An Early Morning, Coffee, Bikes and Scones

Man, you gotta love recovery weeks. Even though it was an early morning and it was a touch on the cold side, we had an awesome ride yesterday morning. Starting out from Barton at 7am we fought the rush hour traffic through HRD and Dexter and caffeinated at Zou Zou's in Chelsea. The traffic at HRD and Mast was so bad we could not make the left hander to go into Dexter. Instead, we went right then left onto HRD turned around and got into a long line of cars waiting to turn right onto Mast. Funny thing was almost all of these cars made a quick left back onto HRD after the right on Mast. HRD was more like I94 then a quiet, curvy scenic byway.

More often than not we see Paul Almand on these early rides through Chelsea. He stopped by for his morning brew and we talked bikes and racing for a moment or two before he retreated to his office.

Josh was not on a recovery week so I had him do some cruise intervals on the Waterloo loop. Once he got warmed up, he seemed to enjoy the efforts. This made the loop go by pretty quickly and before we knew it we were back at Zou's meeting one of our fellow pilots for more coffee then back to Barton.

Later that day, I asked James if he wanted to do the Barton ride with the junior team and he was game so we loaded up and headed back to Barton for a 6p ride out. We met the team and Coach Lovejoy. He took James and Jacob and I took Caleb along with Dan, one of our club members looking for some riding partners. At the entrance to the park I noticed a rider who looked like he was looking for someone and we struck up a conversation. I asked if he wanted to join us and he took me up on it so the four of us worked together for a bit before Dan rode off to Whitmore Lake and the rest of us worked on hill repeats, speed drills and cornering at The Preserve.

The rider we met, Luke, is a grad student in engineering at the "U". He made the ride across America last year from Astoria, Oregon to Virginia Beach. How many people do we ride by out there who have stories to tell like this guy and we never make a connection? I also met one of our new club members who greeted us while we were riding back to Barton. Carl is an orthopedic surgery resident at the U. Again, when you talk to people, you are amazed at the diversity in this town. So many overachievers, eh? And then there's me...a General Studies major from Western Michigan University operating a glorified limosuine!! It just makes me chuckle! Over and over again you meet people like this in this town. MIT, Harvard, Princton, Yale, etc, etc. Professors, MD's, PHd candidates and world class musicians and on and on, but on the bike, we are, somehow, all the same! What a crazy town this is.