Short strokes......

We are really down to the short strokes now.......when I begin to put stuff away in the trailer, and begin to wipe off over two months of weather and grime from the exterior of the Newell it's getting close to lift off......just 3 more days.  TLE's foot was hurting her (you may remember she broke a toe on her foot a few months, and while it has healed it still gets sore with all the walking we have been doing) so she decided she would take the day off from walking.  I decided to spend part of the morning cleaning the Newell exterior.......I never try to clean the entire exterior in one day anymore.....it just wears me out....so I break it up into parts which I do over 3, or 4 days.  

Once I had about 1/3 of the exterior shinny again, and part of the trailer interior more organized I decided to go for a bike ride.  First I did my 'planking' for 2.5 minutes.  Tuesday I'm supposed to go to 3 minutes, or 180 seconds....I can barely get to 2.5 minutes, so I will see if I can do the 3 minutes.  I left on my bike ride about 1:15 pm unsure whether I would ride to the top of Mt. Rubidoux and do a 10 mile ride, or head northeast on the SART* and do a 20+ mile ride......as I approached Main Street on 3rd Street I made the decision to head north on Main to pick up the SART.  

Usually I am riding into a headwind when I go northward on the SART and am happy to be averaging 11, or 12 mph at the turn around, but Monday I had a tailwind and though I was pushing 17-18 mph for quite a while, ended up at a 15.3 average as I made the turn around at the 11 mile mark.    The wind coming up the river was not to bad and I was able to keep my average up around 15.5 mph for quite a while as I headed southwest, but eventually the wind stiffened and suddenly I was having a difficult time pushing 13 mph.  Normally I would not push that hard into the wind, and would just concede that I would not be able to sustain 15+ mph for the ride, but on this day I kept pushing to keep my pace up.....by the time I hit the Fairmont Park turnoff I was just about out of gas with about 3 miles to go, but I kept pushing right to the end.  As I turned in the driveway I looked down at my Garmin to see that I had held on to an average mph of 15 for the entire 24 miles!  That is a new threshold for me.....I don't believe I have been able to average 15 mph on any ride for a long time, and for sure on this particular 'out and back' ride my best has been somewhere in the 14's.

That was pretty much it for me Monday.....after putting so much energy into getting that 15 mph average I was gassed, and spent the better part of the rest of the afternoon (it was 3 pm by this time) sitting in my recliner with my feet up reading, and napping.  Around 5:30 I fired up the Sea-B-Que to grill some chicken breasts for dinner.  TLE added some broccoli and mushrooms as sides.......the chicken came out soooo well!  I cherished every single bite!

Two more days until our move up to the Fontana Elks Lodge.....thanks for stopping by!  

*SART = Santa Ana River Trail