It had to happen sometime

What a great weekend!!
Weather wise things bounced back from the cruel joke that was played on us on April Fool's.  The sun came out and temps jumped up.  It also happened to be my birthday on Saturday.  And UCONN beat Kentucky to advance to the National Championship.

Saturday Annie and I went for a ride at Wompatuck.  It was a great ride.  We got some nice miles in and took some pictures.  I'll leave the details of this ride to Annie.

When we returned from our ride I discovered that a preride for Winding Trails had been scheduled for Sunday morning.  Oh decisions...  UCONN was playing, Annie made ribs and green beans for my birthday dinner, and there were beers to be enjoyed.  Google maps listed the course at just above 2 hours away... I know that to be on the high side, but a 10am ride time would mean an early morning for me.  This is my first race and I want to be as prepared as I can be so I seriously considered attending.  I jumped on the forum and attempted to post a question as to whether or not another preride would be scheduled in the future.  Apparently my posts have to be approved, and apparently no one approves anything on a Saturday evening, soooo I went to bed not knowing if there would be another opportunity.  My posts never ended up showing up so I messaged the ride organizer to no avail.  In the end Annie convinced me to not go and bank on there being another opportunity.

Since I was unable to preride the course I figured I'd get out and ride at least the distance of the race and check my time versus the results from last year.  I decided to hit Wompatuck again.  I do enjoy that place.  Setting out without a specific route in mind I took off with the mission of just flat out riding for 5 miles.  Not knowing the terrain at Winding Trails made this run a rough (at best) trial to get a sense of where I might be. There were some water crossings and downed trees to negotiate today, but overall I was pretty happy with my end result.  5.13 miles in 33'23''.  Last year the fastest time for the First Timer 19+ category was 27'05''.    If times are comparable this year then a 33' finish would land me 5th out of 9.  Not bad... for a best guess trial run.
Still have time to work.  And there was certainly room to push it harder in places.

So I paused my ride at this mark before finishing off with 16.17 miles today.  After my pause I was feeling real good (took off from the car with no warm-up for my "time trial") and maybe too good...
After a climb I set out aggressively down the back and BAM!  Front wheel turned off a rock and sent me down.

Dumb.

My bike took it's first war wounds.

scratches on the handle bar

"nice" gouge on the... not sure what it's called??

in this region here

bruise - day one

I landed with the bike on top of me and my thigh screaming!!  I stood right up to try to "walk it off."  Awesome.  I took a "rock" (although more likely to have been my IPhone - that's why my phone is on steroids) in the thigh.  Perfect.  I just signed up for my first race and it feels like I have a dead leg.

I decided to just ride it out - didn't really have any other option as I was about as far as I possibly could have been from my car.  My leg didn't feel that bad riding - burned like my leg was tired - but didn't really notice the injury except when starting from a stop.  So I decided not to head straight back to the car but to just keep riding the park.

As it turns out I didn't come out the worst that day.  As I was loading up at the car a fellow biker asked for some assistance getting his bike on his car rack.  Apparently he took a nice hit and had - what he thought to be - a broken collarbone.  I kinda looked at him shocked and agreed to help out but quickly asked if there was anything ELSE I could do to help him.  He light-heartedly said "I got another arm" and planned on getting home to have someone drive him to the hospital.

So we'll see how the leg feels tomorrow.  With some rain forecasted for the beginning of the week I'll be back in the gym - which is great considering I haven't been in over 2 weeks.  If I wasn't sure about laying off the legs at the gym before, this injury will certainly force that plan.