Today we went for a bike ride. I am on the cusp of going from the high-end of a slow rider to the low-end of a medium rider and I don’t understand this degree of progress whatsoever. So I am not very good, but I hold my own when riding with The Yankee, who is now an amateur racer.
There’s a 13 mile circle of bypass road around the town proper and we did that today. I just stayed on her back wheel for the first half. There are two “big” hills on that route. (It is coastal-plains-flat here so I qualify our hills.) When the second hill game I bent to the left and passed her.
I am good on this one hill, because I have figured out a way that I can essentially keep my pace or accelerate all the way up it. It involves closing my eyes, counting out pedal strokes and shifting to an easier gear all the way “up.”
So today I shifted down, start counting, shift up, start counting. Normally I go through about 10 strokes per gear on that hill and it keeps everything working pretty well. Only today I overcounted my pedal strokes and that just killed everything on that hill. I counted to 20 in the second gear and that was too much so then there’s the lactic acid build up and so on. I got greedy.
In cycling, commentators could say “Bang. Dropped him just like that.” Which is to say you left the other person standing still as you accelerated away from them. I was trying to do that, but I could not because I got greedy. So I pulled away from her modestly, but I was really trying to assert my control of that particular hill.
So I let her catch up to me at the next light and we rode on the rest of our route.
She stopped when she got to the distance of her first upcoming race and looked on her computer at the pace she was setting and she was very pleased. She said “I’m going to ride hard the rest of the way home to try to boost my average pace.”
I just happened to be in front of her right there, so I started off, standing up and generating more power so that I can get out of her way since she wants to go hard and she’d stopped on this little incline. She goes right by me.
Bang. She dropped me.
Nice day for Auburn sports and technology. We listened to the baseball game on the iPhone app as the Tigers beat Texas A&M at College Station. They finally found the string of at bats they’ve been struggling to put together and it paid off on the scoreboard, felling the Aggies 10-5.
Three home runs contributed to a 9-0 lead in the fourth inning, and then the usually solid pitching simply had to hold things together which, happily, was exactly how it went.
Later in the evening we watched the regional gymnastics meet. Twelfth-ranked Auburn notched a school record regional score of 196.700. That put them third in Gainesville tonight. The top two of each region move on to nationals. That score in any other region would have advanced, but instead they were third behind Florida and Minnesota.
Sophomore Bri Guy and freshman Caitlin Atkinson both advance to the NCAA Gymnastics championships, so, the future is very bright for the gymnastics team.
Finally, I share this video to make you cry. On fourth-and-one the running back breaks a 69-yard touchdown run that cleared the benches in celebration. It is the best of sports and youth and humanity and perseverance and this little guy can run:
More about Team Jack.
And his big run:
Asked what he was thinking when he ran onto the field, Jack said, “Scoring a touchdown.”
And when he broke free and scored? “It felt awesome.” And the crowd reaction? “Really awesome.”
[…]
Jack was diagnosed with cancer in April 2011 and has had two surgeries. He’s now on a two-week break from a 60-week chemotherapy regimen.
Andy said Jack is “doing great” and that an MRI at Children’s Hospital in Boston showed that the tumor has shrunk substantially in the past year.
