Bigun Lonely...

Mrs. Bigun's been gone to see her family up in North Cakalakie - been gone since Monday. At first it wasn't too bad, but I'm ready for her to be back home. Since I got out of the Army, I don't think we've spent even this much time apart - and that's been darn close to 10 years now. Bigun misses Lady Di.

Our pets miss her too - I don't think they know wassup, just me around feeding them and taking them out. I'm sure Di loves on them more than me - so they must be in Di-withdrawal too. We expect her home on Sunday - but it will probably be late Sunday, so the Bigun's got to go one more whole day with the empty house and no Mrs. B. Darn.

I thought it was going to be a cool day - get in a really hard bike and then finish up some work from the week. We had some early rain days, and it's just not easy to cut in the rain - or safe! Yesterday we had 3 people in the Tampa Bay area get struck by lightning.

I met up with Mike (Slowrider) and a couple of his friends, one had just come back from the Death Ride in California - sounds like the ride was aptly named - 16,000 feet of climbing in 120 miles....anyway - we were slated to be wheels up at 7:30am and all was well. These guys are little and light. Good climbers. And do you believe, after a few hills that I had to fly to catch back up to them after, they had the nerve to want me to pull on the flats?!?!?! I did of course, but a break would have been nice. I just couldn't show weakness or pain or suffering - they may not have invited me back!

So it's one hill after another, as you can see from the Garmin Chart - it really never lets up (I would guess that the "flats" I was referring to were around mile 12 or so..?..). I'm chasing them up a particularly nasty hill and I'm losing sight of them, so I stand in the saddle and "ping" - I can hear the back spokes making all kinds' of noise - but that's pretty regular in the hills - except this time I can hear the rear brake rubbing hard as the wheel goes around. I look back and see my back wheel is ALL out of true. Kinda scary when your miles away from nowhere. I got to the top and stopped to check it out, and still didn't notice that the spoke had broken. I opened up the rear brake all the way (fun in these hills) and hope the guys waited for me.

Luckily they had - about a mile up the road they were pulled over. Mike spotted the broken spoke right away..."so that's what happened". We couldn't pull it out, so we wrapped it around the adjacent spoke, and they were goading me on to continue with them - the plan was for 70 miles. I just couldn't see pushing hard up another hill and making it worse, so I opted for the parking lot - just didn't realize I still had a long way to go on my own. The difference was, on my own, I could take my time and not drive the rear wheel with a lot of power - which I did, and made it back with all of my fingers and toes in tact. At an average pace of 16mph, well, I really took my my time coming back - we were right at 18.5mph average when the spoke broke, and those guys showed no signs of letting up.

That's about as much hill climbing as I get in with my 82 mile Suncoast ride - which I can now painfully tell is not enough climbing. I need to re-do my training schedule and hook up with this crew every Saturday morning. Mike says that when the group is bigger, they really go after it - um...what was that today then?