Solo Ride

I have gotten spoiled. I have not had to ride alone in a while. This morning, however, no one could make it so I was on my own. I got up at 4:40 and got dressed. When I got outside I discovered it was foggy and still not very light. I thought about going back in and changing into running attire, but I will be in Memphis this weekend without my bike and I wanted to get two rides in this week. I have decided the only way I am going to get better is to ride more. I just hope it doesn’t hurt my running performance. The fog made the ride pretty freaky and I almost turned around several times. It finally started getting lighter out so the fog was less freaky. I got bored so I started playing with my computer. I decided to try to keep my cadence at 80. Why 80? Because that was higher then the cadence I was at when I decided to play that game. I found I had to change gears a lot more then I normally do to keep my cadence steady. There were times that I just couldn’t do it and it fell into the 60’s. At about 7 miles I encountered two dogs. At first the lab was scared and turned tail to run but when his buddy decided to chase me, he joined in the fun. So I had a dog on either side of me and I was peddling as fast as I could. I forgot to notice my cadence while trying to out run them but once I did get away I saw that it was at 100. The next dog encounter came at about 12 miles. This time it was 3 dogs and they ran fast. My cadence hit 109. I was pretty winded after that chase, and then I saw a dog at the end of the road. I needed to make a left onto the highway and had a stop sign. The corn in the field on my left was too high to risk just running the stop sign. So I slowed, fully expecting to be attacked by the dog. Thankfully that dog had no interest in me. The rest of the ride was uneventful. I rode 20.21 miles in 1:13:56. I am sticking to my fog slows you down theory since this ride was a minute and a half slower then the same ride last Wednesday.