Week 14 Wrap-up

Week 14 marked the start of my racing season, and it certainly started on a high note with the Logansport race. Leading up to Saturday, things were basically status quo—still pounding out the weekday workouts, still not getting enough sleep, and still looking forward to the weekend of training ahead. Friday afternoon, I headed to LaPorte to hang out with Sue and Michele at their cottage—I opted to take them up on their offer to stay with them instead of dealing with the slightly frightening Super 8 in Logansport. At the crack of dawn (actually, before the crack of dawn), we headed south to Logansport for the race (see earlier blog for the race recap). Following the race, we attempted to find some coffee of the non-gas-station variety—sadly, north central Indiana is lacking in espresso-based beverages, so we ended up back in LaPorte.

After refueling with caffeine, Michele and I took off for a 10-mile run (we had a 13-miler on the schedule but opted to count the 3.3 miles from the tri as part of the 13 miles). Thankfully, the rain had stopped by then, but Michele was still trying desparately to warm up—turns out she dislikes being cold about as much as I hate being hot. We attempted to take it easy—we often don’t do so well pacing when we run together—and managed to hold a fairly reasonable pace for the run. After a low-key dinner with some of Michele’s family, we crashed hard—even took the opportunity to sleep in on Sunday morning.

Following a fairly lazy morning on Sunday, we took off for what we thought would be about a 65-mile ride through LaPorte county (which, by the way, has a fantastic bike route system). Sue wasn’t feeling all that great, so she peeled off to head back to the cottage after the first 35 miles or so. Michele and I continued on to round out the day—we both sort of biked our own pace, which meant I spent a fair amount of time looking at Michele’s back from a fairly significant distance. At some point, we ended up riding together again—just in time to have one of the more random experiences to date. We were on one of the random county roads we ride when we saw a horse and a foal (at least I think that’s the right word to use for baby horse) run across the road. Now, we’re both from more or less rural Midwestern towns and are not unfamiliar with farm animals…but neither of us had ever seen a horse in the road before. Cows, yes—horses, no. Michele pulled over to the farm from where it looked like the horses had come and, sure enough, the gate to the pasture area was wide open. Luckily, at about the same time, a pickup pulled into the driveway of the farm—not the owner, but an acquaintance of the owners who had seen the horses running in the road.

The farmer opened up one of the seemingly empty pens on the farm, and he and Michele started trying to get the horses rounded up and back in some sort of secured area. By the time I figured out what was going on and turned around to help, Michele had already started dragging some big pieces of old barn lumber to try to pen the horses on the property—no small feat in bike shoes. When I got over there to help, we noticed two longhorn cattle coming out of the pen the farmer had opened (again, he thought it was empty), so we quickly shut that and kept the cattle in place. At about the same time, the farmer had managed to get the horse and foal back into the open corral/pasture, and, after helping to shut and secure the gate, we called it good on one of the more bizarre biking adventures we’d had to date.

After a brief water stop at the Fish Lake Grocery (and some very deep and fairly surreal life conversations in the parking lot, we made our way back to the cottage—for a grand total of about 85 miles (and about 20 longer than we thought we were going to ride—slight miscalculation, but it was all good). All in all—good ride, and great week!

Here’s the roll-up…

Swim: 46:10 / 7700 meters
Bike: 8:07:48 / 142.58 miles
Run: 4:00:17 / 27.70 miles
Total: 14:54:15 / 175.09 miles