The old boy got out for a few hours.

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Yes. I rode today. Go figure.

You can ride year round in Phoenix. All summer long. Really. I’m serious. You just have to do it really early in the morning.

Legs of Glory
Legs of Glory

I had the time this morning. I set the alarm for 4:30 am. Fill up the water bottles, stuff my big ass into a kit, top off the tires to 8 bar… Go!

The road is mine.
The road is mine.

There are not a lot of cars out on the road at the ass crack of dawn. And that is just fine with me. I did see a whole lot of cyclists. I often see three or four. I saw a lot of ones and twos go by, and one big group of about twenty. Someone shouted out “Hey, big jonny!” as they rolled past. I was pretty pumped. I must be doing something right.

Sunrise from Mummy Mt.
Sunrise from Mummy Mt.

Damn purdy that time of day, too.

The wheels go 'round.
The wheels go 'round.

Rolled home feeling pretty damn good about myself. That was a win.

About big jonny

The man, the legend. The guy who started it all back in the Year of Our Lord Beer, 2000, with a couple of pages worth of idiotic ranting hardcoded on some random porn site that would host anything you uploaded, a book called HTML for Dummies (which was completely appropriate), a bad attitude (which hasn’t much changed), and a Dell desktop running Win95 with 64 mgs of ram and a six gig hard drive. Those were the days. Then he went to law school. Go figure. Flagstaff, Arizona, USA

12 Replies to “The old boy got out for a few hours.”

  1. Can I bitch about it being the rainiest June in Portland’s history? I will anyway.

  2. Fond memories, those sunrises are.   Pavement is so beautiful, even when it’s filthy and not rained on, in the cool early mornings and those wide empty streets.  Some fine ride days were those Arizona summer jaunts that started out cool, so cool that I was shivering, but 50 miles into it, and on the limping crawl home, it turns to such a hot hell as to make salt demand a big factor, and the big tires go to work on making those smooth grooves deeper.  Shade becomes the panacea.  Are those Mesquites?  My favorite tree.  I made my last piece of precious mesquite into a door handle, and was happy with that.  AZ in October for me, maybe?

  3. Loren,
     
    I live north of you.  In what is supposed to be a desert.
    We have not had 2 straight rain free days since February.  I want to go to AZ for summer holiday.  I just want to see some sun.  Sometime.

  4. Well…at least we’re not the only ones getting screwed by the wet spring!  Here in ChiTown, it rained 14 of the 31 days in May, and 10 of the 17 so far in June.  Haven’t been able to ride the mtn bike since late April.  I have caught plenty of sunrises from the road bike of late, but I just don’t like it quite as much as the dirt.

  7. A Mummy ride never gets old.  I’ve been trying to get out there after work at least once during the week.

  9. When I was in PHX for some corpo training a few years ago, I was told to ride early.  As I was on EST, it was no big issue to get up @ 4:30 and be on the bike @ 5.  A few loops around Old Scottsdale, up thru Papago, back to my temporary home that early in the a.m. was good for the soul.  I felt like cyclists owned the town at those early hours.  30-40 miles, then brekkie and a shower…all before work.  Brilliant!

  10. Every once in a while, you just have to chew through that harness and escape.

  12. Damn you Big  Jonny. I can’t tell you how much I miss that route. God to see that you are back on the road, though.