Skip to main content

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).
Labels:
Location: Leesburg, VA, USA

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Apostle Islands: Gordon Lightfoot Warned Us

This entry is part of my write-up of a September 2024 trip to The Apostle Islands. The story begins  here . Thursday 9/5 Thursday morning we drove the roughly 20 minutes to our launch point at Little Sand Bay in The Apostle Islands National Lakeshore. Upon our arrival we were met by Ranger Angel (it makes sense that the Apostles have a guardian Angel, right?), who directed us as to where to launch, checked our permits, gave us useful information about the weather, and told us how to describe our location ifwe needed to call 911 (!). She also gave us a once-over and declared that we appeared to be "shipshape". It is not her responsibility to evaluate people's ability to paddle in the open waters of Lake Superior, but by her own admission if she detects that people don't have the appropriate skills or preparation, she'll gently steer them to safer courses of action.   Loading the kayaks at Little Sand Bay Many people are familiar with Gordon Lightfoot's song The...
Post a Comment
Read more

Visiting Charles in Upstate New York

Looking back, growing up I was friends with a lot of the weird kids. It makes me think - maybe I was a weird kid too? Let's table that line of thought for now, but along those lines, let me tell you about my friend Charles, who was a textbook example of ADHD before ADHD was even in the textbook.  For the record, ADHD was added to the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Psychiatric Disorders (DSM) in 1968. Coincidentally, that's the same year Charles and I met, and yes, he's an ADHD dude. A smart kid, he nonetheless never paid attention in class and typically spent class reading a comic book he had hidden inside whatever book we were supposed to be reading - when he even bothered to sit in his seat and pretend to pay attention. During our college years Charles attended something of a party school, where he focused more on party than school. As a live-at-home commuter student, I loved that I could visit Charles and get a taste of the ov...
Post a Comment
Read more

A Guilty Pleasure

I have to admit that I feel guilty doing it. It's just not something that people like me do. In fact, I have spent years looking down on people who do it. I'm talking about powersports. Activities which involve using a motor to have fun. I have always been a people-powered person. On the water I scowl at jet skiers and water ski boats. On the cross-country ski trails I shake my head at people who ruin the pristine winter wilderness with snowmobiles. Being something of a car guy, I go a little easier on the pleasures of motorized vehicles on land. I don't expect car owner to be a super-miler in a Prius, but I also give a pretty wide berth to ATVs and dirt bikes. But now I'm motorcycling. Over the summer I fulfilled a "bucket list" item by learning to ride a motorcycle (Valerie took the class too). For the last month or so I've been tooling around on a borrowed Kawasaki Vulcan cruiser, and I must say I'm enjoying it. Riding a motorcycle is ridiculous...
Post a Comment
Read more