Silk Sheets

My brother and I tried to coordinate a Silk Sheets ride for 3 or 4 days. I kept getting the times and dates of potentially conflicting events wrong though, and it wasn't until last night that we finally settled on this morning, bright and early.

Except that it wasn't that bright. Just early.

I felt great for about the first 10 miles, except that it was so foggy that my glasses were useless. It doesn't look all that foggy in the photo. My iPhone must have some kind of built-in FLIR that I don't know about because it was seriously wet and damp and foggy.

Along the first few miles of the route we saw some scaffolding set up and a few pop up tents, and small security crews in orange vests. They film the Walking Dead out that way a lot, so that was my bro's first idea, but then he remembered that he thought that they were having the Futureworld Rave out there like a week from now or something. I'd never heard of it but he said it was like the Woodstock of raves. Sounds cool. I'll have to take his word for it though, as I am not plugged into any such scene.

We took a fairly circuitous route in a generally southwest direction. The roads were familiar, but I'm usually on them heading back instead of out.

Around Rico we went through an intersection with 4 things that you don't see that often, all at the same time. There was a firetruck on the left, a girl jogging through the intersection (loaded up and looking like she'd be out there for a while), a pair of dogs running down the middle of the road, and something else that I can't remember now. Dangit I wish I could remember that 4th thing, it's important!

Somewhere around mile 10 or 15 the fun turned into work. I hoped it was just a tough spot but I feared it was lack of good recovery after yesterdays excursion to Blankets, compounded by weeks of bad sleep.

I have this ridiculous schedule these days: work all day, then around 9 or 10 run a process that takes 3 hours, set an alarm and get up to check it, then run another process that takes about 15 minutes. If all that worked then rerun the same 3 hour process in Brazil and set another alarm to get up for that one. If it worked, run the 15 minute processes again there. Then get up at 6:30 with the kids for school. Grab a few hours of rest somewhere during the day, if possible, usually between 9AM and noon. I'll be glad when I'm done with this project, or at least this phase of it.

So, anyway, we headed southwest forever, out past Serenbe, out past the Old Tin Gin...

Around mile 35 or so we'd climbed one hill too many and the work turned into suffering. I couldn't keep up.

No good.

A mile or two later I was sitting on.

We passed a lot of other cyclists, several runners, a guy on a bike that I'm not sure I'd call a "cyclist" per-se, some guy running down the dead-middle of the road, way out in the middle of nowhere, in the fog, and countless other odd things. A flatbed carrying a combine passed us going the other direction once too. It had to come way over into our lane to keep from crushing into the trees along the road too badly.

We stopped at the Roscoe store for a little bit. I wasn't feeling good there so I rested up a little, drank a bunch of Gatorade and ate an ice cream sandwich.

This little dog with an injured leg came limping across the street to see if we had anything for him too.

Cute little dog, but all I had were Clif Blocks and an Ice Cream sandwich and my experience has been that unless you have something with meat in it, dogs are happy to let you throw it on the ground, but then they just sniff it and walk away. No way I was doing that with my ice cream sandwich.

No way.

Right as we got up to leave I realized I had a flat. It turned out that the rubber had just cracked around the valve stem though, no little piece of glass or wire or anything else in the tire. Woohoo! Fortunately I had a picnic table right there to sit on and fix it. Mmmm, hmmm. If you have to fix a flat, then being at a store, with a picnic table, right after refueling and re-hydrating is the way to go. May I be as lucky next time.

I managed to sit on for most of the rest of the ride, until we hit the two kicks on Creel Road. Ugh. It was bad.

And that was it. No additional excitement. The miles were good, and I guess it's good to suffer some, but I usually like suffering when I'm in the mood to suffer and this morning I was decidedly not.

The lack of sleep is the big killer in this equation. Got to get this project finished. Better get back to it now, actually...