2010 MS150 City to Shore - Epilogue

The first 10 miles or so were fairly shady and comfortable, but it got pretty warm down to the 2nd rest stop. Along the marsh was cooler, as there was more of a breeze. The last rest stop wasn’t at the park/field like last year, but at a school that looked pretty new, which was nice. We had a crosswind from the left on the first bridge and a headwind on the 2nd. D’Wife was pretty well bonked by the time we rolled into OC; but we finished around 3:20 – at least an hour earlier than last year.

Oh! We saw Capt. Stacey & SafetyMan at the first stop, which was SO AWESOME!!! And at the tent, of course.

We caught the 6PM Bus back to Hammonton; we were the last ones on & had to STAND the whole way. We got to our house about 7:30, showered, changed, I got the bikes put away & we picked up D’Kid. I FINALLY got my post-ride beer [Flying Dog Dogtoberfest] at about 9:30 LOL

Then I remembered something Donna asked me sometime after we'd finished and were walking the Boardwalk.

"How much beer did you drink last night [Friday]?"
"Only two," I replied "One with dinner, then another around 10; to calm down & get to sleep"
"You are SO good," she complimented, "That Greg Norman Shiraz went down too smooth"
''Smooth-LY'' I said under my breath, correcting her grammar as I am known to do.

I didn't think anything of it until I was pouring my beer. You see, she had been low on her Shiraz and I figured I'd pick up a bottle Friday night, since I didn't know where we'd be Saturday post-race or when we'd get or if we'd have time to hit Canal's on they final leg back to the house.

Turns out, she'd drunk all but a glass and a half of the bottle on Race Night.

Basically, she rode 45 miles on a hangover!!!

Yeah, it was stupid on her part, but I HAVE TO give her props for doing the ride, finishing strong and not even mentioning it ... that's Hard Core

I TOTALLY forgive whatever bitchy-ness she may have given me on the road [which was substantial, mostly stemming from camera issues, sorry to say]

All in all, it was a great ride, for a good cause and we looked AWESOME at the finish in Ocean City

****

Team Tania fielded 422 riders this year [down from last year’s 465] and raised more than a quarter of a million dollars to fight MS; but still feel just short of Captain Stacey’s goal of $275K.

In an email the week of the ride she said “This will be our last year riding as Team Tania.”

She had her reasons and they make sense: “Because staying the same in a changing world is like moving backwards. If we don't do something more, something different, we will lose our effectiveness” PLUS She’s moving to more responsibility in the Greater Delaware Valley Chapter.

However there is ONE part of her email that worries me: “If I have my say, some of you will step right up to the plate and form your own MS cycling teams. You've got great ideas, energy and passion. You have been waiting for just this opportunity to create your own way. And hopefully you'll take what you've witnessed as the best of Team Tania with you, including some of your teammates. “

Yeah, the Midnight Madness girls have already named me Captain of Team “We don’t have a name yet, but we’re sure Randy will come up with something awesome … and make us some nice jerseys, too!!!”

Stay tuned

Autumnal Equinox

In my own personal internal calendar, Fall begins at about 4PM on Distance Run Sunday* ... I usually celebrate by pouring a Dogfish Head Punkin Ale.

That being said, the last BEACH day of the year wil be Saturday when D'Wife & I roll into Ocean City, NJ after pedalling 4 dozen miles or so ... did I ever mention how the ride ends??? Yeah we gotta ride 40-something miles or so across the reasonably bumpy Jersey marshlands then, just for fun ... up & over this little bridge



Oh, wait ... there's TWO of them



it can be a pretty hairy "Share The Road" Experience



ETA: Thanks EVERYONE for your support to me, D'Wife and the National MS Society ... That is what it's for ... The Twin Bridges are just a metaphor for the struggles that people with MS face All Day EVERYDAY!!! It takes power, determination and [for those of us who are afraid of heights] courage to conquer these two obstacles in the last hour of our day, once a year ... Imagine what people with MS go through ... compared to that? It's a cake-walk ... thanks again to our Sponsors [material and otherwise]



* ReGARDless of what ING and their $$$ says the race is called, to those who have run it and love it, it will ALWAYS be The Distance Run

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]

Fifteen Books

From Facebook

The rules: Don't take too long to think about it. Fifteen books you've read that will always stick with you. List the first fifteen you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes.

1. Moby Dick – Herman Melville
2. Count of Monte Cristo – Alexander Dumas
3. War of the Worlds – HG Wells
4. Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe
5. Catch-22 – Robert Heller
6. Cat's Cradle – Kurt Vonnegut
7. Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas – Hunter S Thompson
8. The Iliad - Homer
9. The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway
10. Frankenstein – Mary Shelley
11. Dracula – Bram Stoker
12. The Razor's Edge – Somerset Maugham
13. Stuart Little – EB White
14. The Story of Ferdinand – Munro Leaf
15. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe – Douglas Adams

Along Came a Spider

As if the heat & humidity we’ve been suffering with aren't bad enough, I stepped off the porch yesterday morning and got a face-full of just-begun spider web ... NO amount of bug spray is gonna fix THAT!!!

ugh!!!!

I did my best to brush the sticky silk off my nose & mouth, and ears even, but the thought that perhaps I had a little hitchhiker in my hair kinda took me off my game, running the 4 mile loop in about 37 minutes [I know, you'd think the arachnophobically-induced adrenalin-rush would make me go a little faster, right??? Nope!!!]

Of course, there were no sprinklers running that I might rinse her off and cool down just a bit ... when I got in the post-run shower [fully dressed in my running gear, like I usually do when it’s nearly 80° with 80% humidity and I’m Sweating like Nixon and it’s not even 7AM yet] I didn't see any crawly friend in the tub, so all that worrying was for nothing.

I can't tell you how many times I've come back from early morning trail runs/rides wearing a spider-silk mask/hairnet. The "nice" thing is pulling a "leaf" out of your hair in the shower and watching it unfold and crawl away. Funny, my reaction was usually, "Oh, Hi there!!!"

While one of my friends once commented that she’d “try to save the little dude or dudette from drowning,” I would not get carried away, here ... I mean I would gladly assist her to an open window if that's where she's headed [most adult spiders are girls, the dudes don't make it long] but I'm not going to "Extraordinary Measures" if she's going down the drain, either.

By bedtime, Little Miss Creepy Crawlie had a new construction up ... AWAY from the porch steps, but firmly fixed to the railing. She's a smart girl; any moth-like buggies flying toward the porch light would prolly end up as dinner ... Spidery Strategery!!!

I'm so glad she wasn't home when I walked thru her house; she's about 2' long a 3/4" wide all cuddled up in the center of her silvery net [6cm x 2cm for those metrically inclined]

My grandmom used to tell me that if you kill a spider, it will bring rain. As much as we need it, I wouldn’t want to CRUNCH this little girl.

As luck would have it, we DID get a shower last night at about 2:30AM; but with the nightmare our little web-weaver induced in me, I bailed on my run this morning to make up for the sleep I missed.

When I got up to start my day, I took a peek to see if she'd survived the rainstorm.

The web was there, but she was not home.

Again, all that worrying was for nothing.