Jacquie Phelan's Weblog

Big fun this evening riding up onto a massive hill covered with “corduroy” (pine forest in perfect rows) …in attendance: Colin Shearer, Helen F. Simon, Steve, Chris, Nicky Cockburn (for a short spell)  and a young tattoo’d dreadlocked man..

There was a big concrete reservoir structure that I suppose held water well above innerleithen toun  for….the mills?  Since we did a full circle and then some, I should have seen it two times, but I was so blindly fixated on the six silhouettes up ahead (as well as the rock-studded singletrack) I totally missed it (picture a seventy foot long, fifteen foot tall box plopped on top of a heathery hilltop devoid of trees)

Now it’s covered w/surprisingly neat graffiti. Looks sort of like a big bunker but withthinner walls.
Hard ups, and ripping downhills, six other riders …one of whom, Steve, has a shop he’s opening called I-cycle and he rents a space to (or with ) Lynne Aitcheson (the stunt rider who plays ‘Jo’ in the troupe called the Riderz)’s boyfriend who is a framebuilder. Forgot to take down his name…Framebuilder in Innerleithen or Peebles..
bbq was pretty novel:
You brought your beer.
You brought (well, Helen brought) a disposable (boo, hiss) bbq…
Helen packed two chairs (thank goddess)
I forgot: coat, gloves, down pants (sorry, trousers)…full moon rise was gorgeous. Sunset wasn’t too bad either, great pinkness of cloud.
Best workout in at least a week…the guys had been pulling my chain by misdirecting me down wrong trails (old trick to take the wind out of someone’s sails…esp if she’s 15 yrs older and keeping up just fine, even on a so-called crap bike…my Dreich is doing great…it does NOT know it’s crap!)
THey have no idea that I was a racer once. and I have to say, anonymity is fun when the result is bafflement about a flowergirl, er flowerdowager keeping up on the climbs. This allows sails to billow mightily…

The theme of the ride was STEADY BOATS! (Chris: link?)

This was supposed to slow me  down….Simon,  the fellow who kept yelling that at me, is a woodworker…
I thought about it whenever he said it…it was when I was racing by (the only way I can keep up on rides with my betters is not to stop when they are all standing around regrouping –as in, waiting for JP–and this lets my legs not lock up and gives me a bit of headstart…

I finally tell him: “Let’s imagine the boat wants to be steady, but the ocean underneath is rocking…what do the boats do in that case?
They rock, and they roll.

~ by jacquiephelan on June 21, 2008.

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