Two Wheel Blogs

Route: Edwardsville to O'Fallon
Miles: 23.1
Time: 1:41
Pace: 13.1

I decided to bike down to the O'Fallon Relays today. The field events were scheduled to start at 3:30. I checked GoogleMaps so I could decide how ealy to leave. GoogleMaps, with its new "Travel: by bicycle" feature, listed it as 23.1 miles. "Sounds right," I thought. It listed the travel time as 2 hours, 1 minute. "It shouldn't take two hours to ride 23 miles," I told myself. Still, not wanting to arrive late, I decided to leave at 1:00 p.m.

Apparently, in estimating the travel time, GoogleMaps must check weather.com for the wind velocity and direction. O'Fallon is to the southeast of Edwardsville, and that's just where the wind was coming from. I was eating it all the way down. There were a couple of small hills I had to climb on the way, but I didn't mind because the hills temporarily blocked the wind -- until I reached the top. After a long, slow ride, I arrived at the track in plenty of time.

Edwardsville has a really good junior runner, Daniel Mazar. Last Saturday at the state indoor meet, he won the 800m with a time of 1:55. Today, in the first leg of the 3200m relay, with a nasty wind in his face on the homestretch ... you guessed it, he ran 1:55. On a still day, he probably could have run 1:52 or 1:53. Sick.