A little ride this afternoon

Saturday. I didn't really want to get up at 7am, but my suddenly overactive mind wouldn't let me go back to sleep. After fighting it for an hour I finally gave up and crawled out of bed. The first thing I did (after feeding the cats) was a short 30-minute high intensity workout to try and raise my anaerobic threshold. I'm in pretty poor shape for racing, but I'm just going to go out and have fun. I'm always competitive once I'm racing, but I've never been upset if I don't place well once it's all over. It's just not something I want to stress over. After the workout it was time to eat some breakfast and work on getting my mountain bike ready for the cyclocross race. That included putting a 'cross tire on the spare rear wheel, and initially on the spare front wheel. I'd wanted to use the front wheel I bought from Mike Scardaville since it's so much lighter, but after removing the disc brake from the front of the bike and getting all set up to install the old v-brake from the old Trek Fuel, I realized I didn't have any brake posts for the fork. Sigh. After searching for brake posts for 30 minutes, back on goes the disc brake, and the new 'cross tire on the normal front wheel for this bike. I should just spring for the IRO Cycles Rob Roy singlespeed cyclocross frame this month. It's only like 279 bucks.

I finally finished working on the bike at about 1:30 in the afternoon. I took a huge load of recyclables to the county dump, went to the Common Market in Frederick to pick up some groceries (organic, naturally), then headed over to Bill and Kim's. Kim and I talked for a while, then decided to go for a short motorcycle ride (Bill was on his own tortuous ride somewhere near Charleston, WV at the time, on his way to Kansas City, MO. Crazy place to ride to on a motorcycle if you ask me). We didn't get rolling out of the driveway until about 5pm, so it was definitely going to be short. I asked Kim to take the lead, since she was the native and knew the roads around there well, and she did so readily, setting a very nice pace. Not slow (never that), but safe and definitely within reason -- a very happy pace for me. Within the first minutes of the ride I knew that's where I needed to be right then, sitting on that bike I've so quickly become comfortable with, the power at my command, sense of being in control of my life in that little space of time, my mind by need present and focused. It was amazing the sense of being unburdened of worries and stresses I immediately felt. Over the next hour and 40 minutes and 60 miles of following Kim around the back roads northeast of Frederick that wonderful feeling persisted. The weather was a perfect 68 degrees with clear skies and I thoroughly enjoyed the entire ride. Why had I almost completely stopped riding motorcycles the last two years? It's clearly beneficial to my mental state. Maybe I had just been stuck with a motorcycle that wasn't right for me, as this VFR so clearly is. Hindsight.

After a mediocre dinner at Famous Dave's that took much too long, with help from Kim I got the new Givi luggage rack installed in under an hour. It was a whole lot easier than installing a Givi Wingrack (that's a pain in the ass). The new rack isn't too bad looking minus the bags, unlike the Wingrack. With the bags the bike is, well, wide. I can live with it for now (forever?). Maybe some day I'll get the factory bags, which I think fit tighter to the bike and don't stick out so far. I'll have to take a picture later. For now, there's this one.