Weekend Riding, part 2

(If you haven't done so, I would love it if you would read part 1 first. Please & thank you.)

So the plan for the next day, Saturday, was a ~44 mile ride with Husband.  I figured if I could survive 64 miles spread over two days back-to-back, I might just be able to do it all in one shot next weekend.

What I hadn't mentioned is that Husband had been out of the country for the past few weeks.  He just got home Friday afternoon. As it turns out, he wasn't feeling up for the ride Saturday morning.  We needed to postpone until Sunday.

While postponing certainly wasn't the end of the world, it brought with it a few challenges.  First, without splitting the ride across two days back-to-back, my confidence on doing the full metric century the next weekend was dwindling. Second, the route we intended to ride intersects with the DCM, which was occurring Sunday. I did some math, and figured if we left our house at 11am, by the time we got to the DCM area, most of the marathon runners would have cleared the course.

I didn't get very many photos from the first half of the ride.  I was right about the marathoners clearing the course.  But I had forgotten about the half marathon which started later!  For about 4 miles, we were sharing the trail with way more runners than I had hoped.  But we made it through that without incident.

Here are some photos from the ride:

Took a break under this tree

Mid-point stop: south of the city by a junkyard.  Yes, someone had tagged the bench. Niiiice. 

Coming back north.  If I'm riding alone, I don't go south of this point.  See photo above to understand.

I thought it was interesting that some of these trees had dropped their leaves already

Less than 5 miles from home and Husband gets a flat.  Perhaps I should have waited at the winery?

And for the record, I pulled two thorns out of my front tire while Husband was fixing his flat.  No big surprise, but this morning, my front tire is flat.

So while I did make it through the 44 mile ride, it was not easy.  My shoulder was bothering me before we started, and unfortunately it got progressively worse as we were riding. Not good.

I'm not sure what we are going to do next weekend, but there is a good chance we will plan to cut the ride short.  Disappointing, given that my original goals for the ride were simply "don't quit and don't hate the bike when it's over."  Guess if we have to choose one over the other, "don't had the bike when it's over" is going to win.