Today was going to be easy, 77 miles of flat farmland in south-central Illinois. It is also Mother’s Day. For one or both of these reasons we started riding at 9 AM. Everyone was awake by 5:30 and had eaten by 7 at the latest so we sat around and waited until 9 when we could but our luggage in the van and depart. 77 miles for us should be a cakewalk, without any wind no more than 4 hours on the bike would be needed, with a good tailwind we could do the ride in 3 hours, hence the late start. However, today we had a 15 mph wind from the east and all but about 5 miles of short zigs and zags were due east of Illinois’ grid like secondary road system. I took me just over 6 hours to finish the ride and for all but 10 miles I was working in a paceline. It was as hard as any century I have ever done. Since there were no hills we were in the saddle all day. For the first time on the ride my butt hurts. It is not a rash or boils, no it is just sore. I don’t know but maybe I have lost all the cushioning fat from my derrière. I will have to look into that possibility. I do not believe that I have lost that much weight on the trip, but it has been redistributed within my body.
We had a tee-shirt swap tonight. It worked like this, everyone donated a tee-shirt and got a number from the ‘hat’. Then the first person selected a tee-shirt. However that shirt wasn’t necessarily his, as any tee-shirt could be taken from someone else until it had been selected three times, then it was out of the game and whoever had it had it for good. One rider donated a cycling jersey, it changed hands very quickly but by the time the fourth person selected it had had tree owners and was out of the game. I was about the tenth to select and chose a shirt that had already had two owners; I got something I liked and didn’t have to worry about someone taking it. I donated a GPC Century tee-shirt from 1992, it has a tandem with a cyclist and bear as the stoker on the front and a bear with the remains of a bicycle and no cyclist on the back. Andy a rider from England took the shirt early on and no one else seemed interested until the next to last person selected Andy’s shirt. He was crestfallen. The look on his face was priceless, so much so that after the swap was over the other rider gave the GPC tee-shirt back to Andy. Our club century will now be known in England. All in all it was a fun event.
I must report that the crank arm Karen sent me and that we installed on my bike last night worked without any problems today. I have shifted between the three chain rings in the parking lot so that also seems to work, but for the entire ride today I was in my middle chainring, the one I used yesterday. I really haven’t tested shifting between the front chainrings under actual road conditions. So I can only say that I hope the problems of my broken crank in Missouri are behind us.
As I prepare for bed I and hoping the Weather.com will be right and that tomorrow’s winds will have a westerly component we ride due east again from Tuscola IL (south of Champaign) to Lebanon IN 121 miles. Another day with headwinds would be a killer.
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