Happy Ride

I've been on a lot of group rides this past year. But not everyone is training for an Ironman, so as the rides got longer and stupider I didn't see some of the people as often. And that's not good. So I wanted to do a ride which would just be fun. It would be a chance for people to get together again and just enjoy riding our bikes without worrying about doing an actual "workout". The ride would have absolutely nothing to do with training. I dubbed it the "Anti-Jon Ride", or more colorfully, the "Screw Jon Ride".

How does one host an Anti-Jon Ride? Basically we did everything that my unofficial bike coach would NOT do:

We started relatively late in the morning.
We drove 15 miles further down the bike trail for the start, to avoid anything resembling an incline.
We took a calm, leisurely pace.
We took a long break for snacks in the middle.
We kept the ride short.

Eight people showed up for the ride, and then by coincidence we ran into Rich who is doing Coeur d'Alene with me. But Rich was in the middle of a 112-mile ride when he saw us, so technically he was doing the "Anti-Anti-Jon Ride."

I really enjoyed the ride. I have to ship my bike to Idaho on Friday, so this was my last weekend with my bike. It was nice to just have a calm ride with friends without stressing about my pace or if I was falling behind the group. And people actuallt were able to CHAT while on their bikes. We need to do more of these. And when we got back to our cars, Steve had a Pot-O-Sugar waiting for us.



Oh, and one more thing: Jon is always taking me to task for having too much stuff on my bike. My bike bag is too big. I carry too much stuff in it. It's all excess weight that is just slowing me down. So in a final act of defiance, I did the ride with 5 pounds of weights stuffed in my bag. Ha!



(you know I love ya man!)