I ended up with 115 miles on the bike this week. Considering we had one inch of sleet on the ground here on Monday morning, I’m thinking that’s not bad. And it’s much better than the paltry 65 miles I rode last week.
On Monday and Tuesday, the weather was just colder than I like to ride in. Wednesday was still chilly, but Rose and I took off on the Screamer tandem in the afternoon and rode to Purtis Creek. We picked up a piece of steel wire remnant from an automobile tire in our front tire on the way back, and had to stop a couple of times and air it up, but managed to get home before I had to take the time to fix it. We ended up with 25.2 miles.
On Thursday afternoon, I rode the Xstream to Purtis Creek for another 25.2 miles. It was still cool enough for me to appreciate the Xstream’s fairing. On Friday afternoon, I took off on the Corsa and rode to Purtis Creek, intending to ride on into Van Zandt County and do my usual 40 mile route. I instinctively turned toward home when I left Purtis Creek though, and had ridden several miles berfore realizing what I had done. I turned around and rode back for a second stop at Purtis Creek. I ended up with 40 miles. This morning, I did another ride to Purtis Creek on the Xstream, for another 25.2 miles. Rain had been forecast for late morning, but I managed to finish before it started.
My riding style has changed over the years. I’ve done my fair share of club rides, charity pay rides, and randonneuring rides, and most of my blog reports have been on those rides. But I’ve also done lots of shorter rides from home, including three years of commuting to work by bike. Most of those rides didn’t seem worthy of a blog post, so unless something out of the ordinary happened on a ride, I didn’t blog about any of them.
But, since moving to Gun Barrel City, the vast majority of my rides seem to be just short rides from home, so my blog has grown pretty quiet. I’m thinking that I’ll start trying to do weekly blog entries, summing up that week’s riding. Surely, a weeks worth of riding is worthy of a blog entry. Hopefully, the weather will improve soon, and there will be more weeks of riding over 100 miles, and very few of those 65 mile weeks.