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6:12am, sunny and 27°

Woke up at 5:30am. Checked the weather on my PDA… 27 and sunny. Ugh. If I didn’t ride now, I might not until Sunday, so I faught the aches and climbed out of bed. On the road by 6:12 after layering up with two sets of tights, an undershirt, two long sleeve jerseys, jacket, gloves and 4 heat packs. This kept me warm for nearly the entire ride–only the thumbs hurt briefly and toes started to chill around 1:30 in.

Saw two roadies cross King Rd on Ruggles just ahead of me. Briefly thought of catching them, then decided to stick to my own pace. Ruggles, as John had previously told me, is under construction. Yay! Fresh pavement.

Paused next to a pond on King road and watched some redwing blackbirds hopping from cattail to cattail. Ate a Luna Bar. That felt good like picking a warm penny up off the pavement.

Heading north on West River road, the sun was dazzling off the river blinding me on the right. Heading south on Foltsville road, the dappled sun streaming through the trees like a strobe light and blinded me on the left.

I didn’t start to feel comfortable and strong until the last 15 minutes of the two hours. If this is the pattern to follow for my spring and summer morning rides, then I’m going to be disappointed. I’m sure the cold is a significant factor and these first couple of rides are not typical. Plus I’m sore from last night’s two hour softball practice.

Yeah, softball. A team sport. Very unlike me. I thought I’d try something new. I’d played before in, like, you know, gym class in high school. Seems like decades ago. Oh, wait, it was. So far it’s been fun. Our company team is mostly neophytes with only two or three experienced players. Our first game was a loss and we’ll just leave it at that. We have a lot to learn.

Got back home at about 8:20 with nary a minute to spare in getting ready for work. That shower felt great! I would have liked to soak for 15 in the hot tub but my excessively slow pace precluded that particular luxury.

Game Day, April

This game day happened at Lisa’s for the first time. She was a very good host with plenty of gaming snacks and drinks. The day outside (outside, what’s outside? Nothing beyond the game table exists on a game day) was reassuringly dreary and drizzly.

In attendance were Lisa, Andrew, AJ and myself. We started at noon with pizza and Talisman. Half our group was new to Talisman and I was worried the game may take a little longer than usual. My fears slowly came to fruition as the game lasted a little over SIX hours with nary an interruption. But excessive play time doesn’t necessarily mean low quality of gameplay. Au contraire, mon frère! The gameplay was some of the best I’ve enjoyed in my years of playing this game.

Some observations on this Talisman session:

• We had no less than THREE toads
• I believe all four of us attempted an assault on the Dragon’s Tower
• At least two players died and restarted
• Due to an unfortunate slip of the tongue, AJ’s Bag of Carrying became a Bag of Caring. It then promptly morphed into his He-Man Man-Bag until finally, comfortably, settling into the moniker, Love Purse. Our gameplay productivity quotient faltered a little around this point as we reveled in our cleverness.
• I went over four hours without ever carrying a weapon. Once I got a broadsword, Lisa turned up a storm card on the next turn and I immediately lost a life as a penalty for carrying said sword.
• Andrew, while hopping about as a toad, turned over an Adventure card and found a Princess follower. Sadly the princess did not kiss him and undo his toadness.
• AJ monopolized both the Doomsword and the Skullwand. Though I suppose he deserved it after dying mid-game and restarting.
• The gaming gods had their retribution on AJ for the above by blasting ALL 4 or 5 items he was carrying off to the discard pile during his trek up to the Dragon King.
• AJ had terrible luck in the Tavern.
• Lisa had slightly less bad luck in Jail.
• Andrew had difficulty thwarting gravity.
• There were several instances of confusion over special situations. We decided them variously by chance, by similar rules interpretation and by referencing the internet. Note: Morak’s Hammer is a Special Card. I guess after all these years, I still haven’t seen all situations. Here is a short reference.
• We agreed the figurings would look better painted, but that task would be pretty challenging

After Talisman, we tried AJ’s new game Bogus. It’s a trivia/betting game. It’s easy to learn and play, though we had difficulty accumulating more than the two betting chips you start out with.

Andrew had to leave to head back to VT, so we finished the evening with a couple of games of Star Munchkin.

Solo Century

Due to a fortuitous series of events I got Friday, my birthday, off from work. I took the opportunity to attempt my first solo century ride.

It went exceedingly well. South Shore Road on Sacandaga Lake was on my agenda–it was paved this past fall and I have yet to try it out since. I was a little nervous about ranging quite so far unsupported, but my fears were unfounded. No mechanicals plagued me (aside from GPS related problems, but more on that later).

In the past I have been always been hesitant to ride along South Shore Road because of the crappy pavement. North Shore, by comparison is like a freshly laid ribbon of caramel with melt-in-your-mouth riding goodness. This year, both sides of the lake are now up-to-date pavement-wise. Granted there are still some older sections of road, but they are in good shape. I’m a bit of a pavement snob since nearly all the roads within a 15 mile radius of my house are in very good shape. Saratoga County definitely doesn’t skimp on money for the highway department. Locust Grove road was a recent repaving project last year that fixed a seriously poor stretch of road. This is a road on which I constantly see other roadies since it’s a good “connector” that doesn’t have much traffic on it. I guess my last repaving wish would be for Ruggles Road.

I started at 10am and immediately was annoyed by my FlightDeck bike computer. It wasn’t registering any data. Probably the battery, I thought. Turns out, 16.27 miles later I realize, maybe it’s in ’stop’ mode. You know, especially since it was happily registering my speed this whole time. And after pressing the left button, lo and behold it started working. I’m an idiot.

Later on around 65-70 miles or so, my GPS suddenly says “Choose a language.” Huh? I select english with a sense of forboding. Next it says it has to initialize. Ok, that’s not a good sign. This was my 2nd technological mishap. It mysteriously reset itself and lost all my ride data. Luckily I resolved the FlightDeck problem earlier, so all I had to do was add 16.27 miles to my bike computer’s odo to get my total ride distance. (I didn’t plan the route so I couldn’t just complete the ride and know I had 100 miles. It was a ride-’til-the-odo-says-100 course.

Since I lost GPS data for the ride, I don’t have elevation gained data. I’m very interested to see what it was–I’ll have to manually plot the course.

Due to some poor pre-ride preparation, I didn’t closely check on the set of roads just prior to reaching Sacandaga. I ended up zigzagging on a couple of dirt roads before reaching Rt 16. Luckily they were well packed and mostly downhill at that. Those Serfas tires are troopers! I always carry a repair kit and replacement tube. I quite good at repairing a puncture also, freqently not even needing to take the tire off more than a 1/3 of the way to get at the fault. You just never want to have to do a repair. Plus, I don’t carry a pump, just air canisters, and once you’ve used them up, that’s it.

Much of the time on the ride I was just in the zone, unconsiously avoiding those little stones sitting in the shoulder like sentinels waiting for their moment of glory in bringing down a tire. Listening to the birds. Lots of birds out in the morning. Only spotted one hawk, though on Rt 16.

Lately I’ve noticed I mentally count pedal strokes when I come up out of the saddle. I don’t necessarily do anything with this info. The mental odo just starts clicking away and resets itself almost before I even know what the total is. Maybe I’ll start harnessing that mental energy and try to keep track of how I feel in relation to the gradient, number of pedal strokes, gear ratio and heart rate. That’s a lot more processing power my brain needs to put out but it’s probably worth it. At least then I can size up a roller before hitting it and be a little smarter about shifting and effort expended.

This is a course I would definitely do again (at least the first 70 mile loop–the remaining 30 miles were simply around my “neighborhood”). It’s not that it’s on roads I’ve never been on, but it’s a bigger committment that my normal loops. The 20, 30 and 40 milers around my house invariably are arcs that stray no more than, say, 10 miles directly from my house. At any point, I could abort and be home within 30 minutes. Ranging out to Sacandaga forces my out of my comfort zone.

Anthony later e-mailed me about this ride and mentioned “It is kind of interesting, being out there and not talking to anyone for that many hours, isn’t it? Almost meditative and cleansing in a way.” I wholeheartedly concur. Though I was alone for much of my childhood, being an only child and living far from neighbors. I’ve had a lot of practice at being alone and being comfortable with it.

Things I noticed:

• The General Store by the Batcheller bridge in Sacandaga remodeled. It’s quite nice both inside and out. I enjoyed a brief rest on their front porch’s little cafe tables and chairs.
• Shockingly, there were no discarded toilets spotted. This flies in stark contrast to big-ride patterns John, Anthony and I have seen.
• Two ducks casually crossing the road were startled when I silently came upon them.
• The climbing did little to tire me.
• My grey jacket vents remarkably well. Around noon I was heating up a lot with sunny 65-70ish temps.
• The temp dropped at least 5 degrees upon reaching the lake.
• The temp never rose again after leaving the lake. The cold front had moved in with overcast skys.
• Brain-farted in Corinth and couldn’t remember which fork in the Y to take without checking my GPS.
• The Road Rage lube was still working its silent magic on my chain after about 200 miles. ‘Course it was filthy as all get out. But a quiet filthy.
• Red Bull, Snickers, and a bag of salty peanuts made for a tasty lunch at the general store.
• Long rides like this are a gift. I’m lucky to be able to do this for two reasons: I have the time, and I have the ability.