Ridley surpasses 10000K…

Body woke up a little tired this morning which is a good thing because I get a rest day. Just a light swim on the schedule. I’m going to take the day to explore a little more of Tucson and try to checkout an aviation museum.

Yesterday I rode by bike for close to 6 hours (a quarter of the day sitting on a piece of plastic!). I did an entire loop of Tucson. Starting North and working my way counter-clockwise.

I had a map but didn’t pay much attention to it. The day was warm, about 20 when I started.

The fist 40K I had a tail wind which was good way to start. Time flew by and so did civilization. At about 50K I realized that I hadn’t seen a gas station or convenience store in a little while. Not a big deal as I had some water and a decent supply of food.

At 80K I was down to a couple of mouthfuls of drink. I started passing roads like, Tomahawk Terrace, Lizard Lane, and Death to Cyclists Citation. Ok maybe not the last one but picture just dirt and cacti. Nothing else.

This was about where I had to consult the map for the first time. Apparently I had blown past my turn off and now was heading down towards Mexico. There were cars traveling along the same route so at least I wasn’t completely alone!

I have this thing about not turning around so I kept pedaling on till I hit a secondary highway (between Tucson and California). At this point I was getting pretty thirsty. It was about 3 hours of cycling at this point on 1.5 liters of water. I knew from Sunday’s hill run that I could go a long time without it but didn’t want to push it.

Around 90K I started seeing civilization again. Then finally what I thought was amall turned out to be a casino. A casino out in the desert? Do you really need to gamble that bad? It did however have its own gas station so I stopped in for some drink.

I was now South West of Tucson. Construction was the theme as most of the road was under development. This was also the way to the airport so I battled traffic for a good 20K.

What surprised me the most was besides feeling thirsty before hitting up the gas station, I had no hunger pains. Usually I’m dying for food. All I packed was a couple bars and some pretzels.

At about the 110K mark I started heading North again back towards Mt. Lemon. Here I got my second tail wind and was able to motor at 40km/h back towards the base. This was a familiar spot as I had biked to and from here plenty of times already. On the way though my odometer on my bike turned over from 9999.9 to 0! My bike had officially hit the 10000K mark! I will drink a beer for it later I thought as I kept going.

Heading West and towards home I met my first person with Tourette’s. The scene looked like this: She was at a stop sign in her car at the bottom of this mini valley. I had just crested the hill and was coming down toward her. She wanted to go right but saw that I was coming which set her off on a tantrum. How so? Screaming and smashing her steering wheel. She didn’t however, run me over.

As I crested the next hill she flew past me and again had to stop at a red light. As I pulled up in the bike lane at the front there was a car between us(2 lanes turrets woman was trying to go left). She was screaming at the top of her lungs, bashing her steering wheel. The light turned green and all Iand another car could do was stare. After a few moments we both drove on leaving this lady freaking out.

The ride after that was pretty uneventful. I did however do my first century in Tucson. It ended up being 165K in just under 6 hours. Great way to spend the day if you ask me!

Anywho, thanks for reading. I’ll post some pics up tonight. Happy (Resting!) Trainin!

Cliff