Liberated into a pure self and into the fresh, awakening world

In March, I read this great piece about accepting the risk of cycling to experience joy. "I swear that sometimes all I wish for, cool air, bare arms and to be free, free from the labor of making sentences, liberated into a pure self and into the fresh, awakening world."

The first year I did the week-long Ride Across Minnesota was a much-needed respite from an extremely difficult and stressful work situation. Since then, I treat this ride as a way to be free from my daily life, free from the labor of making sentences, liberated into a pure self. I also learn more throughout the week about the struggles of those living with MS and the accomplishments of the MS Society. As a result, it also helps reconnect me with my motivation for doing these fundraising rides.

This year's ride followed a relatively short (260+ miles) and flat route in western Minnesota, with a loop in South Dakota. I rode up and down most hills more than once (~300 miles), pushed myself to ride hard on some of the flats, and dug into the headwinds to help myself prepare for my California BikeMS ride in September. The weather this year was probably the best I've experienced on this ride - we had one overnight thunderstorm, and the days weren't too humid.

I apparently should have done more stretching - although I finished feeling that I had many more miles in this body, everything has been kind of tight and wound up since I got home. In between bouts of stretching, applying assorted balms, and cajoling the massage place to squeeze me in for a short visit, I've pulled together a sampling of photos to describe the events of the past week. 

Getting started: Willmar to Montevideo

After a very hot and humid week in MSP,
Matt and I tried to squeeze in a quick ride
before I left for the week-long ride.
We got stuck in this storm, but I am
glad it hit BEFORE I left town.

Rest stop #4 each day had watermelon. I think that's
why my teammate Steve and I were pretty giddy on the
first day. We saw a lot of old metal park equipment
from our youth throughout rural Minnesota.

We found a great taproom and pizza place in
the town of Montevideo (MN, not Uruguay). Here
is our team with our nice friends from the team "MS is BS."
We normally have over 60 riders from our team do
the MS150, but just a handful that do this 5-day ride.

Kim and I at the first day finish line. This
was her first time doing 5 straight days of
riding. She did great. I've been considering my
dentist's suggestion that I get Invisiline (despite
having had braces as a teen). That snaggletooth
makes a persuasive argument.
Or does it give me character?

Montevideo to Ortonville; South Dakota

Steve's photo of Kim and me rolling into Ortonville on Tuesday.
I'm pleased with my posture. I've been working on that.

Stacy and Travis flew to Ortonville on Tuesday to have
dinner with us at a supper club on the lake, and Stacy took this photo.
(Restaurant choices in town on a weeknight are limited.)
The guy across from me is Aaron, from Team MS is BS.
He is from Colorado, is nice and interesting, and joined us
for dinner. I hope he'll ride with us again someday,
even if riding in MN likely is kind of flat
and boring for a former pro racer.

Stacy's photo of Ortonville

Ortonville has been a host city for this ride
10 times over the past 30 years, and was a host
city the very first year. We spent two nights
in Ortonville. They went all out for us: bands,
a beer vendor on a golf cart, s'mores, fireworks,
cornhole tournament, kayaks, pontoon rides...  

On Weds, we did a loop in South
Dakota. The stretch by the lake was
amazing, the long south stretch was
one big fat headwind. The last leg back
to Minnesota was downhill with a tailwind.
I'm not sure I've ever ridden faster.

Percy the skeleton is on the route every year. This year,
his "minder" suggested that riders make a $2 donation
to the MS Society when taking photos with Percy.
He raised over $60 on Wednesday alone.
These were the riders from our team this year. Such great people!

After getting back to Ortonville, Steve and I did an extra
14 miles or so, heading over to and through the Big Stone
Wilderness Area. This photo doesn't do it justice. It
is astoundingly beautiful, with its preserved (non-mined)
stone formations and wetlands. It was hot, so I stopped in
town on the way back for ice cream with shot of
espresso poured on top: I recommend it!

That night, after losing the team jersey contest (we were robbed),
a teenager strong-armed me into going on stage and joining
in on this drumming thing. I was glad when it was over. :-)
We didn't enter Thursday's team song competition, but
Team MS is BS did great, winning a trophy!

My tent and my bike in Ortonville, with South Dakota
across the lake.

Benson

This was a sign at a rest stop. It makes sense, but
I had never thought of this before. Sobering.

Rest stop #3 was at a family farm.

I raised over $3000, so I had to go in.
I was going to pull down my shorts for
the photo, but realized not everyone
would find that quite as funny as I would.

We got to sleep with a bit of a light
show. I am lucky that I have
a good tent and the rain stopped
by the time I had to get up in
the morning.

Back to Willmar and Whatnot

I actually have no idea what day this is from. I stole
it from Veronika. We saw a lot of corn and soybeans this week.

I believe I stole this photo from Kim; and
think it is the final rest stop on the final day.
We saw some nice lakes heading back.

Veronika took this photo one of the days. I love the clouds.

Done! Thanks for your support and encouragement!

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Summ'r Dayz

Since our last episode, our protagonist has been keeping busy, seeking out area hills to ride up and down repeatedly, visiting family in The Northwoods, spending time on her bike to remind all the relevant body parts that they will be in those positions all of next week, and making various lists of reminders for packing.

Hills

I have posted some photos of my Garmin on Facebook, showing that I've been riding up and down, up and down, up and down. We don't have many big, long climbs close to my house, so I've been trying to fake it. Here's the route map for the California ride in September. I thought it was going to be 6,400 feet of climbing. Instead, it will just be 6,123. Easy peasy. Too bad that most of my local rides end up being about half of the distance yet only one-third of the elevation gain of the California ride.

This is my niece's bike, which lives in California. We'll see how 101.1 miles feels on a mountain bike. But it is under 22 pounds and, thanks to my B-I-L's installation, is sporting new slick tires I ordered for the event. I still have to put my own seat on it. My goal is to finish in whatever amount of time it takes to visit the shower truck at the finish line and catch the shuttle back to the marina. (The Blogger app really wants this paragraph to be centered. It must find it noteworthy in some respect. Does it question my goal?)

The Northwoods

All of my siblings (and their families) on my mom's side met at those parents' house on the lake in NE Wisconsin over the Fourth of July. As is our tradition, we swam from just to the right of the right-hand dot, where our dock is just outside the shot, to the left-hand dot, the sand bar off the island. We looked goofier than normal this year, swimming with a big inflatable alligator to help make us more visible so that my mom's job supervising from her pedal boat is easier.

My B-I-L had shipped his bike to Wisconsin, and I convinced him to go for a ride with me, promising him that we'd ride by a Dairy Queen and get Blizzards. He eats DQ pretty much every day he is in Wisconsin. We rode a new route I devised and, shortly before this shot, needed to carry our bikes down a sheer dirt wall, across a rocky creek, and up the dirt wall on the other side. He only got wet when he had to help me cross the creek. 

Body Parts

I was able to sneak in a weeknight ride with Matt when he got back from Korea, and then I made Kim ride around assorted parts of the city with me last weekend before the heat advisory kicked in. I learned that she can go really fast when she's in the left lane on a road with cars. She hates riding on roads. She didn't hold a grudge, though, and was willing to take a picture of me in downtown St. Paul. I cannot resist photo opportunities like this, for some weird reason. I've been making a photo album of my assorted "head in a hole" photos so that they're always easy to find. She and I talked about the Ride Across Minnesota next week, coordinating some of our gear (e.g., I'll bring the stuff to make coffee in the morning). Here's hoping that this week's "don't even think about pulling out your bike because you'll get hit by random lightning, swept away by a flash flood, and/or die from excessive heat" weather leaves the state before next week's ride.

Stay tuned for next week's exciting conclusion to this chapter, "2019 Bike MS Rides Based in Minnesota," and a sneak peak at what's left for the season!

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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.

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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...

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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).

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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.

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