The campaign to revoke Gust, Gail and Windy's bike club membership!

I hereby put forth, before the board, a request to revoke Gust's, Gail's and Windy's club membership for abuse of rider members on club rides!

Wow, I thought last week's ride was windy. It was supposedly a stronger wind with higher gusts but this week's ride felt worse. I guess it really does have to do with ride selection. I was forced to start heading south into the open prairies of the NJ flat lands. This was the only way I could really get my mileage up to the 65 mile ride we did and ride to where I wanted to ride. Yes, I like to site-see while I ride, it's important. The hard part in selecting a ride is not only figuring out where you want to go but also figure out how to get there. My ride is called "Which every way the wind blows" because I tend to get head winds at some point. I try to adjust the ride as we go (hence cue sheets are useless on my rides). Yesterday's ride required I toss in a few extra miles and zig-zag through some tree lined and hilly roads (Province Line Rd outside Allentown NJ). One other part of ride selection is that I have hundreds of rides in my head and thousands of variations. This led to one funny incidence where a rider congratulated me on never getting lost to which I replied: "Oh $#!7 we took a wrong turn 3 miles back. We're doing the wrong ride.". I still get chided about that.

So other than the wind was there anything special about yesterday's ride? Well there were 3 other riders on my ride. Because of the mileage I tend to get only 1 or two riders. And the second, which was really exciting (okay, not really) was Hockamik Rd was being ground up. Never heard of it? Not surprised it's a bit off the beaten path near the Ft Dix Artillery range. We decided to ride down the road only to find it was extremely soft. Our tires sank to a depth of about two inches. Not what we expected from ground up road. We had expect a gravel like material. Boy were we disappointed. Another special thing about the ride was the gorgeous weather. It was in the mid 60's and I would gladly take the wind and that temperature vs the winter we had. The coldest ride I did was 26F which was only slightly better than being stuck indoors. Well next week I have a 78 - 82 mile ride down to the edge of the Barrens (Mt. Misery Rd and New Lisbon). Hopefully there will be less wind and my avg. speed can get to a respectable level. Besides putting on too much weight and asthma and wind and getting older and not getting in as much base miles as I usually do I can't understand why I'm so slow.