70th ride

Yesterday I took another day off—the second one this week, for crying out loud! I got off work way early, and thought about doing a long ride, but then realized it was perfect pool weather (warm and brilliantly sunny), and the ride would really be better done late afternoon or evening. So I headed for the pool, fully intending that. But then, when I picked Michelle up from school, she said she and a colleague were going to Red Robin, and wondered if I'd like to join them. I decided to go with the flow, hoping (foolishly, as it turns out) that I might be able to ride afterwards. But, instead, I was wiped out, ahd the book in which I was immersed (Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol) was calling me, so I read on our patio until it was getting too dark to read, and then came inside and finished it up.

Accordingly, today I was eager to get back to riding, and I rode to work in the morning, and after work, lengthened my ride considerably, to go by our credit union, in the far northwest part of town, and then to church to do my weekly work of creating Sunday's projections, before heading home. This made for a ride of 15.9 miles, which, with the morning's ride to work, gave me 18.1 miles in 1:45.

On the way home, though, I had to deal with a mishap. At the east end of Scio Church Road, where it intersects with South Main Street, you have to make a 90° turn to the right and immediately begin ascending a relatively daunting uphill grade. I thought I'd try it without slowing down too much and thus losing momentum. BIG mistake (as Julia Roberts' character says to the sales clerk in the movie Pretty Woman). I was unable to negotiate the corner, and ended up flying off the bike. Fortunately I landed in the grass, and was not seriously injured. A couple of Good Samaritans stopped to be sure I was OK, and I was grateful for that. But the solicitude with which they asked me, "Are you OK, sir?" made me feel virtually elderly! And they were not youth, either—both the woman and the man were north of 40 years old, I'm sure.

Though I was not seriously injured, I did scrape up my right elbow quite impressively, and also jammed my left thumb into the ground. I was able to get home OK, as it's only about 3 miles from the place where I fell. But the thumb has now stiffened up quite a bit, and I've typed much of this with an ice pack on it. This concerns me slightly for my plans to ride another Chelsea round trip in the morning (my second of three consecutive Saturdays I intend to do as a warmup to the nearly 50-mile ride to Mom's I want to do on June 29), but at this point I don't see it as jeopardizing my plans.