It gets better unless you don’t have any brakes descending 84, but we’ll get to that in a minute. Not such a bad morning to ride. Wet roads but it wasn’t raining, and the temps weren’t too bad (lowest was 42 I think?). I’d gotten a text message from older Kevin saying he was heading up the hill “early” and couldn’t quite figure out what that meant. But one thing the other Kevin and I did know… we weren’t feeling like we’d be in chase mode trying to catch someone who started out ahead of us!

Yes, it was a really slow pace up the hill. Actually slower at the start I think; I finally found my legs maybe 2/3rds of the way up Kings. But not before I considered turning back a couple times. Just did not seem like climbing Kings was what I wanted to do. Which, of course, is exactly why I needed to do it. Just past that 2/3rds point, older Kevin was riding back down Kings towards us. Thankfully, he wasn’t feeling any faster!

OK, the brakes. On younger Kevin’s bike, he hadn’t bothered to check the adjustment on his disc brakes, and by the final descent, he was squeezing both levers all the way to the bar and just barely able to keep his speed down. But just barely was good enough to get to the bottom where we stopped and I readjusted them to compensate for wear, and all was good.

We were determined to do the full regular ride this morning, although I was beginning to wonder if that would happen as Kevin began complaining about his knee shortly after leaving the house, as we rode over Jefferson to the start of the Tuesday/Thursday-morning ride. Like Tuesday it was foggy; unlike Tuesday, it was also wet. Wet enough that we rode quite gingerly through the infamous corner where I slid out on black ice last February and cracked my pelvis in two places.

Who else rode with Kevin and I? That would be… nobody. We saw no other cyclists coming back from the “morning” ride, and only a couple heading down Kings as we were riding up. On the positive side, we noted that we were not passed by a single car the entire way up the hill. We are truly blessed by how little traffic we see when we ride. And we gave the cars plenty of time to find us too! I don’t even remember the time but it was probably around 34 minutes, and it was not feeling like it was particularly easy. But as the ride went, there were increasing opportunities to test my legs and discover they’d respond. The slight descent from Skyline down to West Old LaHonda on 84? I was able to go to the front and push it reasonably hard most of the way.

It was on West Old LaHonda where we came across not one but two small rattlesnakes, dead on the road. Both had likely been dropped by birds, as they had the characteristic puncture wounds (you can see that in the photo above). Thankfully it wasn’t an omen; our ride continued without incident.

I think I’m stronger than I actually feel right now; it just takes me forever to get warmed up. At least, that’s what I want to believe. In a couple weeks I’ll find out if there’s more to the story, when I go back for another blood test to see if my hematocrit level is still declining. If so, I’ll be making some adjustments to my medication, reducing it a bit in hopes that I can get my hematocrit back up to a reasonable level while maintaining a sale number of platelets at the same time.