on reaching a personal best

and the art of recovery

How much mud do you need to roll through before you start rethinking your life choices?

For me it was about twenty kilometers.

Twenty kilometers in the middle of a hundred and twenty kilometer ride.

Today I set a personal best - seventy five miles in the saddle.

Last week, on the first big ride of the year, I did a mere fifty.

On April 20, I’ve stated that I’m going to ride a century.

That seems possible.

Beyond that?

Well, I’ve made some promises, but after today I’m not sure if my role is rider or support verchicle driver.

Somewhere between miles fifty five and sixty five I encountered the mud. The frost is leaving the ground and the trails are soggy. Things typically as hard as asphalt were as soft as quicksand.

There’s nothing quick about quicksand.

There’s also very little as soul sapping as watching my heart rate race to a hundred and sixty beats per minute while crawling along at seven miles per hour.

We rode this shit on the way out. It sucked. On the way back, it was deadly.

I wanted to…