3,000+

I managed to do it. After putting in over 62 miles in two separate rides today, I have achieved my early-year goal of getting 3,000 miles on the bike in the first six months of the year! Now this is not a lot compared to some of the guys I ride with who do a lot of heavy training miles (I'll bet some already have 5,000+) but I never had this many miles by the end of June EVER. Even when I was racing a lot back in the late 90's and early this century...I got most of my miles in late spring and all summer. Yeah, big accomplishment.

Tonight's ride at Tuesday Night Worlds was one of my best so far. The speeds were high and I even took a couple of pulls but mostly sat in, with an occasional move toward the front. The main thing was that I didn't get dropped the whole time and things were looking good until Daniel crashed. We were flying toward I-49 from a rough side road and I was sitting mid-pack when Jason attacked from the right side. This opened up a nice gap up the right and I immediately thought about taking advantage of it to move quickly to the front. Well, there were about 3-4 other people thinking the same thing and they were closer to it so they made the move...I stayed where I was and let them have it. That jammed up the right side and Daniel (who had done a Half-Ironman Triathlon just three days earlier in Texas) bumped the back of Mary's bike and dropped off the edge of the road into a rough patch with gravel. His wheels slid back to the left, kicking up gravel into the road and down he went into the ditch on his right side. I was never in any danger of getting caught up in all that although I did have a ringside seat to the whole thing. As the group slowed I yelled out to everyone to ride straight and not turn their heads to see behind them or we'd have another crash due to stupidity. As it turned out, Daniel was fine though scratched up a bit and was shaken up enough to want to throw up (he didn't). All but four of us went on, including his wife because he told her to go ahead and keep riding. Jason, Jeffrey, Tony, and I stayed back with Daniel and rode back in with him. After a few miles he was back to riding normal and we were speeding down the road again. He wasn't looking forward to washing/scrubbing the road rash on his arm in the shower tonight!