45 miles + 25mph wind = 105 miles to me

...okay just kidding, it's not even close to comparable especially when the guys from the team that did do 105 miles on saturday ALSO rode it in 20+ mph wind which = ridonkulous in my book. (for those that may be confused "ridonkulous" is a really fun new way of saying ridiculous...but it's actually more ridiculous than ridiculous itself...making it fun to say. annnyways, as i said earlier a bunch of the guys went out for a 105 miles on saturday while i took a huge nap and just hung out around the house. i'm actually really glad that i didn't go out with the guys because i'm not sure if i could have made it that far, let alone stay with the pack. i've actually never ridden a century and the farthest i've gone on the road is around 86 miles or so. i've had plenty of chances on organized rides, but it just never felt like the thing to do. this year, i believe is the year of the first century for my legs and myself. i will certainly be blogging about it when the time comes.

our big group ride for sunday kind of got blown apart, like my legs last sunday, and everyone ended up doing other smaller rides which turned out to be okay. a bunch of awesome people go and get coffee at the java cat-5 here in town after church on sunday mornings so crystal and i decided to head down there to have some good conversation. after a while of laughing about off the wall things my friend jed (whose legs did not blow up like mine last week) and his wife renee asked me and crystal if we wanted to go out for a ride. and certainly we did. so we all hopped on our mountain bikes and went for a lovely stroll in the sunshine east on"old old" highway 50, you know, the one that never gets any new asphalt...ever. it's really great on mountain bikes but definitely a death zone for road bikes. tried it once, and shook for nearly two days after incurring all the bumps through my rigid front fork. as i said, it started out being sunny and then that terrible northwest wind blew in some clouds and the temperature decided to drop about 10 degrees and the wind chill probably 15 or more. we were adequately dressed except without booties so my left foot is still trying to recover from the numbness. crystal and renee took a different route about half way through the ride and jed and i continued on to lebo. when we got there we were glad that we hadn't decided to go farther because the head wind all the way back to emporia was vicious. jed can climb with the best of them, so i was just hoping that i wasn't holding him back at all but we had a great ride back, regardless of the numbness in our extremities.

also (this is for lelan) this past week i hit the trainer for an hour ride on wednesday, went for a 40 mile crush fest with matt and wiggins and then did the ride yesterday with jed. i think it's a step in the right direction for training for ouachita. i just want to be much more prepared this year and try to finish stronger. i'll let everyone know how the next suffer fest turns out, try and keep warm this week because it's only supposed to top out around the 40's. but all that REALLY means is that you should drink hot chocolate and eat popcorn every night to keep warm.
-bobby