Terrible Wednesday Ride....First Chase!
Every week, we have 3 standard rides from our store. Tuesday is a road ride, Wednesday is Maybury Miles, Thur is Ride the Rouge. Yesterday was Wednesday so we had our Maybury Miles day.
This ride is a 40 mile ride, we leave the shop, ride about 13 miles on the road to a trail, do a couple laps on the trail then ride home. It's a long, hard ride. I have my first off-road race this weekend and have been training on my KHS 29er. It's a new bike for me, LOVE IT, but the downside is it's also one of our shop's demo bikes. As fate would have it, someone came in yesterday and decided to demo the bike this weekend, so I had to hop on my old 26" hardtail yesterday to get used to that bike for race.
As I started the ride, the bike felt uncomfortable. The geometry is way different, plus I have ergon grips on my 29er which I love! My 29er is 10 lbs heaver than this bike, but I definitely preferred riding the 29er. From the start, I wasn't mentally into the ride and knew it wasn't going to be good. We begin the ride, I'm feeling tired and quickly fall behind the group. This is OK, I want to keep my own pace anyway, but my husband kindly rode with me. My bike was feeeling like a SLUG and I look down and realize my back tire is really low on pressure. Apparently I had a slow leak...no wonder I was so incredibly slow! I pull out the tube, feel the tire for anything, don't find anything, put a new tube in, put some air in and get another flat. Now I'm getting frusterated, take out the tube, feel the tire again, find something, replace the tube and I'm on my way again. By the time we get to the trail, I'm really not enjoying myself and since I felt tired and I have my race this weekend, I decided to pass on the trail and just start my journey home by myself. I said my farewells and began the trek home.
As I start the ride home, the sky gets dark and it starts to rain. My glasses are covered in water, I'm feeling miserable and continue my crawl back home. I decided to take a slight short cut near the end of the ride through a neighborhood to knock off a couple miles and as a nice calm cooldown. As I'm riding down the dark, lonely neighborhood street, I hear something rustle in someone's yard. I shine my light over to see what it was and HOLY CRAP out comes a dog racing toward me!!! While I've read many stories about being chased, this has never happened to me. I stand up and start cranking to try to get away, but the dog is gaining fast!!! I scream out, in a deeper voice, "NO BACK!!!!" and thankfully, the dog stopped the chase and turned around. Maybe the dog was harmless and just wanted to play but I didn't want to find out. Man did that get my adreniline pumping!!! I can't believe how frightening it was.
I finally got back to the store, tossed my bike in a stand, took a recovery drink and sat down to relax. I don't know why the ride went so poorly, must have been a combination of stress from work, no time to eat, about to start my period and well, just mentally not pumped for the ride. I was just happy to get some miles in and be done. It did leave me unconfident on the bike, which I used to love, so I know that's mental. I definitely need to do some personal brainwashing before the race on Sunday! As for the dog, well, I'll have to avoid that short cut from now on. I definitely don't want to deal with that again.
