The Longest Ride

There was a race yesterday near Middleton that allowed day-of registration.  I seriously considered showing up & entering it, but decided against it since I hadn't done any speed training since the Broome Time Trial.  I also hadn't done any long rides in a while so I figured that I should do that.  Plus I had other business to take care of in Boise - a tire wore out a bit sooner than I'd have liked (~800 miles) so I wanted to take it back & see if I could get a bit of a discount on a replacement.  

So I rode from home to the site of the race - one of the many subdivisions in the area that had begun construction right as the housing market tanked and now grow weeds but have beautifully smooth pavement.  On the way I stopped at a little park to pee and ended up spending twenty minutes or so reading about the Ward Massacre.  Until this point I was ignorant of the fact that the road I rode was originally part of the Oregon Trail; and pretty much right at the spot where I was standing, a small party of emigrants were killed by Shoshone Indians after a trade went south.  Having not grown up in the West, I never learned much Oregon Trail stuff in school; so it was a highlight of the ride, and it was brought about solely by my small bladder.

Got to the race, hung out there for a while, got a small amount of razzing from Tyler for not entering, saw Krisitin Armstrong, ate lunch, and took off for Boise.  I'd never traveled this particular leg of the journey before, so I ended up missing a couple turns and adding a few miles onto the ride.  But I got to Boise and was satisfactorily compensated for my underperforming tire and continued on my way in relatively short order.  By the time I returned home, the ride I'd projected to be 67 miles had turned into a little over 73 miles.  Whew!  And those last six - mostly into the wind - were the least enjoyable of the whole ride.  :)  But that ended up edging out a last year's LeBow ride as the longest ride ever for me.