Mulberries and Turtles Take a Back Seat to Math

Oy! (In the voice of Sarah from Orphan Black.) I had this blog post sort of set in my head, figuring that I'd pull some photos off the web to illustrate the toasty 80-mile ride that I took today, but that I neglected to photograph.

For example, I'd tell you about weaving my way through Eagan, stopping to eat many handfuls of mulberries, which are about 3 weeks behind normal years, due to our long winter. I had to wash my hands 5 times to get all the blue juice off of my fingers.

Courtesy of someone's Pinterest site.

I'd tell you about seeing varying heights of corn in the fields near Rosemount, much of which will not be knee-high by the 4th of July.

I'd describe riding through Spring Lake Park, which I find so pretty and have not yet stopped to take any pictures.

When I searched Google images,
my friend Deb's photo from her blog
showed up in my search results!
Yay, Deb!

I'd relate how I found a baby snapping turtle by the lock and dam by Hastings, no longer than my index finger from nose to tail tip, that writhed when I picked it up to move it off the trail. It wiggled as much as Piper does when I try to pick her up.

Courtesy of the Southwest Journal (not sure
which SW Journal, but...)

I'd relate the tale of finding a different (and much less good!) route back to Minneapolis.

But, then, for the heck of it, before typing, I thought I'd check the ratio of altitude per distance on my bike rides this week and see how I'm doing with my hill training for the Waves to Wine Bike MS Ride, from South San Francisco up into wine country in September.

Uhm, well, the only ride that I did this week that meets the ratio of miles/altitude as the CA ride is the hill training route that the Minnesota Molly (versus my sister Molly) shared with me, which she fondly calls "Prescription for Pain." Oy! I'm going to have to ride that route - in full - twice - to replicate the distance and climbing of the CA ride. Uhm. Ouch!

On the bright side, the organizers of the Waves to Wine Ride have emailed me a few different times to make sure that I have the info I need and to see if I want to join a team for the event. That sure is nice and welcoming. But yikes. I'm going to need to really focus on hills, in this flat place.

http://main.nationalmssociety.org/goto/GoMaggieGo

Did someone say pie?

My friend Peg is a bona fide blogger (and now podcaster). She said, during a podcast episode, that she heard that people who aren't good blog writers use a lot of photos. I could do a better job writing, and have been mortified by the number of typos in some of my recent posts, but I think people of all ages like stories and words.

(Side conversation: HOLY COW are the planes really loud over our house tonight. I can barely hear myself talking to myself or to the dog. The rain that came through (and now is starting up again) must be part of a system requiring a flight path change. Wowza.)

Uhm, so, yes, yes, stories and words. Dan wanted to camp this weekend and I, having ridden on trails/roads out of the Mankato area during last year's Ride Across Minnesota, suggested Minneopa State Park. I knew there were some hills and I'm going to need to ride up hills in California, so it seemed like a place to revisit.

We camped at Minneopa once before - almost exactly 13 years ago. The camping was good, but it was an ill-fated trip. The short, less traumatic version of the story is that it was on that trip that we learned our former dog, objectively considered The Best Dog in The World by all, was dying. So, I had mixed feelings about the weekend with all of that baggage. 

Now, we are older and we have a camper. And, our current dog is an old girl, too. Her arthritic self was very happy to share our bed, but she was a trooper on our little hikes.

That green piece of artificial turf has no
cushion. But while we set things up,
she needed to keep an eye on the car
to make sure we didn't leave her.

We lucked out with our campsite. We were tucked in a corner so people going by couldn't really see us, and no one was in the site next to ours. There was a lot of standing water and the river down the cliff from our screen house was still very high, but the bugs were really minimal. We could have lived without the screenhouse. But it was nice to eat our food in there without having to swat anything.

Site A14

I posted this on Facebook. The last of our beer from
Belgium, enjoyed by the campfire on Friday night.
Despite the lack of appropriate glassware, it
still was delicious.

Okay! So, where were we? It didn't rain Friday night as originally forecasted. We had a nice walk after dinner, down the bluff and through some muck to the receding recently-flooded Minnesota River which ran below our campsite. The river was beautiful. I didn't sleep very well Friday night because there was a really vocal owl! For hours it just kept hooting away.

Saturday morning, I got up, slammed some coffee and a light breakfast and began my ride. My destination: the pie shop at the Rapidan Dam. Dan was going to meet me there. The plan is that he'd eat breakfast while I rode and we'd have a piece of pie. He'd then drive me back to the campsite and then he would go for his bike ride.

On Friday, while driving to the park, I mapped out my route (thanks Gregg, for helping me re-create the route from last July!). I didn't have the ability to load it on my Garmin and don't have a phone mount for my bike, so I just was planning on looking at the map when I got to important turns. Well.... I have realized that I'm now of that age that I need my glasses to read tiny fonts. It was hard to see what to do when I got to the fork at about mile 5.5. A guy rode up and I told him I was going to the dam - - he said to go right. Technically, he gave me good advice. That park, circled in red, took me almost to the dam. But it wasn't the route I'd mapped and it didn't have the hills I wanted to ride. So, I backtracked and then did the route as mapped. I got to ride up some good, long hills. They weren't as hard as I remember them, but I needed to shift through many gears and they did get my heart rate up!

Side benefit of my incorrect detour:
by backtracking and then doing
my planned route, I got to ride 6
extra miles. 23 miles is a pretty short
ride for me, but I still ate the pie -
a la mode!

So, if I had done this exact route 4.3 times, that would equal what I'll be doing in California - in terms of both distance and hills. I might need to go back for a long day trip, when I have no time constraints, and find some other hills to draw out this route a bit.

I read and Piper napped - undisturbed by bugs - in the screen house while Dan rode. The three of us then went for a decent walk - along the bison range - to a historic windmill. Afterwards we had a rather satisfying dinner of bison, ironically, with potatoes and veggies. My vegan friends will be sad about that. I don't eat much meat, and then it is local stuff from small farms and rather infrequent. (I know, I know, this is still not environmentally ideal, but it is a good compromise when you're married to the son of a butcher.)

We forgot her bed, but being the glampers
we are, we had a spare comforter. I think
she will never go back to her regular bed.

Our gourmet dinner.

The owl wasn't as hoot-a-riffic on Saturday night, and there was some light rain providing some good sound effects. So the sleeping was good. We went to Minneopa Falls right away this morning, before anyone else was there.

Piper and I are on the edge of the falls. We're kind of hard to see.

The full falls. The lower falls
are much taller.

It is a pretty park and I was able to rid myself of my traumatic association with it. Which is good, because I need to ride those hills...

http://main.nationalmssociety.org/goto/GoMaggieGo

Nature's hearth

"To be admitted to Nature's hearth costs nothing. None is excluded, but excludes himself. You have only to push aside the curtain."    - - - Thoreau


I'm a little nervous about sullying my feelings of love for my life-long favorite place by working remotely from my northernmost parents' house for a few days. Today, in addition to figuring out my setup for working from the north woods while my laptop is in Atlanta hopefully getting fixed, Piper and I went to our most usual spot, but couldn't pause long for photos because we were getting attacked by hoards of mosquitoes. We made a lot of noise, so we only saw one deer (but lots of tracks), and thankfully didn't see the bear that's been hanging out in this region (or its cub).

The baking pine needle smell is my favorite.

"Why won't you let me eat deer poop again?"

Then, I went for a long bike ride on roads I haven't ridden on before, primarily on back roads that I also haven't driven on. My final destination was Luna Lake, which is the other place that Piper and I like to walk. The water was super high and the campground was very empty but for some hearty souls who had to have been hanging out in a screen tent. I tried to eat my bar by the picnic table. Even standing in the direct sun, I couldn't keep the swarms of mosquitoes off me. The biffy was a mosquito haven. Ugh. I'm glad I didn't try to take Piper there.

Luna Lake

It's a good thing I recently have ridden on sand and packed gravel roads recently. It helped me be more confident when I had two unexpected rather long stretches of gravel roads to cover on my road bike. One stretch was on Nine Mile Road, which, not oddly, runs along Nine Mile Lake. I've never been to that lake before. It was pretty astounding. The red wing blackbirds were very chatty. 

Nine Mile Lake boat landing

My route through the Nicolet National Forest was very winding and had a lot of rolling hills, tuckering me out a bit more than an average 50-miler. I'm glad I had the opportunity to push back the curtain and get out to where pretty much no one else was (except lots of deer: I saw 6 before hitting mile #7 - and stopped counting at 12).

http://main.nationalmssociety.org/goto/GoMaggieGo

MS150 Snapshot (or Snap-not?)

I have a lot of thoughts about this past weekend that have been kind of hard to concisely put into words, and now it is late on Monday night and not the time to try to start thinking of the words. So, I will share a hodgepodge of some photos from the weekend, most of which have shown up on Facebook or my team's Instagram pages already. I realized that I pretty much took no photos myself. Whoops.

I put ridiculous amounts of foam on my bike before putting it on the truck. I usually ride my crummier bike, which got damaged last year on the truck. I forgot to tape the foam on, so only about half of it (the foam) made it to the starting line. (My whole bike made it.)

We had some inevitable dawdling at the start. I was grateful that Alicia took a picture of me with Tim, who has been my friend for 25 years. And that I got a picture of Alicia and me together, too. We spent a lot of time bonding over jersey designs and ordering processes these winter.

In the event of any confusion, this is the one with Tim.

This is the one with Alicia.

Speaking of jerseys, aren't our new
jerseys pretty amazing?!? We got so
many remarks on them while riding.

I was trying not to spill my coffee on either of them.

We have two real dynamo fundraisers on our team. Dave Steensgard is one of them. He couldn't do the ride this year, but still raised money for the MS Society as a "ghost rider" on our team. At one of the rest stops, there was a sign recognizing his contributions. I really like Dave.

Renee was on our team last year, too, but couldn't ride this year. She also still raised money for the MS Society as a "ghost rider" with us. I love that she pointed out that Keyvan and Sterling (in the bottom right) made it into this photo. They were on our team last year, but rode with Sterling's new employer's team this year. I totally understand their social obligations in that regard. (Although I gave Keyvan crap, pointing out that *he* didn't go work for Sterling's company.) I ran into them a lot during the ride and loved talking with them.

This is most of our MS150 riders this year. Our friends and family team really is one big family. I'm very fortunate to know these people. I have such amazing people in my life, overall, and it is great that the trend has continued with my recreational and volunteer activities.
 

For our tenth anniversary, we had a lot of cake, thanks to Kari, Danaca, and Kelly. Here is one of them (below, and actually it is just a photo, not actual cake). Kim, who founded our team (and cuts my hair!) is the one with her arm around me. Stacy, who is our friend for whom we all started riding 10 years ago, is holding the cake with me. Kelly organizes all of our snacks, drinks, and dinner in Hinckley - - no small task! Keisha is a long-time rider and all-around great person. Everyone in the photo, but me, went to high school together (and maybe even junior high). People in the Twin Cities don't always move away (like how I had to escape my home town), and a lot of them still hang out with people they've known since they were kids. This fascinates me.

The four of us pictured below have done the MS150 every year for the past 10 years. Travis is Stacy's husband and has volunteered to help fix people's flat tires and provide first aid for the past couple of years. He's done the Ride Across Minnesota with me many times. (The first year I did it, he was the only person I knew, and vice versa.) You may recognize him as our trivia emcee. Stacy and Kim always help with trivia, too (and so does Keisha! (see above)). [Can you embed parentheses within parentheses in a blog post that was supposed to be short??]

My teammates seemed even more thankful than ever this year to have a team captain. (One person even bought me a beer, and another bought me lunch!) Is it because they know that I'm thinking of retiring? My friend Susan gave me this card when I got home from the ride, which sort of continued the wave my feeling the love.

So, maybe someday I'll process the thoughts that are rattling around in my brain, besides thinking of a polite way to share my observations about senna dosage and port-a-potty life, all of which is part of a continuing research project to more comfortably participate in the Ride Across Minnesota in July. TMI? Eh, you're used to it.

http://main.nationalmssociety.org/goto/GoMaggieGo

Shoulda taken a break, not an Oxford comma

I don't really know exactly what it means, but that's a lyric from the 19-year old phenom Billie Eilish. (I also enjoyed her "You're italic, I'm in bold" lyric while "dancing" around tonight putting away my laundry and scaring my dog.)

I don't think that Billie was talking about taking a break by sitting down with a bunch of Icy Hot on your back after calling the chiropractor to squeeze you in to massage and manipulate that nagging area above your left hip that's been giving you problems on and off since you hit your 40s. But who knows? Maybe that's what she meant?

Billie looks like she might have some back pain.
Here, she looks like she has some bigger issues.

And "not an Oxford comma" maybe means "don't skimp on your sleep like you have been." She's prescient, that young woman.

Just two more nights at home and then my team loads up their bikes, bags, and bodies on buses for Duluth and then rides back home over the weekend. It's always a busy, busy week, getting myself ready, tidying up some logistical details, squaring away things in my work and home lives. The weather looks like it might be okay! I don't even want to put that thought into words as I'm a firm believer in jinxes.

Anyhow, the reason why I'm freaked out about jinxes is that Duluth is colder than Minneapolis and, until this past week, Minneapolis hasn't been particularly summery (e.g., 9 days ago, our rainy ride was in lower-50 temps).

My hands two weeks ago after
walking the dog. It
was 60 degrees, but drizzly.
They turn white, then purple.

But this past weekend! Oh, what great biking. I led 6 others on a 40-mile ride from my neighborhood, along the river, to a cool park, along the river, to a cool park, across the river, up a big winding hill to a park, down a hill to the river, and to a brewery.

My teammate Mike and me, modeling our new
jerseys at the brewery, so we could send photos
to the local businesses that we cajoled into sponsoring us.

I went home, mowed the lawn, walked the dog, and met friends for a concert at the zoo, where the seating is not ideal and my unstretched, somewhat sore back turned into my back of yore. My back before I went to yoga (which I've been neglecting). My back before I had my bikes adjusted to better fit me. My back before I had the seat that gives me better posture (which I wasn't practicing as I moved around due to not having spent a lot of time on my bike this year and having a bit of a sore butt bone).

But (or butt) nonetheless, Matt and I went for a great ride the next day to Hastings, a small old town along the river. This ride was about 80 miles round trip for me. We had a non-busy route way of getting there, including an amazing trail for the last 10 miles (I never take pictures of it - I just absorb it with all of my senses). The only thing that wasn't 100% perfect were the big patches of gnats, which must have just hatched.

The Mississippi in Hastings

I'm a horrible selfie taker! Where's the
bridge, Mahoney?!? What you can't see:
the gnats caked in my eyelids, along
my hairline, and in the neck of my shirt. 

So, yes, I didn't take a break when my back was signaling to me that it might be a good idea. But I'm taking one now and my hip is more in its intended spot.

So, to Duluth we go!

http://main.nationalmssociety.org/goto/GoMaggieGo 

I'm Not Gonna Lie...

I'm not gonna lie, the cold rainy days are starting to get to me.

Waiting in my car for the others to show up
to ride today, taking photos of my fendered-up bike.

I'm not gonna lie, I did have fun riding despite the conditions and the fact that I had to sit in my car with the heat on for a long time before I could bend my fingers to remove my bike helmet or shoes for the drive home.

Today's hearty crew. I'm wearing a shower cap under
a baseball cap under a bike helmet.

I purposely crappily cropped the screenshot
so that you'd know I stole this.
Look at the water around the pavilion.

As a frame of reference, this it the pavilion when
the water is at normal levels. It is not normally
an island in the river. This is from a ride in 2015.

I'm pretty impressed that we rode, given what
all the weather sites were accurately predicting.
But look! I got my passport jersey from the
MS Society. This is what I get for raising enough
money to do rides in other states. That's fun.
I like that they gave me this, in addition to
promising me that I won't have to
wait in lines for port-a-potties.

I'm not gonna lie, I didn't mind the 90-degree temps in Kentucky this weekend, although I missed two nice weekend days in Minnesota that would have been great for riding.

We toured Woodford Reserve, which
was very slick. We also toured a
tiny distillery in Bourbon County -
the only distillery in Bourbon County in
the past 100 years. It was tiny and cool.

Woodford. Check out all the bubbling
stuff that will eventually be bourbon.

Tons of huge barrels in the warehouse,
including some that are special editions.
At the small distillery, they use way
smaller barrels. Now I know why the
TTB/ATF regulations I saw about
getting rid of small barrels are causing
such a ruckus and I now know
more about Big Alcohol's nefarious ways.

I'm not gonna lie, I didn't take photos of the important stuff, like all the family members I saw at my cousin's wedding. But I never even shared photos of our trip to New Orleans five weeks ago.

New Orleans. April 2019.
I cannot resist mimicking statues. And my
eyes are demonstrating how much I liked this Bloody
Mary mix. So much, in fact, that I just ordered a box
of six bottles. It was good even without alcohol.
I ordered the crawfish sacks because I was
(obviously) super curious as well as the fact that
I have a juvenile sense of humor.

I'm not gonna lie, I thought that it would be painful to start reading Dune, as I promised my S-I-L and nephew I would do. I am really liking it. A lot.

I'm so happy to be back on a fiction kick
after reading all of the non-fiction
books that people gave me as gifts.
They were important books, but not
something I feel compelled to read during
all of my free moments.

I'm not gonna lie, I'm nervous about the MS150 in less than two weeks and the likelihood of cold rain. It just snowed in Duluth again recently. S.N.O.W. Camping out the night before the ride could be rather bone-chilling. Argh.

I'm not gonna lie, I'm grateful for all of the donations to the MS Society, but my team is behind on its goal of hitting $100,000 this year, our 10th anniversary year, so I'll gladly accept more of your generosity! http://main.nationalmssociety.org/goto/GoMaggieGo

Biking: The New Karate

“Karate is many things, but mainly it's about synergy, ebb and flow, trial and error, action and reaction, rhythm of life, progress . . .” 
― Soke behzad Ahmadi, Shorinjiryu Ryujin Kenpo


Sunday was the first of the four BikeMS events I'm doing this year. Watching the looming forecast, Alicia and I were texting each other: "Which route are you doing?" "Are waterproof socks really waterproof?" "Do you put nitrile gloves under or over your other full-fingered gloves?" "How many layers are you wearing?" And, "Why do we do this?"

We decided that MS doesn't take a break, people with MS don't have a choice about whether they're going to deal with it on a particular day, MS doesn't care if it is 40 degrees, rainy, and windy. And, so, neither were we.

Well, thankfully, the MS Society decided to cancel the long route due to potential flooding and then cancel the next-longest route due to the fact that hardly anyone would ride it and they didn't want to punish their volunteers. So, we did a fun, albeit cold, wet, windy short ride around the cities with our teammates Andy and Mike, running into some of our other teammates along the way: Carmen, who designs our team logos, and Saunya and her two children, who were wearing the most creatively designed garbage-bag-and-duct-tape rain gear.

Kelly, the woman in orange, volunteers for all
the rides. She's awesome.

Andy lives near me, so he and I decided to ride the 4 miles to the start of the bike ride. We were pretty chilly and wet when we got there, due to the fact that he got a flat tire roughly 1 mile from my house, but were surprised and happy to see that Alicia and Mike waited for us. (p.s. Why it can be good to ride with others: Andy inadvertently had packed the wrong type of tube, so needed mine. Plus, we were able to share some pump-pumping arm energy and each take a turn prying the edge of the tire over the rim.)

Andy, looking for his flat-fixing stuff.

All was better after the ride, because the MS Society had moved all of the post-ride events to inside the Surly brewery, instead of in the tents in the soggy field. We had donuts, beer, coffee, and pizza - - way more food than we needed for our caloric output, although I think I did use more calories shivering than biking.

Saunya and Alicia. Their energy and humor in one week
is equivalent to an entire lifetime of my energy
and humor. They make things fun.

So, this experience serves as a reminder that this could happen again, as it has on the MS150 and on the Ride Across Minnesota, and that I will survive - especially because it *should be* warmer during those rides and hopefully my Raynaudsy hands and feet will get a break. (Although with temps in the low 30s last night, I'm done trying to predict what is normal weather.) 

I also acquired a fun event t-shirt to add to my collection!

Cannot take selfies and smile. Too
hard to do both at the same time.

Here we go - - - BikeMS season is underway! Just a couple of weeks until the MS150! 

http://main.nationalmssociety.org/goto/GoMaggieGo

(p.s. I've never done the Twin Cities Ride before, only the longer, multi-day rides. It's a great way for people who can't commit more than a few hours to make a difference in the fight against MS. It is sort of a one-off for our team: most of our riders just do the MS150, but we raised about $3000 for the MS Society with this ride (1/3 of which was raised by those little kids!), which isn't too shabby.)