Just a few degrees warmer this morning but I’ll take what I can get. Seems like it got cold really fast this year (I’m sure I had a ride without leg warmers just a couple weeks ago!), but I don’t recall it ever warming up very quickly as we exit winter. Doesn’t seem fair.
Quite a few on the ride this morning, but not Kevin. When I woke him up at 6:55am, he just kinda moaned and gave me that “Dad, no” bit, claiming not to have slept well the night before. Whatever. Tough enough fighting myself when it’s cold, so I gave up on him in less than a minute. The other Kevin was there, and George, and Marcus, and Karen, and Karl, and JR, and Jan. Maybe somebody else I’m not thinking of, not sure. Chris! OK, think that’s everyone.
Started up Kings pretty easy but before the halfway point somebody got moving, then everybody got moving, except me. Well, I was moving, but in the wrong direction relative to the rest. Hate that, but there’s something about thermal tights and three layers of clothing in general plus glove liners and split-finger gloves and my breathing being worse when it’s cold… you add it all up and I felt lucky to get under 30 minutes up the hill!
But once up on top I felt better, and heading down the back side of 84, towards West Old LaHonda, I even got into chasing down Kevin & Chris, whom we’d spotted way too much of a lead. It should have been a one-minute chase but went a bit longer, which was a problem because I can handle one minute of hard effort, but not much more! But one minute, 45 seconds later and I had them. Not that I didn’t feel like giving up about 30 seconds earlier, but I noticed I was still gaining, even though I’d seemed to run out of gas. So you just keep on going. Because that’s what you do. You have to redeem yourself after that sluggish climb up the hill.
Temps ran from a low of 25 to a high of 36. Strange thing about that. 36 would normally seem darned cold, but by the end of the ride, it felt really, really nice. As usual, by the end of the ride, you’re really glad you did it.
