With Charity out of town and one of my biking buddies still hurting from running over a full grown pit-bull on our ride last week, I needed to find a new peleton to ride with today. I chose poorly, out of necessity.
I got a taste today of what those triathletes that I have ridden with a couple of times must have felt like riding with me. Seth has been asking to go for a bike ride, and talking trash about being able to ride for "a whole hour." So I thought, "It's Sunday and I need the exercise, let's go." Both boys promptly (I only say that because it is so incredibly unusual) got their "biking jerseys" on, filled up water bottles and they Seth asked if I was going to ride my red bike (I only have one bike) to which I instinctively replied, "No, I'm going to ride my purple bike." "You don't have a purple bike!" "Then what bike should I ride?" "Your red bike." I dropped it at that point, without having been able to make my point!
It was like trying to stay with the tortoise and the hare (who only has 3 feet) while in a F-16. I dropped to my lowest gear and still could hardly keep moving enough to stay up. About 3/4 of a mile through the neighborhood, Seth announced that we should ride to Mr. Anthony's house (about 5 miles away). It seemed unlikely, but actually do-able and we had no on-coming traffic when we got to the one major road we had to cross, so we headed that direction.
At this point I need to tell you that on the last bike ride I took with these two, they got 3 miles from the house and decided that they were tired and couldn't go any further--that only took an hour, assisted by 2-3 "pee-stops" and 14000 "water breaks."
Remembering that I had them unload bladders before setting off and we were moving at a "reasonable" pace. As I waited up for "turtle-boy" and tried to keep his enthusiastic younger brother in sight, I glanced at the odometer and noticed that we had made 3.5 miles in about 25 minutes (about 8 mph average). We were making good time ... until Toby asked, "What time is it?" Without thinking I told him that it was about 1:15....Sunday!
For those of you that may not understand what MAJOR mistake I made, let me try to explain. Sunday is sports TV day and one o'clock is the one time during the week that there is almost always something on that his mother is willing to allow him to watch!
Well, his response was, "I think we should turn around and go back now!" Surprisingly, his brother agreed. As is often the case with biking, when we turned around there was a mighty fine head wind, but Toby was not to be deterred and off he went as Seth decided that his legs were tired and he couldn't bike any more.
To make a long and painful story a little shorter, we made it home safely covering 7.75 miles in 1 hour 4 minutes (of actually biking--it was about 1.5 hours with all the water breaks!) and averaged 7.2 mph. Not quite the average I am used to, but about twice the workout!
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