Road Noise

The bicycling community has a lot of cutesy ideas and affectations, most of which I ignore. But there is this thing to ride your age in miles on your birthday. Well, my birthday turned out to be a nice weather day (for late November) and my recollection was that my calendar was empty, so on the spur of the moment I decided to blow off work and do a fifty-seven mile bike ride. As always, I chose the default, lazy route - hopping on the W&OD bike trail, which passes within a few blocks of my house, and just riding 28 1/2 miles out, then turning around and riding 28 1/2 miles bake. Or thereabouts - that distance takes me to the eastern outskirts of Leesburg, and just a little further gets you to a shopping center with a Dunkin' Donuts and a Starbucks. Given that it was a bit chilly I figured I might enjoy a coffee break at my turnaround point.

At about 10:30 AM, about eight miles short of my planned turnaround I stopped to use the Porta-potty at Smith's Switch Station (the older you get, both the miles and the number of potty breaks increase). I checked my phone to make sure nothing dire was happening at work and noticed an email from a colleague forwarding the documents I needed for our 11 AM call with a potential teaming partner. Uh oh. I had completely forgotten that I had agreed to participate in this call. Hmmm, what to do? I wasn't going to get to the turnaround in 30 minutes (I'm not a 16 MPH rider). Turn around? No, that wouldn't really get me anywhere. Email that I couldn't make the call after all? Nahh, I didn't want to leave my colleague in the lurch. So, I decided to ride on.

At 11 AM I was just a mile and change short of my destination. I pulled off to the side of the trail and dialed in - but I really didn't want to stand there in the cold for the whole call, so I told them that I was "in the car" on my way back from another appointment and was going to stay on mute because of road noise. I put the phone on speaker and muted it and held it in one hand while I continued to ride - slowly - along the trail. I didn't have the deterity to work the phone with one gloved hand while riding, so any time I needed to participate I'd stop, unmute the phone, say my piece, remute the phone, then keep riding. Fortunately, this didn't go on for too long, as it took me only five minutes or so to get to the doughnut shop. Also fortunate is that my colleague really likes to talk and it was his call, so I was mostly able to just listen and ride.

Once I got to the doughnut shop things got easier. While my colleague blathered on I ordered a doughnut as a birthday treat (I don't usually eat doughuts) and a regular coffee as a ride enhancer. Caffeine is a staple of my longer rides. It's something that I also usually avoid, which makes it super effective as an athletic performance enhancer. A cup of coffee and I'm recharged for a lot of miles.

Thanks to my colleague's loquaciousness what should have been a thirty minute call lasted almost an hour. Once we finally finished I packed up my puffy jacket in my seat bag (it was warming up nicely), put the rest of my gear on, and headed home. The ride home was uneventful, but between riding more slowly than I anticipate and the call, what I expected to be a five hour outing took seven - essentially an all day affair. total mileage was 60.9 - that's 57 for my age and 3.9 for good luck (and doughnuts).