Exciting Tuesday

Today was quite the exciting day. After sorting through a few piles of work this morning I received a call from my Oshkosh peep, Aprilay (that's what we call her) stating she was contemplating ditching work early to do a mountain bike ride at one of our local trails. I had a mountain bike ride on "my plan" anyway. . . . .so we hooked up and headed out.

The sky looked like it was going to dump at any moment, but I figured as long as we didn't get hit by lightening, we'd be ok. It can rain pretty hard before you are soaked deep in the woods. We figured we'd be good to go. So off we went.

The first lap was rather uneventful. It felt very humid, but we kept it under control. I think my bike seat (height and saddle tilt) is finally right. My back was feeling not-so-bad. We stopped back at the truck before heading out on the third lap to stock up on beverages. The clouds seemed to be congregating to the north, so that was good.

Towards the end of lap 2 i had noticed my bike doing some strange things. I dropped my chain a couple times after hearing a little ticking noise. Almost like the chain was going to suck up. . . .but instead it dropped off. After careful examination of the the cassette and rings, everything appeared OK, we made some minor tweaks in shifting and set out on lap 3.

Part way into lap 3 I turned a corner to start a short steep climb putting the power to the pedals only to hear "TINK". Chain broke. Crap. Luckily Aprilay had a quick link so we pulled it out and started working. After a few minutes of trying to figure out what we were doing, running the chain the wrong way through the derailleur, a smack of the pedal to Brittany's shin and a TON of laughter we got the chain back on. Sweet. As I turned to start walking up the hill we were at the bottom of I froze in my tracks and whispered to Aprilay - "look at the trail!"

Ahead on the trail were 2 fawns with their mommy watching our whole escapade go down. They slowly moved closer and closer to us trying to figure out what the heck we were. They probably thought I was road kill I smelled so bad. . . . . .

It was the neatest thing to stand there and watch these creatures. So peaceful and calm. And to think, if I hadn't broken my chain we would have rode right past them and never experienced this wonderful moment.

Sometimes one has to stop and "smell the flowers". You can't go "race pace" all the time in life. . . . .or you're going to miss special things here and there. That's the lesson I learned today. :-)