had offered to wake up super early on Tuesday and drive me out to Red Rock again, but that would have required me to ride every day for the rest of the week and I wasn’t sure I would be up for that. My mother the offered to drive me out to Foss Lake where I could pick up the schedule so sorely messed up the day before. This struck me as the best idea and I took her up on it, but before we left I had to cut some weight from my bags.

Or Disaster Strikes Or Where Our Intrepid Hero Gets Bit on the Backside by Hubris Or What Were You Thinking???

I don’t know about you, but I find that the week before a vacation can be more stressful and busy that any of the weeks preceding it. There always seems to be too much to do and so the night before is always a mess of chaos and frayed nerves. This trip was no different except that I was tired from my ride during the day. It was in this frame of mind that I made my first foolish choice. Instead of fighting through the sleepiness and finishing everything up that night or even more intelligently, rescheduling the ride for the next day, I decided to just finish packing and put off my “work work” till the next morning.

Or, Things Start Looking Rocky but are Ignored Through Enthusiasm for the Adventure.

It is a sign that it has been a troubled trip when it is almost a week in before I start posting trip reports, however things are improving greatly and I have the time and the energy to start catching up. Saturday was a day that I had been dreading for sometime. I had volunteered to lead any of this year’s Freewheel training rides that no one else picked up. Unfortunately, this left me with the 70 mile training ride the day before I was scheduled to head out on my trip. We tried and tried to find someone to take the ride for me, but to no avail.

So today was my first day back to driving.  I drove primarily just for the contrast and to mark and end to the experiment.  Boy, was the irony suddenly laid on thick. I climbed in my car, turned the key and nothing happened, just a clicking noise as the starter motor tried to turn over.  My battery had died.  I had to get a neighbor to come over and give me a jump-start.  I guess the heat combined with the lack of use had drained it dry.  I had noticed that it had a hard time starting on Tuesday for my short trip to work after my tires were punctured and apparently my short commute hadn’t been enough to top off the battery.  So the great irony of the experiment is that after all of my worry about being without a car for a month, the time when I really needed help was when I returned to driving.