And now for today's ride, and a few thoughts....

This morning, I woke up later than he did, sat around being up-right a while, had some breakfast, put on my bike shorts and a shirt, then sat on the floor in his office to put on my socks and asked "wanna go for a ride?" I was having an allergy morning and needed to distract myself while drugs kicked in. It wasn't working to try to accomplish anything "of value."

I still think it's pretty amazing how many miles we can ride in an "amble" through the various subdivisions that are popping up in our area. Today, riding to the grocery store that's about 3.5 miles away from us, we managed to meander about 23 miles! There's relatively little traffic, nice roads, and they're LONG roads too -- so we were able to "amble" at around 16mph a lot of the time. (comfort bikes, leaning toward mountain style, remember!) A few little hills, and I'm celebrating how much my hill climbing ability is beginning to improve. These are WEE things that I call hills, but for me, anything that's not flat or a downgrade is still a hill. Today was lots of fun. I felt some nostalgia, cruising along on some of our "old stand by" stretches (that we haven't ridden in a while because of chipsealing) -- I was remembering how I'd go up this wee hill at 5mph earlier this summer, and how top speed on that stretch used to be 12mph, and now 12 feels slow...

Besides this nostalgia thing going on today (like, you know, way back in the day, six weeks or so ago....) today's ride had this other element of fun going on: He likes to challenge me to push myself a bit, which is good for me (some days it annoys me greatly) but today he's pretty well shot after the ride: he had to work pretty hard today! There were a few times he'd mention things like "we're riding harder than you meant to, I know," and "just a little farther and we'll take a break." There were no breaks, and I think he was about to suggest going the short way home at one point when I said, let's go see what they've built over there since we were that way last!

Weather here in Boise is beautiful lately, but the air is very smokey. We live by mountains -- well, okay, foot-hills, since the mountains are just past those -- and lately, the smoke here in the valley is obstructing our view of those hills/mountains. Normally, I can see the ski-area where we spend many weekends during our winters playing from my bathroom window, but not today! As Tater says, our area could use a decent rain, to put some of these fires out! (and clean our air!) I worry about her commuting every morning in our stinky air: my daughter, the silly one who smokes, says this is very economical air, because she doesn't have to light up, just breathe deeply! (That said, I'm out riding in it myself today, and kicking DH out of his chair to ride too!)

Usually we make a pretty good team: I push him out of his chair and onto the bike (which he needs), then he pushes me to work hard out there (which I need!). Between a hectic schedule in August, and his resistance, he got by with slacking off, and coaxing me to slack off with him a LOT in August.

Ain't gonna happen in September. My goal was 300 miles in August, I was 106 short. Now I'm trying to decide if my goal for September should be the 300 that I haven't made in a month yet, or if it needs to be 406! When we got home, cleaned up, had lunch, and went out to REI, the big "SNIAGRAB" sale at Sports Authority, and Costco. I asked him "Where are we going to ride tomorrow, dear?" in the car. He said, "who said we're riding tomorrow?"

So I told him, I didn't ask IF we were riding tomorrow, I asked WHERE!

Oh yeah, almost forgot: While we were in REI, looking for bargains, and he wouldn't buy himself the better pair of shorts that were on sale (PI Short Attack are on sale for about $50 this weekend) he initiated looking at the road bikes, pricing them! Even talked to a sales person a bit about them! He did preface the conversation with "we're NOT buying any of these," but he looked, and that's a start!

Karen in Boise