My Legs Hurt

 

Cold Front Moving In

13 February 2022

Unlike an increasing number of the Slugs I ride with, I am not retired. We've had a winter of weekend weather that has kept us, for the most part, indoors. Since January 1, I'd been on all of three bike rides, two of them on trails. 

The rest of the time I've been rolling out of bed before sunrise three times per week, feeding the cats, downing half a cup of milk with a splash of coffee in it, and hitting the home gym -- weights, and Gonzo on a smart trainer -- before work. On weekends, at least, I get a full breakfast before I get on the stationary bike for a longer ride.

While many Free Wheelers are devotees of Zwift, I opted for Rouvy because it lets me upload videos of rides I've done. Unlike Zwift, Rouvy uses real video that they or we users have created. This winter I've visited the Dolomites, explored Israel, seen Majorca, and have gone back to Acadia National Park to climb Cadillac Mountain over and over and over again.

One would think that a month of indoor training would prepare one's legs for a 52-mile hilly ride on a 52-degree unseasonal Saturday.

One would be wrong.

Five slugs were with me: Plain Jim, Rickety (who was hanging out around the corner from my house, having come from Twin Pines, when I found him on my way to Twin Pines), Martin, Racer Pete, and Heddy. 

To hear Jim tell it, we were all climbing well for having had so much time off.

We were chatty, which helped distract from the shock of being on the road. As we made our way up Stony Brook, Martin updated me on his Scudder Falls pedestrian bridge crossing contest with some dude whose nom de Strava is something like Towpath Guy. The two were neck and neck for a while, each one making the out-and-back passage once every 24 hours. But then things got out of hand, and now they're playing Calvinball.

By the time we got to the top of Stony Brook, my legs were already complaining, and my back was telling me that my hamstrings were tight. 

Still, we soldiered on, because it's only February, and we're not likely to see another day like this until late March (but who knows what normal is anymore anyway).

It helped not at all that the wind was strong out of the west, gusting at 20-something miles per hour. 

When we reached the top of Mount Airy, all of us but Racer Pete stopped to look at the cows. What we had in our line of sight was a herd of muddy bovine butt.

We got spread out on the Mount Airy-Sandy Ridge Road climb, and gathered at the cemetery to recollect ourselves. When I stretch my back, I straddle my bike and arch my back, looking up to the sky. Tomorrow's cold front was making its way in.

We were headed for Sergeantsville. I like the old general store as much as the new bagel place, but murmurings from the crowd led me to turn into the latter. It doesn't have the charm and variety of the general store, but the bathroom is cleaner, and not up a narrow flight of twisting stairs. 

A larger group of riders from Central Bucks coasted in from up the hill, and there was a modicum of mingling.

For our return trip, I stuck with Rosemont-Ringoes Road, which is curving, open, rolling, and with a tailwind. We had the wind to push us across Wertsville, too.

We took Losey, Rocktown, and Linvale to the top of the Sourland Mountain. On the other side, I offered a less hilly detour that would have added a handful of miles, but the crew chose to face those two annoying hills on Marshalls Corner-Woodsville Road instead. Where the big hill is, the road faces southeast, so the wind helped us there too.

Back in Hopewell, I stayed on Moores Mill-Mount Rose to soak up some more tailwind, and then we turned east again on Old Mill. We had to do battle with the wind on Blackwell, but then it pushed us back to Twin Pines. 

As is my habit, I hung out in the parking lot, talking and resting, before the 3.5-mile ride back home, which is mostly downhill and, this time, mostly tailwind.

I was a hurtin' puppy for the rest of the afternoon. 

Sunday's forecast had, in the space of a few days, gone from just cold, to cold with a little snow, to a storm that would drop wet snow on us from midnight through to the afternoon. 

We woke up on Sunday to a couple of inches of gloppy snow that was still coming down. Jim canceled his ride. That was fine with me. Rouvy and I had some unfinished business on Acadia's Park Loop Road.