Fourth 100-Mile Ride of 2024

I decided to take the road bike out for a long ride on April 27th. Temperatures were mild, and the rain chances were small enough that I was willing to risk getting wet. The forecast for the wind, though, was not promising: 17 or 18 mph, out of the southwest as usual.

Still, I rode out early, with the hope that I could avoid the worst of the wind by the time I turned around and had a tailwind on the way back home.

Unfortunately, the headwind was already pretty terrible, even before 7:00 AM.

I fought it for 45 miles, all the way to Uniontown, population 907.

It started to sprinkle as I rode into Uniontown, so I went inside Floyd's Supermarket and waited for the brief shower to pass while I purchased and ate some snacks.

Back on the road, I headed south toward Waverly, population 297. The wind was now mostly out of the south, and it was brutal. I stopped for a while at the abandoned roller rink there.

I headed toward Sebree, but the wind out of the south was becoming intolerable. I changed direction and headed toward Cairo, where there's a café that I like. I didn't have anything to eat, and was feeling the onset of a bonk. I was also annoyed that a song by a musician I detest, Billy Joel, had become lodged in my head. Early in the morning, before I rode out on the bike, my brother had texted me a link to a vicious, but accurate, takedown of Joel by a music critic whose tastes definitely aligned with mine. My brother is a big Billy Joel fan, and presumably thought I would find this amusing - and I did - but there was also a terrible side effect: One of the awful Joel songs, "Anthony's Song" became stuck in my head. It was worse than the headwind.

I eventually arrived to find the Cairo Country Café was closed for the day. I'd forgotten that they close early on Saturday. That was a major bummer.

The food situation was now desperate. I was 7+ miles from Robards, where there's a country store. I headed that direction, fighting the wind while becoming increasingly listless. I was bonking.

The most commonly misspelled word, by far, in my experience.

I arrived at the store in Robards, population 515, and immediately purchased several snacks and an ice cream cone.

That fueled me the 25-ish miles back home. I finally had a decent tailwind for the last part of the ride.

As I write this, the next day, I'm still tired. The headwind really zapped me. This doesn't bode well for bike tour in a month and a half, but unless something drastic happens, I'm still planning to do it.

Heart

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