Some Kind of Morning

The posting has been sporadic of late. This is probably a manifestation of the schedule-free (more or less) living I've been doing lately, but I'm surprised at how tough it's been to find time for this. It's not that I've been extremely busy, but rather that lately I'd rather be out enjoying the weather instead of typing away at a computer.

I had intentions of reflecting on the cycling journey I took last weekend, but the week escaped me. I'll likely throw in thoughts here and there relating to the trip over the next few weeks, because if it's like other similar trips I've taken, the impressions it has planted in my memory will dwell quite a while.

The few days following my return on Monday eve were slow. Surprisingly, I never was sore. But man was I tired. A deep down, body tired. To the point that it took considerable mental effort to get up from a chair after having sat down.

I felt much better by Wednesday night and I decided to take a short run on Thursday morning. Per doctor's recommendations and also because of a fear of reaggravating the stress fracture in my left foot (which by the way is just about recovered, I've decided) I'm taking any runs for the next few weeks VERY slow and easy. So I did a 3 x (5:00 run, 5:00 walk) around my neighborhood. This was very uneventful. That's what I was expecting, and I think that's a good thing. Man did those old motions feel good.

Friday evening I met some friends and co-workers to ride out to Oaks, PA. Eric and I were riding Mike, the bike tech at our store, halfway to Bear Creek. He was christening a very shiny new Long Haul Trucker and trailer, and we wanted to make sure he didn't have any mishaps. Eric and I rode our fixies, and it ended up being about 60 miles of easy riding round trip. About an hour into the ride the sun went down and I experienced my first official long night ride. It was really a blast, very surreal riding along the Schuylkill River trail in more or less complete darkness (Eric's headlamp helped this issue). My chaffed rear end reminded me why I love my touring rig (also an LHT) so much.

For the past month or so I've been trying to get together with my friend Justin for a long weekend ride. He's on a cycling team and goes out on Saturday's and Sunday's for rides ranging from 2 to 4 hours. This morning it seemed like we were finally going to connect. I was up at ten-to-six (after returning from my night ride at around 11:30) to clean up my LHT and strip the rack and barbag mount. At the last minute something came up and I couldn't seem to get out the door in time. I showed up at our rendezvous a few minutes late, Justin had already left, and I didn't have a phone, so I sprinted down to the PMA to try and find him. The scene down there was typical for a Saturday AM: some sort of charity walk/run, a thousand runners, and just as many bikers, and in the mix I couldn't spot him. At that point I'd grown pretty frustrated and was steaming at the the ears a bit, so I turned what would've been an easy group ride into a hill workout. For some reason I didn't want to stray too far from home, so I strung together some running routes over in Fairmount Park that included the infamous Bloody Nipple hill. Did this roughly 7-mile loop 5 times, covering each in about 25 minutes or so, and by the fifth I'd definitely blown a lot of steam. Afterward as I was coming up MLK Jr. Drive I smacked right into a hand cyclist, flipped over my bars and face-planted. Good thing I was wearing a helmet. I only sustained minor injuries as far as I can tell, but I'm picking out bruises by the hour.

I decided that I kind of like the format of the mobile-phone posting, so the next few posts will probably be a combination of those and weekly summaries. I'm looking forward to another run tomorrow, slightly longer than Thursday's. Good luck to all of you running the PDR tomorrow. Weather should be perfect.