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After riding home with Phil the other night, you would think I would learn not to try to keep up with someone on their road bike when I’m riding my Surly commuter. But NO…Mike and I went for a night ride the other night, and I rode the Surly because my rear lights are almost kind of permanently mounted on it and I don’t have one on my road bike yet.  Mike was on his road bike, and after a pretty hard week of riding with Phil and fighting the wind on my commutes, I eventually hit the point where it was work to keep up with him!

Things started out tame enough.  Kind of nice, actually.  We headed out Sunshine about 7:15 to ride my long High School loop.  At that point, what little wind we had was at our backs, and I even commented that it was the best riding I had all week.  We made it through Turners in fine shape, then headed on toward Rogersville.  As we got out into the country, we stumbled across a stargazing “party”.  There were a ton of cars parked along the road and in a yard, and lots of people gathered at the edge of a field.  As we approached, we couldn’t figure out what in the world was going on, then as we passed, I saw several telescopes set up.  It was a perfectly clear night, so they should have had great viewing!  I’ve kind of always known that one of the MSU professors often took his students out that way, so we guessed that’s what it was.

As we turned around and looped back toward home, the impact of the wind began to make itself known.  At that point, I began to wish I was on my Madone, but there was nothing to be done except to keep pedaling.  Had I not already ridden 19 miles on my commute, I would have probably been OK, but for the next six miles, I felt like I was hanging on by the skin of my teeth!  I decided later to just call it training!

About 2.5 miles from home, Mike flatted on his front tire.  Great!  Out in the dark, on the edge of a road changing a flat.  We moved to a drive and Mike went to work while I held the light.  While he was finishing up, a car passed, turned around in a drive and came back to check on us.  It was a lady who lived down the drive and just wanted to be sure we were OK.  We assured her we had it under control, but appreciated the gesture on her part.

We pulled back into my driveway at 8:45 PM with 24 miles under our saddles.  That gave me 43 for the day, so I considered it a decent effort!

God bless….

TW

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This entry was posted on March 5, 2012 at 5:15 pm and is filed under bicycle, Bike Commute, Cycling, Fitness. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.

Tags: bicycle, Bike Commute, Cycling, Fitness, Night Ride

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