Sunday, January 28, 2007

Tandem treks

Sunday, 28 January

Saturday: 79 miles on the tandem. Beautiful back roads from Snohomish, past Lake Roesiger, into Monroe. Glacier Peak and a bunch of mountains nobody could identify were spectacular, as was Mt. Rainier from the Tualco Valley. A few thin patches of fog at the start, but mostly pure sunshine.

Sunday: 104.5 miles on the tandem. More beautiful roads, this time out to Carnation, Fall City, Snoqualmie Falls, North Bend, Beaver Lake, Marymoor. Mt. Si was just gorgeous. Sunshine all the way.

Funny thing. Back in the last century when I started training and racing my bike, my reasoning was that it was the only way I'd see my husband on weekends (otherwise, I'd be at home, doing chores, while he was out riding, and then I'd want to go "do something" when he wanted to sit on the couch and recover). All these many years later, finally I really did get to see my husband ALL weekend. On the tandem, he never disappears up a climb ahead of me or decides to take a longer way home. (He did try to trade places with a teammate to get away from me, but Kenny was lucky and still had his cross pedals on his rain bike so couldn't swap bikes.) But you know what you feel like after 104.5 miles on a bike, and after all that togetherness, it was probably a good thing that he had to go to a team meeting and leave me at home by myself.

If you need some entertainment early Monday morning, come watch me try to ride my single bike to work. After 183 miles of not steering, I will not be able to point my bike in a remotely straight line. And forget getting out of the saddle.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

It sounds like the "Husband You Can Afford" was a better partner than the "Coach You Can Afford"... Curly's back baby!

UltraMick said...

Ah, no, I'm a discriminating tandem whore. All my partners are the best! But O.A.D. does get extra points for tolerating me all weekend.