Saturday Morning on the Bike

The last week has been a blur at the office.  Typical day for me starts at 5am, answering email while eating breakfast.  In the office by 6:45.  The next 9 hours will be a blur, typically working through lunch and eating a sandwich with one hand while I click the mouse with the other.  Around 4, I will give up and go home, and then the phone calls will start.  I'll break for dinner, manage a chore or two (the lawn must be mowed even if the world ends), and then after dinner I'll stare at more email or more likely will end up on the phone with either the East Coast lead or the West Coast team debriefing what we've done and what we plan to do the next day.  All of that will wind down around 9:30,  get in bed around 10 and I'll lay in bed awake until after midnight, and then repeat.

Mrs. Durden has been a real champ through this.  The stress has been building for several weeks, but the last week in particular we've been in overdrive mode.

We are thankfully in a position where most people will get the weekend, and I won't be back to the office until Monday (although I have some homework to do on Sunday while we're watching whatever blue-ray goes in the player).

There are things that I should be doing around our property today.  Burning brush, running the weed whacker, replacing the security light that finally burned out.  Normal crap for someone that owns and cares for 10 acres.

Instead, I got on the bike, clipped on my new GoPro, and burned almost 1200 calories in an early morning ride.  I was on the bike by 7:40 to avoid traffic around Home Depot and Walmart, and got away from everything and everyone for a blissful 90 minutes.

I was following a route that I've used the past couple years for training.  It's a 20-25 mile loop, depending how I do it.  There are some hilly sections, pretty sections, and a good mix of road surfaces (good new smooth pavement and old cruddy stuff).

Partway through the route, I noticed that a local club/shop had marked the route for their local rides and I happened to be following their course turn for turn.

I got outside a small town near me, and I had a choice - break from the shop/club route and follow my old route and climb two monstrous hills back to back, and into a stiff headwind, or follow the white rabbit into the unknown and stay with the club route (Matrix reference there, woot).  I chose the latter.

I got treated with this:

It was a 3-4 mile detour through some of the prettiest, twistiest, windiest, rolliest terrain that I know of.  The road surface was great, and it was mostly downhill out of the wind, so I got to really open it up and crank it.  I've driven this road in the car, but had never biked it.  There's a creek on the left side that the road follows, the birds were singing, and I was fully and blissfully alone.  I was grinning so wide, I no doubt now have bugs in my teeth.

Sometimes it's good to be impulsive.

Then, I came home and the water heater had quit.  It was an easy fix, but I'm sitting here in my stinky bike clothes waiting for enough hot water to shower.

Back to reality.