Today I learned that next week is Memorial Day. Sorta sneaks up on you, doesn’t it?
We get a three-day weekend! I wonder what that will be like. Probably we’ll hang out with the cats, same as everyday. They are having a great time of it all. Phoebe has lately been enjoying the steps in the midday:
Poseidon spends a lot of the day warning off the birds, finding new ways to get into the same kinds of trouble and relying on his cuteness to make us forget about it.
We’ve recently shown them some more windows they haven’t had available to them, but they always come back to the windows that point to the southeast. They get it.
Had a lovely little bike ride today. And by lovely I mean we did hill repeats. You go up a hill, then you go down that hill, then you go up that hill, and then you go down that hill, then you go up that hill, and you realize you’ve lost count already.
So I sing a different song to myself each time. It’s somehow easier to count back the songs than recalling how many times I’ve grimaced over that especially steep spot.
Today I was singing aloud, which has the added bonus of amusing The Yankee when she was going up or down the hill opposite my journey.
(That is not the hill. That’s just part of the ride on either side of the hills. The hill was steep, tree-covered, slick from an earlier rain and featured an embankment on one side and a steep drop-off on the other. Also part of a tree fell over behind me at one point. It was an altogether different vibe than the approximately-a-suburb you have in that photo.)
She’s getting stronger on climbs, and if that continues I’m in real trouble.
So it was a lovely 22-mile ride. We rode past a colleague’s house and I yelled to him from the road, which amuses us, and him, but not his neighbors. Probably that route takes us by someone else we know, but I don’t know where everyone lives, which is a shame for so many reasons.
On my last repeat I went all the way down to the lake, where the boat launch is, and climbed the whole way out. And suddenly I realized why we were only doing the top half of the climb for the repeats. After 13 reps up an 8.6 degree ascent the bottom half of the full climb is a leg breaker, it was a 200-foot ascent over a half-mile with a maximum gradient of 12 percent, which, by then, was enough. And that’s not the point. The hills were the point. which is certainly one wake to look forward to the end of your weekend. And since there was a ride we can return to the irregular-when-I-think-of-it Barns By Bike feature. Look at this beaut!
Remember how, on Friday, we examined the malfunctioning speed on one of the cycling apps? Today it said I was doing 130.7 miles per hour on the first descent. I was not.
I save that kind of speed for the climb back out, where I set PRs on three Strava segments after riding all those hills.
