Knocked out 80 miles today. Eighty. My last long ride before the Rouge-Roubaix bicycle race in St. Francisville, LA in a week. That'll be 106 miles of exquisite effort and some pain with about 20-22 miles of the route on gravel/dirt roads, some of which possess a few hills that'll more than tempt you to get off the bike (if you don't fall over first) and walk. I've done The Rouge three times and I've walked parts of the course each time. Watch the video at the link above and you'll see why.
Anyways, I had a pretty good ride today. Got a little aggressive on some climbs and went thru a couple of dirt sections with a bit of speed. Our ride "leader", Mack (that means he knows the routes better than we do), followed me on a muddy section because I was picking good lines thru the debris and he said he trusted me to lead through. I was chasing Chris but he already had a good lead going into the section, so catching him was going to be a bit hard...however, I didn't have to. I did go after him and Warren a couple of other times when they took off later in the ride and caught them. I'm not going to say I'm ready for The Rouge (I'm not...not enough, anyway) but I hope to make myself proud. It'll be a good workout and maybe I might place well enough in the Masters 50+ to get some points for my team.
Jonnene and I are talking about other improvements we need to do for our house. The kitchen is a high priority but not an immediate one. We're moving our sights to the back yard for now. The gutters that I put up a couple of years ago are going to come down and we'd get new ones put up by professionals. Remove a couple of trees, too, but I need to remove part of the patio bricks and concrete so that the trunk of one of the trees can be ground down after it has been reduced to a stump. Replace the patio surface with new patterned concrete and possible include a deck. Then improve the drainage and get some grass back there. Oh, yeah, and a new storage building would be nice, too. Obviously, we'll do this a bit at a time, in a timely and orderly manner.
Already had some work done on the front of the house last week to replace some rotting fascia boards. The husband of a friend (who is also a graphic designer) is an independent contractor and I hired him to fix it all. He got it done in a day and he did a fine job. I finished painting the new work on Friday after priming the wood and reset one of the corner pillars on the front porch in the meantime.
It's always something.
