Saturday was another weird ride. I had high hopes for riding with my entire group, but the coach sent out a confusing email that had some people going to one starting location and others to a different, but nearby location. Basically, he combined the name of one location with the address of another. I input the address into my GPS, which is how I ended up at the main location. But other people looked up the name of the parking area sent out in the coach’s email and ended up a few blocks away. It all worked out and no participants were left without any support, but I have yet to ride with my whole group. And we’re getting close to the end of training season!
Fortunately, we all had a good ride. I took two participants who went to the other location and my ride group coach took the two that showed up at the intended starting point.
I also left home without charging my bike GPS unit. Normally, I charge it after every ride and it maintains its charge until the next week. But somehow, this time, it was left on. So it discharged during the week and when I turned it on, it only had 1% charge left. DOH! It’s not a huge deal, but I’m doing a virtual “run to Mexico” where some friends of mine are all keeping track of our running, riding and swimming mileage for the year to see how far into Mexico we can go. It’s a fun way to motivate yourself to exercise, but I need my GPS to track that data! So, I had to download the a GPS app and get that started before I could ride off. Grrr, it’s frustrating, but not the end of the world. Even though the ride lasted almost eight hours, I ended up recording the whole thing with about 20% battery left. Thank you, Apple and Strava, for doing your homework on this phone and app!
Speaking of the end of the world, literally, one of my participants is a hospice nurse and she lost one of her patients this week. As if that weren’t bad enough, another participant — and honoree, nonetheless! — lost his mother, too. So, there was a pall cast over this ride. But everyone finished in good shape, so there’s that.
We also had a coach go down with a strange stomach infection this week. He is fine now that they know what is wrong, but he must concentrate on getting well again so he is not going to finish the season. The head coach can ride with his team, so those participants will be properly supervised.
With only five weeks go to until Solvang, I hope we are done with these kinds of events. We need to focus on our core mission: reaching our fundraising goal and training for a century!
