“Work” has dominated my life for a couple months with the last three weeks taking up every waking minute. Because of this I haven’t ridden at all for a long time.
Yesterday (Monday the 25th) was the drop-dead date for shipping the project we’ve been working on for so long. In the morning we had a room full of food packaging/processing equipment to load on two semi-trucks but still lots of work to do. Amazingly, we were able to finish up odd and ends, load the trucks (bolting parts on machines all the while) and quit work with som daylight left. Enough daylight for a Coker ride! Yesterday just happened to be my 49th birthday too.
I arrived home at 4:30 pm to the amazement of my family. My wife and two daughters were just leaving home for “the barn” for some horse back riding and mucking. The barn is 6 miles away so I took off on the Coker to meet them there, then go to dinner after riding. We put my littlest daughter’s 20" Torker in the car so we could ride together after meeting up at the barn.
The temperature was cool - in the mid 40’s - but pleasant after warming up. I still have Harper’s 175mm Kooka cranks on my Coker and I had a GPS hanging around my neck so was able to see how fast I was going. I found that anything over 11 mph was pretty tough to maintain with those long cranks but the control they give is great!
I didn’t push it, instead I just plodded along at a slow easy rate just enjoying the ride and feeling good about getting that job done. The last half of the ride was into a pretty steady head wind but not too bad. After arriving at the barn, my little girl and I rode laps around the barn spooking all the horses. Good fun!
Here’s the stats from my GPS: 6 miles ridden - 8 mph average speed - 11.3 mph maximun speed. Not much of a ride really but in this case it was more about quality than quantity.
SH
Wish I could take credit, but I’m just one in a long line of copyists on that theme.