Thursday, March 20, 2008

Chilly but oh-so-nice

My wife is down and out with the early stages of bacterial pneumonia. She stayed home from work last night. I got my bags packed and we got to bed pretty early (10:00 or so) netting me almost a solid 7 hour coma for which to recover from yesterday's adventures. Her new antibiotics seem to be working pretty well.

This morning, I grabbed some breakfast so she could take her next batch of pills, and threw together a batch of Gatorade for the road and a few PB Sammiches to eat once I got downtown. A quick check of the e-mail via my phone showed that no one other than Karen was going to take me up on my convoy. Flipping over to Wunderground Mobile, I saw that conditions were similar to what most people were predicting. 37°F and a south breeze. I threw on the Deflects and Balaclava (for ear and neck cover) then I was off.

Karen's LED headlight glistened over the crest of 79th to the west of Quivira, and I waited for her to roll up, then it was downtown bound: a mostly quiet single-file trip due to the fact that there seemed to be quite a bit of traffic. We parted ways near the brewery, shortly after passing Sidewalk Riding Wrong Way Bike Ninja Guy. It's always the same guy, too. He waved at us this time.

It's odd how you come to recognize things. I see a lot of the same cars when I ride downtown. This is only my 5th ride into downtown this year, but I'm pretty sure all 5 of them, I have seen the black Ford Ranger with its piercing blue-ish fake HID headlights and its large-ish CB antenna. I used to see it almost daily back in the summer. Then there's the silver Mazda 3 with the 2RUNNRS plates. Compared to the evening rush hour ride home, traffic in the morning is almost non-existant, but I do find myself picking out familiar vehicles.

I was almost flawlessly dressed for the sub-40° temps. Under Armour running shirt under a hoodie, and a chamois under cargo pants worked nicely. KC will easily clear 60° this afternoon, so it'll be the running shirt and my MTB shorts on the ride home, I think. I'll also be dealing with (barely) double-digit headwinds. Should make for an interesting ride home.

Random Tunage:
Nirvana - Lithium
Junkie XL - Mushroom

No comments:

Privacy Policy

This site is driven by software that uses third-party cookies from Google (Blogger, AdSense, Feedburner and their associates.) Cookies are small pieces of non-executable data stored by your web browser, often for the purpose of storing preferences or data from previous visits to a site. No individual user is directly tracked by this or any other means, but I do use the aggregate data for statistics purposes.

By leaving a link or e-mail address in my comments (including your blogger profile or website URL), you acknowledge that the published comment and associated links will be available to the public and that they will likely be clicked on.