Why Stop at Twenty??? Or Twenty-Two?? Or ...

With the rain coming on and off this morning [varying in intensity between sprinkles and downpours], and D'Kid down at her BFFs house for the afternoon, I thought I might be able to get a nice drizzly 20-miler in today.

It was sufficiently cloudy when I left the house [Team Tania jersey in FULL glory] that I didn’t expect it to be long before I was soaking. Yeah well, my weather-reading skills aren’t what they used to be. Although the air was thick & humid, it was still too warm for it to shift over to precipitation. What was worse, at about the 8-mile mark, the sun actually came out, warming the roads and what puddles & dampness were left from earlier in the day. The upside was that the woods were spectacularly lush this afternoon.

It had been a while since I rode this particular route; it’s NOT one of D’Wife’s favorites and there is a considerable bit of climbing [“climbing” being a relative term, down here in Farm Country]. So it was understandable that I didn’t turn where I should have gone left and added a nice 2-mile loop to my journey. When I re-found myself at the intersection where I’d made this mistake [by SHEER Dumb Luck, I must add] … wouldn’t you know, I almost made the same turn AGAIN???

This is where the oddities of my own “special” Zen-Core Dork Brain come in.

“Okay, looks like your 20-miler is gonna come to 22 … but that’s kind of a funky number; it won’t look good on your log … let’s go for 24”

I reached the 24-mile mark about ½-mile out from home.

“Might as well make 25!!!”

I pedaled around an adjacent development.

“You know,” my Zen-Core voice told me “Using 1.5 points per mile, your VRAA score for the ride would be37.5. Why not go to 26 and make it an even 39? Plus, you don’t want to go LESS than 2 hours do you?”

I rolled into the driveway at 4:15 on the dot … EXACTLY 2 hours after I’d left.

I did 100 push-ups to bump my VRAA points to 40 on the day.

It rained at about 5:30; a massive downpour that would have probably taken me off my wheels had it come by while I was on the road … Fortunately, I was already into a pint of RiverHorse Hop Hazard and could enjoy the cool grey storminess outside from the safety of my kitchen.

[My buddy Satch added "You could have down another 0.2 and said you rode a marathon" ... If I'd thought of it, I probably WOULD have]