No, this is not a post about marital infidelity in the last 100 years. It is a recap of the bike ride I participated in two weekends ago.
As you know, I have been training for a 100+K bike ride for a while now and last weekend was D-day! They Boyfriend drove me and my bike to the start of the bike ride. The weather was cool, which was good, and the forecast had sad rain, which was not good.
Anyway, after registration I was soon off on my 115k bike ride! The Boyfriend would drive somewhere so we could meet after about 25k. Before you read on I must warn you that the pictures are hilarious. The Boyfriend is very good at snapping pictures from such an angle that I look totally weird. And I guess the helmet didn’t really help either.
The course was very beautiful and luckily there wasn’t too much wind. We cruised through fields, some villages, the forest, up and down hills.
First meet-up with the Boyfriend I almost passed him. He was parked somewhere and I was going downhill (finally!) and there was lots of water on the road because it had just rained. Luckily, I missed that rain!
Then, we looped back to the city we started for the first official rest stop. However, I got lost… I was just following the signs and at a certain point I thought, hey, I think I have been here already… But I didn’t thing much of it, because we the course crossed other parts of the course all the time. But then I came to a turn I really recognized and I was not gonna go there again! There were more people with the same problem, so we decided to ride the course backwards for a while. Then we came to a crossroad and I had the choice of going uphill, further backwards on the course or….just follow the road sign indicating that the village I was supposed to go was 14k the other way. I decided to do that because the first official stop was supposed to be at 50k and I would already pass that. So, I cycled a bit and somehow ended up on the course again! The other (faster) bikers, who did go further back on the course, caught up with me later. So I was very glad that I did not make all those extra miles.
Just before I came to the rest stop we had a downpour. The water was leaking into my socks and it was freaking cold!! The sound of the drops falling on the helmet was cozy though… :P
Here I am at the rest stop. You can see that my sleeves (cotton shirt that I wore underneath) were totally soaked, brrrr!!
I put on my jacket and off I went again. After about 10k I met the man with the hammer while going up a mean hill in the forest. But, I kicked him in the butt and moved on. I did silently wonder when he would come back though…
He came back about 5k later. I was exhausted, thinking we would finally arrive at my hometown soon for the next rest, when the course said I was supposed to go down a street and from there up another one I knew was pretty steep, leading up to a spot just a couple of 100 meters from where I was then. I figured that after my little detour I deserved to cut off a few, so I skipped the hill (one of the toughest on the course).
I met with the Boyfriend and was seriously considering turning around and going home…
to be continued….
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