With fall colors comes winterizing chores. I’m not complaining. I took most of the last year off from any major farm chores. So, I thought I’d better spend some time getting the horses’ water tank boxes repaired and repainted before the cold, wet weather gets here. I should’ve taken a picture of them — I’ll do that soon and post it here. The insulation boxes have made a huge difference in our electric bill over the last couple of winters and it lets my mind rest\u00a0a little easier. I just hated wasting energy heating water in heavy plastic tanks where I knew the heat dissipated just about as quickly as it was generated!<\/p>\n
My folks came over and my Dad\u00a0 gave me a hand. That always makes doing chores more pleasant. After we had prepared three large boxes for painting and moved them into the garage in case it rained…. I thought. Hmmm, there’s still a little bit of daylight left and Scooter needs a little exercise. So, we headed off. In my mind, I thought — I’ll try a leisurely pace today. Nice relaxing ride and just toodle along. I took deep breaths as I rode out the driveway and even yawned once or twice as I coasted to the stop sign after the first half mile.<\/p>\n
But, that’s when the ride changed. A ‘rabbit’\u00a0, that I hadn’t even seen in my mirror, rode by me – moving like a gazelle. Do they ride bikes? Anyway, when this stealth rider passed, my attitude toward today’s ride changes as if someone had flicked a switch inside me. My pace immediately (if not sooner…) picked up and I was off. I wasn’t chasing the rider who was now several hundred feet in front of me, I was reeling him in. Keeping my sights on him and gauging whether I was gaining or losing ground. Of course, the rabbit couldn’t have cared less. This was my game, not his. He was a very fit, fast rabbit too. That made the game more challenging. I liked that.<\/p>\n
I set a very fast pace to my first time-check (the stop sign on CO 56 near the ‘new’ firehouse). I got there in just over 10 minutes. Seeing this pace, I decided to see what I could do over the rest of my ride. The rabbit was still in front of me, but I was closing the gap at a respectable rate. We rode along for another 10 minutes before he pulled off\u00a0 onto a wide section of the shoulder at the opening of a housing development. It looked like he just needed a break! Huh! I didn’t let up at all. If anything, I may have put just a little extra ‘umph’ into my pedal strokes as I came along side and then passed by his rest stop. That’s the last I saw of him. I rode on. I felt good. There was little, if any, wind and the temperature was perfect of pushing the pace. Although I was definitely exerting, I felt like I could maintain this effort for a long time. I was crusing along at 19 and 20 mph. I surprised myself!<\/p>\n
I rode up by the rez and around back to CO56. I think of it as my ‘lollipop’ ride since there is a long straight stretch and then a big loop at the top that brings me back to the top of the lollipop stick. I raced down the lollipop stick towards home like there was no tomorrow. I did feel a bit tired towards the end, but pushed on to see if I could get a personal best for the ride. Unfortunately, my Garmin was not charged up, so all I had was my Vetta-C-16 backup computer. I rolled back into the driveway at 53:55. I’d have to look through my old hand-written ride times, but I’m almost positive that’s my new personal best. I covered 16.2 miles and had an average speed of 18 mph.<\/p>\n
Wonder how fast I can really ride that thing if I keep training? Is a 20 mph lollipop ride out of the question?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
With fall colors comes winterizing chores. I’m not complaining. I took most of the last year off from any major farm chores. So, I thought I’d better spend some time getting the horses’ water tank boxes repaired and repainted before the cold, wet weather gets here. I should’ve taken a picture of them — I’ll […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1629","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.starfirefarm.com\/ride\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1629","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.starfirefarm.com\/ride\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.starfirefarm.com\/ride\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.starfirefarm.com\/ride\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.starfirefarm.com\/ride\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1629"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.starfirefarm.com\/ride\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1629\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1630,"href":"https:\/\/www.starfirefarm.com\/ride\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1629\/revisions\/1630"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.starfirefarm.com\/ride\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1629"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.starfirefarm.com\/ride\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1629"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.starfirefarm.com\/ride\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1629"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}