We spent a very long day on the trails on Monday, which lead to pure exhaustion, sunburn and a big smile on my face. With Donna’s race almost exactly 14 days away, what she rode this weekend, she’ll really benefit from on race day – muscles work on roughly a 14-day delay, meaning that if you work them extremely hard and recover well, 14 days later they’ll be fully recovered and amped up from the big workout.
Donna was the real trooper of today’s ride, carrying me through the last hour with some words of encouragement and even better, some conversation that kept my mind off the discomfort.
During the course of the ride we discovered that the cactus plants have apparently been enjoying the wet season, judging by their size and abundance.
The ride started at home, went up and down one ridge line then through a long canyon that leads to the beach. The beach was loaded with these birds who were out in force, enjoying some fine dining. A sunny, 70-degree afternoon at the beach isn’t an all-bad place to take a break.
This guy made an encore performance, which was lucky for me because I didn’t get a very good photo of him the first time he crawled along the top of this fence. You know you’re not exactly cursing along when you actually notice such a small critter – I was actually walking at the time, up an extremely steep section of trail.
By time I got to the beach, I was wondering what it would take for Donna to go get the car and come pick me up. It truly was a beautiful day though, so a few more hours on the trail didn’t sound all that bad.
The tall grasses have really taken off and ticks love to hang out on them and wait for you to ride by. Before the ride was over, we had each pulled almost a dozen of them off our arms and legs. We had sprayed down with Deep Woods Off prior to the ride, so fortunately none of the ticks had started to dig in before we got to them, but we were stopping about every 30 minutes to look for them.
