Two Wheel Blogs

A week ago, while I was running the cross country course at SIUE, several cyclocross riders went by me. "This is what you should be doing," one of them called out to me. I recognized a couple of them as guys who work at The Cyclery. "So, Thursday night is cyclocross practice," I thought. "Cool."

August 31st -- it sounds so final. Tomorrow is September 1st. Right around the corner is the Labor Day weekend, the unofficial end of summer. This is not the time to look back, to flip through the summer like an old magazine, looking at the pictures but skipping the stories. No, this is not the time for that.

I should have gotten up and run my 6-miler first thing in the morning, when it was still in the low 60s. Instead, I drank coffee, read the paper, and watched TV. When I hit the trail at 11:00, temperatures had risen to the low 80s. Fortunately, there was a breeze. Without it, it would have been a much hotter run.

Ah ... where to begin?

Three weeks ago, I had a wreck. As I was riding towards home, I hit a sewer cover on the Delyte Morris bike trail that runs through SIUE.

As I write this, I should be at the Skyview Drive-In in Litchfield enjoying a double feature of THE SORCERER's APPRENTICE and DESPICABLE ME. I should be there after having spent a couple of hours riding the 40 or so miles from Edwardsville to Litchfield under clear skies and in warm (but not too hot) temperatures. the ride to Litchfield should have been the second of two rides for the day.

Mike, a friend of mine from work, took up running recently. In May, I ran with him as he did his first 5K race. Since then, he's come over to Edwardsville to run the Route 66 10K, which I did not run, and the Mud Mountain 5K cross country classic, which I did. The week after that, we ran the Cross Country Kick-Off 5K in Forest.