Posts Tagged ‘biking’
Rest Day
Sunday was certainly a day of rest for me yesterday, after having ridden so many miles on Saturday. I took a most luscious nap in the middle of the day. My eyes just didn’t want to be open, so I gave them some rest. The rest of me followed suit.
After my nap, I revved up to do the tiniest of chores. I was able to mow the overgrown trails in the woods, because it has dried up lately just enough I was able to drive on it without getting stuck. I wound new line on the spool for the trimmer in the cool shade of the shop. I stood with the horses while Cyndie tended a scrape on Legacy’s front leg.
I also ate a few extra calories, to make sure my body had more than enough to regenerate itself. Visions of the week of biking that lies ahead next month.
Will I be ready? I think I already am, despite having been on my bike only twice so far this season. Must be all that pitch fork work and hill walking I do around Wintervale that has allowed me to stay fit.
Rich Gordon snapped a photo of this athlete in action…
I wasn’t hurting too much yet!
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Biking Pepin
It was about as pleasant a day yesterday as we’ve had lately for bike riding, with minimal wind and plenty of blue sky. Just perfect for a training ride that was planned to help us get some miles in before the Tour of Minnesota next month. Five friends that I met years ago on the annual week-long biking and camping adventure, back when it was led by Jim Klobuchar, gathered in Red Wing to spend a few hours pedaling around Lake Pepin.
The lake is basically a wide spot in the Mississippi River, 22-miles long, with a good number a sloughs in the areas where bridges cross on either end.
You might think that a 22-mile long “lake” would allow for somewhere around 44 miles of riding to circumnavigate. I wish. After only one brief ride of 13 miles this spring, I logged almost 75 yesterday.
That was enough mileage to sap most of my functional stores of energy.
We left Red Wing mid-morning and headed over the bridge into Wisconsin, riding toward a grueling 2-mile hill in order to face it with fresh legs. We stopped at one of many turn-outs and posed for a picture in front of the Lake Pepin sign. A lone motorcyclist who pulled off for a break at the same time as us obliged us with snapping the photo.
Notice how fresh we all look? It was early in the ride.
We took our time on the way to lunch in Wabasha, pausing often to keep the group together and fill water bottles. The day turned out a bit warmer than I am used to and required purposeful attention toward staying well hydrated. By the time we reached our lunch destination, it was almost 2 o’clock. Our first two cafe choices were closing.
Funny how that makes being hungry for some fuel feel a bit more significant. We needed to find a restaurant, and NOW! The kind woman closing the restaurant that was our second choice offered directions to Slippery’s Tavern, made famous by the movie “Grumpy Old Men.” This took care of my hunger pangs.
It didn’t do much for refreshing my energies. That meant the second leg of our trek was going to be a lot more work than the first. It occurred to me that our chosen direction of travel also meant we were now riding upstream. Logic would have it that it might also generally be uphill, what with the flow of the water always moving down.
Rich assured me it was mostly flat, which makes sense since the river widened into a lake there. My tired legs still noticed there were more inclines than declines. Toward the end, as I was standing up to get off the saddle and give my butt a break, both thighs instantly reported they weren’t interested in that additional exertion. I was running on reserves.
Back in the saddle, with Steve as a precious companion to distract me, we eased our way back to Red Wing at the dinner hour.
Lake Pepin had been circled and I was done.
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Tired Legs
I’m home again. After a week of biking, my legs feel much stronger, yet thoroughly worn out, if such a thing is possible. I was awakened by thunder this morning, at the hour we would have been just waking up to pack our tents for the day, extremely grateful to be in my own bed and under a roof.
For the most part, the weather during our adventure was good for biking and camping. We even enjoyed a few occasions of a tail wind, which always provides a much appreciated ego boost when traveling by pedal power.
My body developed some stiffness from all the exercise, and probably from sleeping on the cold hard ground, but I didn’t develop any specific nagging issues from the prolonged hours of pedaling. That is something that I find particularly rewarding, as it hasn’t been the case every time I have done this trip. Joint pain or muscle strain can really mess with the pleasures of day-long riding.
I think most of my stiffness was a result of just a few games of pickle ball in Albert Lea on our day off from riding. I found that to be enough fun that it was worth the muscle soreness.
Participation this year was split almost half-and-half between returning riders and those who were doing it for the first time. Meeting new people becomes one of the highlights of the week for me, and this gave me plenty of opportunities for that.
I rode to breakfast with a group that included one man whom I felt had been with us before, but when seated in a booth beside him, discovered he was from Kansas City and it was his first year on the Tour of Minnesota.
As always, I was carried along throughout the week by the incredible support and precious energy of friends Gary Larson, Julie Kuberski, Rich Gordon, and Steve Reynolds. I struggled with the challenging limitations of creating blog posts and taking pictures with my phone, and Rich and Julie were kind enough to offer some of their great photos to help me out.
I’m not quite the mobile device guy, and I am extremely happy to be back on the laptop today, writing and editing my words and pictures. Something tells me I may resort to my old ways of writing posts in advance again next year.
Today I have plenty of laundry to do, and if the rain stops and grass dries up, a lot of lawn to mow. Pequenita seems happy to have me home and has stayed close to my every move. Delilah appears to have bonded stronger to Cyndie again, in my absence. The horses show no change at all, though they each gave me some intimate moments of breathing in each other’s scent when I stopped down to say hello.
It’s really good to be back home, tired legs and all.
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Tangled Web
We survived yesterday’s day-long precipitation without receiving any torrential downpours! The ground is soaking wet, but we avoided any further washouts, I’m very happy to report.
I spent yesterday trying to finalize my preparations for the Tour of Minnesota bike trip. I will leave this afternoon for the drive to the initial camping spot before tomorrow morning’s departure on the first day of cycling. I’m hoping for much better weather than we endured last year.
I found the exercise of packing to be almost beyond my mental capacity. It seems a bit extreme to me, but I seriously believe I am continuing to suffer rather significant symptoms of withdrawal due to my quest to stop over-eating foods laden with sugar. I did some reading on the subject, and opinions seem universal about the individuality of responses to reducing or eliminating sugar from a person’s diet.
I hate to imagine that my very noticeable symptoms are a reflection of how much excess sugar was in my diet prior to this effort to pay attention. I have had headaches and dizziness, but my primary complaint, which was making me particularly uncomfortable yesterday, is flu-like symptoms of aches and pain, lethargy, and weakness. I just want to lay down and sleep. I feel crappy. If I thought I had the flu, I would just stay in bed.
Meanwhile, I am preparing to embark on a week of bicycling. What am I thinking!?
My thinking was pretty foggy all day, and packing became a random series of wandering around collecting things and then setting them any variety of places. Nothing actually got packed. In the early afternoon, I succumbed to the overwhelming urge to lay down and napped for over an hour.
Today, if the grass dries enough, I would like to do some last-minute mowing before departing. I hope to use the early morning hours to finally put things in my bag and be ready to jump into afternoon traffic after one last shower in the privacy of my own home.
I think I have participated in this week of biking and camping so many times that my frame of reference during preparations has shifted significantly from the excitement and anticipation of what lies ahead, to lamenting the last night of sleeping in my bed, using our private bathroom and showering alone for the next week.
Granted, those issues are some of what contribute to the charm and camaraderie of this event, which is what draws us all back, year after year, but the inconveniences seem to become amplified after so many years of doing it.
I plan to drown any sorrows in sugar during the week, as I anticipate “cheating” on my diet a fair amount, to calm my symptoms and provide necessary fuel for the confused furnace of my body. I just hope it doesn’t mean my withdrawal symptoms have to happen all over again when I get back and resume my measured daily intake.
It’s a tangled web I am weaving.
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Pedaling Upwind
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Seriously, we agreed to go, and even paid for the privilege of riding bicycles in a region that is so windy that they hold National Championship windsurfing competitions and power companies put up wind turbine farms.
What were we thinking?
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Maybe more of us would have thought twice about dealing with that wind if we would have known that the region was also going to be soaked by repeating waves of massive thunderstorms creating flash floods that closed roads, destroyed crops, and trapped a lot of cows.
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We witnessed innumerable fields with large amounts of topsoil sediment dropped in the lowest draining corner, and even more fields with massive amounts of previous year’s dead stalks and debris pushed into piles where it flowed over roads, or dropped in winding patterns when flood waters receded.
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Luckily, the camaraderie and shared accomplishment of like-minded friends proves to be a superb distraction from how miserable we might otherwise feel were we to endure such dreadful conditions alone. Riding while chatting —when the winds aren’t gusting so severely as to make that impossible— is a great way to cover long miles and not notice how far you’ve actually gone. We had opportunities to experience a little of both situations on this year’s ride.
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Relative Something 