Triple Digits

They say that some like it hot, well, that is not me. Summer is again here with a vengance, as it was over 100 degrees here yesterday and it feels like the temperature is headed that way again. And, hey I am the fool out there riding in this weather.

Yesterday was the Indiana State Road Race Champioships up in Indianapolis. I had to get up really early to make it there for the 8:15. This is a race that I was going to do earlier in the summer, but it had been rained out (actually stormed out) back in June. I was racing in the 4/5 field, so I felt that I should be pretty competitive in the race. Unfortunately the course did not really favor my strengths, nor did it favor breakaways, as the field of around 75 racers stayed together for the entire length of the race (42 miles). There was one little hill on the course at around 1 mile to go to the finish, and at the top of that hill on the last lap, I tried to shift down into a harder gear and my rear derailuer did not shift, so I kept trying to shift again and again. Well, it took my a minute to figure out that my derailuer cable had snapped (at first I thought that my shifter had bit the dust, but lucky that was not the case). The problem was that this left me with only one gear for the final sprint, my hardest gear. It might seem that this is the gear that I would want to use in a sprint, and yes it is, but only for one last burst of speed, I needed my other gears to build up to speed, instead of trying to grind out the 600 yard sprint to the finish from my 53/12 gear. I still did better than I thought I was going to, and was actually moving up into the top 15 or so with 100 meters to go, but then people started to catch me and I finished the race in 34th place, so who knows what it would have been if I had been able to use all my gears. But while that was disappointing, honestly, it did not bother me all that much.

This morning, Kate was going over to her parents to work on her costume for the Anime convention, so I took the opportunity to get in a long ride. There is a club ride that leaves from Silver Creek High School up in Sellersburg on Sunday mornings that has a 50 mile l00p, so with the mileage of riding up there, the ride would be around 68 miles for me, a pretty good distance.

When I got up there, a couple of my teammates were there also, so I knew that it would be a pretty quick ride. In the end, one of my teammates split off from the ride pretty early on, so there were just two of us to finish the ride. The ride heads north from Sellersburg, up in Scott County. Most of the scenery is classic southern Indiana, meaning rolling farm land, a few small villages, old homes, and scrub forests. We hammered the first part of the ride, and then took it easier when we turned into the wind at around 25 miles. The house in the picture is a little stone house that I have passed several times on rides and I always like it. It looks like something out of the Black Forest in Germany.

We did cut the ride short as we were tired of riding into the wind, and so the ride today ended up being 101Km or around 63 miles.