I met Mike at Life Cycle at 11:45 this morning for a ride. We planned on doing an easy 130 miles up the mountain on row river road again, this time with the hope that the single lane road would be clear of snow and trees. We didn’t have the chance to find out though, because I felt like crap. We got about 2 miles to the place we reached a few weeks ago, stopped and dunked our heads in the river, and headed back down.
I’ve been riding the last four days, but just easy. Yesterday I rode 3.5 hours and began to bonk (my first bonk of the year). My lungs were still a bit phlegmy and I had very little energy during the ride, just like today. Mike ended up pulling me through the headwind most of the way back home to Eugene today after we turned back down the mountain. I’m hoping that by next week I’ll be feeling like usual. I’ll leave you with a little story about our ride:
During one of our stops at the Row River Road convenient store (east of cottage grove out in the boonies), Mike and I had a little cultural experience that left us both slightly disturbed. We were standing outside the convenient store sipping our first gallon of Squirt for the day and eating popsicles, when we noticed a bit of commotion coming out of the front of the store. A very rambunctious and raggedy-looking women in her 40’s came bursting through the door, laughing and yelling obscenities at her friend. Her toothless upper jaw and jagged lower front teeth gleaming in the searing sun. Actually they weren’t gleaming, they were yellow and brown. But anyways, she stumbled past us and threw a package of hamburger meat at a parked car. The meat hit the windshield and the woman burst into more crazy person laughter. The guy she was with just shook his head as they both made their way to the rusty car she had thrown the meat at–which was their car. As she walked past Mike and I, she commented about us being too uptight. Before we had time to say anything, she said, in a drunken drugged-out drawl, that our “muscly legs were making her wet.” She climbed into the back seat of the old beater, laughing and yelling like a mad-woman. Her friend got in the driver’s seat after retrieving the meat from the windshield and they drove off as Mike and I stared, jaws slightly dropped. Mike put the experience in perspective a few minutes later, shedding light on the good side of what just happened. “Well if we can’t turn on a berserk hill billy meth addict, then there’s not much hope for us at all.” Point taken Mike. Point well taken.
KENNETT PETERSON 