In the movie "Back to School", Rodney Dangerfield's character performs a dive from the 10 meter board he calls the "Triple Lindy". It's a thing of pure athletic beauty, the fans go wild and he wins the dive meet for his school.
Today, the ABB riders performed a similar feat by completing our third century ride in as many days- something this old boy has never done. Now, gentle readers, get this- tomorrow we have a ride scheduled for 92 miles. With the least little detour- and we've had those every day this week- we could rack up our fourth back to back century ride. You people who ride single centuries and metric centuries amuse me. Now get out of here.
Today's ride was incredible on so many levels. I could fill pages (and put you to sleep, I'm sure), but to summarize: wonderful weather again (blue skies, 70's, no humidity) except for a headwind throughout much of the day, a bike trail for 20 miles that was shaded, smooth and mostly flat, an encounter with a rattlesnake on that trail which two of our riders ran over, a
one mile climb that ran 10-12% and featured a 20-30 MPH headwind the entire length, a bridge that took us over the Mississippi River and into our sixth state- Wisconsin and beautiful country roads through the Minnesota Bluffs country.We rolled kinda late today- some time after 7:00AM I'd guess. The group was large (Millers, Gary, Max and Mark), as we zigged and zagged our way out of Rochester and onto various two lane county roads. Road surfaces were better than what we'd been experiencing, but we quickly found that the flat terrain was yielding to serious rollers. Many of these rollers were long and had faces that were 7-8%, so we began accumulating some vertical feet in excess of anything we'd seen since Mt. Rushmore- somewhere around 3,500-4,000 feet by day's end. By mid day we were really into some beautiful country-
I saw it referred to as "Bluff Country" in one town- with lush green hill sides and very fertile valleys. Still a lot of corn being grown, but at least there was some relief from the laser leveled flatness of western Minnesota. We also gave thanks to the little baby Jesus for delivering us from the gaggingly evil odors of the hog farms or whatever the hell they had going on for the last two hundred miles. That stuff ain't funny. Smells so bad it hurts to breath it in.
One of our riders (he goes by Badger Bill in these here parts) had a visit from his wife yesterday and as a treat for the riders she brought three monstrous boxes of donuts, from a small, family owned bakery in Eau Claire, WI. These things were fantastic. I cannot describe how good they were. we had them after dinner, for breakfast and at two sags today. God almighty they were tasty. Thank you Mrs. Badger Bill- you're a good person.
Ride stats: I've now ridden nearly 2,400 miles (about 75% of the total). In the last four days I've ridden about 380 miles, an average of 95 miles per day. I have ten days of riding and about 800 miles remaining- it's going fast.
I'd like to write about the climb, the bike path and the rattlesnake, but it's getting late. Maybe I'll fill in the blanks on those gems later. For now- it's lights out.
