Weekend, part 2: Bloomin' Metric

On Sunday, Kevin and I drove down to Norwalk to participate in a bike tour called the Bloomin' Metric (it's kind of making me cringe to type that apostrophe instead of a g, but I'll persevere). Unlike a race, this was (theoretically) non-competitive. It wasn't timed, and there wasn't an official start time, although I'm sure there were groups of people racing with each other, and many people trying to beat their times from previous years.

Kevin and I had much simpler goals: avoid disaster. We tried to do this ride last year, but less than 20 miles in, Kevin went around a corner too fast, slipped on some wet pavement, and flew off the road. Amazingly, he missed a sign and landed in the grass just short of a stone wall, so he was basically fine but a little bit bruised and scraped up. His bike, on the other hand, was only semi-rideable--he ended up needing to replace his front wheel. However, we were determined (and we'd forgotten to bring a cell phone, so we couldn't call the race organizers for a ride... although someone probably would have loaned us a phone if we'd thought of asking), so we figured out the shortest way back to the beginning of the race, and rode back that way.

This time, we both stayed on our bikes, I managed to detach my feet when I wanted to and keep them in when I didn't, and we did the whole thing (there are 3 possible distances: 25 miles, 75K/about 46 miles, and 100K/about 62 miles--we picked the 100K course). It turned out to be much hillier than I expected, and a million people passed us going up hill, but it was mostly fun.

We started early, when it was still cloudy and raining on and off, so once the day warmed up we had a lot of extra clothes. It's better to have extra clothes to take off than to be freezing the whole way, but we do need to figure out the whole clothes thing a little better. We're good at dressing to run in different temperatures, but you're going so much faster on a bike that it seems like you'd get cold from the wind and we tend to over-bundle. And I still barely believe that I run enough to justify running clothes, so it'll be years before I accept that I'd really use biking clothes (at least I accepted right away that gel bike shorts were a necessity). And as I mentioned, several things (twigs? nuts? rocks dropped by squirrels? small flying saucers?) hit me in the face.

I knit a tiny bit as we waited in line to check in and pick up our maps, and in the car there and back, to make up for missing SnB.