Wow! Ok, so let's take a minute and think about the fact that I am able to sit here and write instead of the fact that I almost flew away yesterday.....and done.
Yesterday, I had this great idea to go for a nice bike ride with Red and a couple guys from his work since it was BEAUTIFUL outside. Well that idea wasn't very well thought through. The wind was attempting to be a small factor in whatever we were going to do that day and it made things kind of interesting. Here at home I was texting Red asking if he still wanted to bike since it was so windy and he said that it wasn't too bad over at his work and we would be fine. Fine. Ok. Well I go over to his work, about 10 miles from our house and the wind isn't quite as bad so bike ride is still on! We head out and the wind is a little bit rough but nothing too terrible. We go down the Socialville-Foster hill, hit the bike trail and migrate over to the Lebanon extension fighting some random wind, but nothing too substantial. In my head though I'm thinking "if we're not fighting wind right now that means it HAS to be at our backs so when we turn around up here we're going to be heading right into it!" I hate it when I'm right. We did end up riding into the wind on the way back to the trail from the Lebanon extension but then the wind kind of backed off. For being the first ride of the season for me I certainly didn't choose the easy ride. The Lebanon extension has a nice little hill that you have to climb up. I for some strange reason remembered it being shorter and easier last year and so I flew up the first half and then thought I was going to die the rest of the way up. Once I got to the top I am almost 100% positive that my heart rate HAD to be over 200bpm. I survived getting up the hill and the best part was that I wasn't last! We then turned back down and migrated our way back to the trail and were debating about the best way to get home. The way the trail is positioned your only choices to get away from the trail are to go up hill. Now which up hill is the question. Going back up Socialville-Foster means a long steady 2 mile hill which every one is relatively familiar. Our other choices are less steep but longer hills or steeper but shorter hills to get out of the valley that is the bike trail. Well one of the guys told us of a hill he prefers because there aren't as many cars and you have more room on the shoulder to get around therefore it is safer. We all agree that safer is MUCH better so we hit that hill. I hate that hill. It was better than the alternative of Socialville but definitely left much to be desired. All in all though it wasn't terrible. The problem that we had was once we got to the top we were going to be moving through Kings High School parking lot AND the parking lot of Kings Island.
Holy Twister Toto! The wind that we had been missing on the trail and getting up the hill nearly knocked us all off of our bikes once we hit the parking lots! I was re-enacting the munchkins from the Wizard of Oz saying "Eets a tweester! Eets a tweester!". Here we went from a happy 15-16 mph to a lucky 5mph. At times we were moving faster going up hill than we were going into the wind. I attempted to draft off of anyone in front of me but it was pointless. There was no drafting in this stuff. We were only about 5 miles from our cars, at most, so we all switched to lower gears and flew/crawled back to our vehicles where we could finally get off the bikes and in the safety of our cars. Next time I'm going to wear my heart rate monitor because I would love to see how high it was when I was going up those hills and then fighting that awful wind. Oh and by the way, there was a wind advisory in the end, gusts up to 40-50mph. I think we found those "gusts".
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