Part of why I didn't want to do it, I hate signing up for things that mean scrapping bike rides. Tuesday is my round-trip day on my normal bike commuting schedule: drive to work Monday with Minnie Pearl, my Surly Long Haul Trucker on the bike rack. This is the bicycle equivalent of a Toyota Land Cruiser with a roof-top luggage rack, not exactly light or nimble, definitely not the fastest thing in the world, but rugged and able to go pretty much anywhere I'd want to go—and either haul or tow anything and everything I want when I get there. There are more capable off-road vehicles, the H-1 Hummmer-ish Moonlander, for example, but all design is compromise and my Trucker is at home on pavement, too.
Monday night I ride home on the bike, Tuesday back to work and home again, cycling back in Wednesday morning. Wednesday evening I have my kiddos, so I drive to pick them up (the Land Cruiser analogy falls flat when you talk about hauling a pair of teenage daughters), and drive them to school Thursday morning, having left Minnie Pearl at the office. There she waits to be ridden home Thursday night and back in on Friday morning.
I live, depending on my route, 12-1/2ish miles from work, so this schedule means I ride every day during the week, at least 12 or 13 miles, on Tuesday 25 to 30. About eighty miles of cycling built into a normal workweek, so if I get out on the weekend for a couple of good rides (I often don't) I can get 500 miles a month in with a little luck.
Luck is often not forthcoming, though, so Alpha class was something I resisted for fear it would amount to bad luck. Worse luck on the health front kept me off the bike most of January, a series of colds and stomach bugs the likes of which I can't recall ever having, with the result that I made the second class by automobile. Which turned out to be fun and engaging, plus they feed you. And there's a band, of course.
I doubt I'll quite manage this every week, but this Tuesday I started out according to schedule, riding back to work on Tuesday morning. Then from work, I rode out to Heartland, and after Alpha class, I rode home. 48 miles, with the theory that I would then ride in on Wednesday morning. I was really stoked about this plan because it takes the bible study and makes it into an excuse to ride the bike more instead of less. Plus, it was a challenge. Those weeks off take a toll, and I had to battle saddle soreness plus restarting sore muscles after they'd cooled off and rested a couple of times. On top of all that, the temperature range on Tuesday was the kind of thing you should have to cross time zones to find: I rode out in 29ºF to work, left work at 55ºF (off from almost 60ºF for a high), and by the time I got home it was down to 36ºF. Bare arms and long underwear on the same day.
I went to the restroom at one point during Alpha and a man who was at Heartland for some other thing was walking in asking, "You got a band in there?" Sure, I said. Doesn't every bible study have a band?
Of course, I had to take these pictures. I took just under 50 shots, actually. I've been experimenting with bracketing, for one, so I end up popping three for one doing that. Plus, I fell in love with my prime 35mm lens (on my Nikon D7000, a DX camera, it functions more or less like a 50mm would on a full frame/FX camera) in large part because it can shoot so fast, but I think I've fallen into a trap of shooting faster than I need to. F1.8 is great for showing an isolated subject with a blurred out background, that 'narrow' or shallow depth of field thing. I love that, but I started to realize that even in limited light, sometimes that depth of field is too constricting. I've had to kind of coax myself to tighten that little aperture sphincter up a bit, even to a point where I also have to reach into higher ISO values where things can get noisier. The D7000 is great at low light compared to anything money could buy just a few years ago, and better than anything I've ever owned before but it's still cleanest when the ISO is set down low.
I kind of cheated this morning, though. After all the excitement of riding home with Corinna in the cooling dark, I had a terrible time falling to sleep. I finally took some melatonin about half past midnight, after busting my but to get home by 10:30 so I wouldn't be terribly slort of sheep. Wondering if the melatonin would work anytime soon, I looked at my phone and saw 1:15. When that 4:45 alarm went off, I got up, peed, and promptly accepted Corinna's offer to drive me in to the office so I could sleep another 90 minutes.
I think next week, Corinna's headed out of town and unavailable for chicken exit duty, so maybe I can do the 48 next week and still ride in on Wednesday morning.
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