“Ride #28: Me Mazda Zoom Zoom”

(This is Thursday's ride, though I'm writing it up on Friday.)

How's that for the lamest title ever?

It had been raining off-and-on all day. Sunny one minute, pouring the next, sprinkling rainshower a little later. The weather reports said it would be raining in the late afternoon, so... of course, I went out for my ride, fully expecting to get soaked. (It's just water, Apollo! ;-)

I was lucky, though. Not only did this turn out to be the first windless day of the year (well, almost windless), I was moving so fast that the raindrops were vaporized as they neared the super-heated pocket of air that I pushed ahead of me and which stretched out behind me like a ghostly, shimmering comet tail.

Er, what? I mean that I only got sprinkled on a little. In fact, the approach of rain in the last ten miles of the ride just motivated me to ride faster.

My average speed was over nineteen mph (for the first time this year) until the last mile. That's when a fierce headwind found me, blowing in frustration that it hadn't seen me leave the house over two hours earlier. With so little time left in the ride, all it managed was to sap about 0.15 mph from the day's average. Still the year's best-so-far.

Stats: 44.23 miles (71.21 km) in 2h 20' 3" for an average speed of 18.94 mph (30.50 kph).