After taking Thursday off from training for the Muncie Endurathon, I spent Friday running\u00c2\u00a0five miles, mowing the lawn at the lake, trimming the lawn at the lake, doing three loads of laundry,\u00c2\u00a0driving three plus hours to Traverse City for dinner with Becky and her sister Judy, and then driving on another 45 minutes to Torch Lake. When we got to Mike’s cottage, there was no power and the caretaker mouse had died of boredom right in the middle of the living room. I told Jean his brothers were all lined up under her bed, waiting for her to go to sleep, so they could attack. She didn’t sleep well both nights. I wonder why.<\/p>\n
After calling Mike and Diane to find out where the breaker box was, looking for matches to light one of\u00c2\u00a0the many candles\u00c2\u00a0but finding a flashlight that worked instead, we turned on the main switch and we had power. We didn’t have any water either but I found the two switches that started the pump and away it went. After hearing some splashing, which turned out to be a burst pipe, I flipped the switch back off and thought we had\u00c2\u00a0better wait for Mike. To make a long story short, Mike fixed the broken pipe and we had water by 8 AM.<\/p>\n
The “gang” was going to ride long and I knew I would ride short (50 miles around the lake) so I left about five minutes\u00c2\u00a0after they did all by myself. It was actually a nice ride other than missing the first turn and going two miles out of my way. I didn’t feel so bad since I made all the rest of the turns, but the rest didn’t. Tom, Brian and Jean missed the second turn (and all the rest), rode directly to Elk Rapids, and then rode 15 plus miles along a very busy, windy US-31. Diane, Kim and Corrine missed the second turn, but got it back on track only to have a flat tire (Kim) which took them 45 minutes to fix. Thankfully I wasn’t there because it would have been painful to watch.<\/p>\n
Since I finished before everyone else (Jean\u00c2\u00a0and the boys went 90 miles while the rest of the girls went 83), I showered first. Mike had turned on the water heater and said we had hot water. I could discern maybe five degrees difference between the hot and cold faucets, so I took the shortest shower on record while still washing and rinsing the important areas. When the boys got back I told them of the problem and one of them switched the water heater from “vacation” to heat.<\/p>\n
After a while, Brian took his shower and couldn’t feel any heat at all. He would get wet, turn the water off, lather up, and then turn the water back on to rinse. He was visibly cold after he finished (no, not the shrinkage factor…blue lips) so then it was Tom’s turn. He said the water had not heated at all and, just before he finished, he thought he would turn the shower handle to cold. Instant\u00c2\u00a0hot water. The hot water\u00c2\u00a0handle was on the right,\u00c2\u00a0just the opposite of what\u00c2\u00a0it would\u00c2\u00a0normally be.\u00c2\u00a0The girls had very nice warm showers.<\/p>\n
After an eight plus mile run Sunday morning (everyone else ran longer), and a great breakfast with the group, Jean and I headed for my Aunt Juanita’s cottage to put in the dock. Without going into great detail, the mosquitoes were worse than I remembered, the dock sections were heavier than I remembered, there was one way to pick up the dock supports that would pinch your fingers and I found that way immediately (sorry Aunt Neat…I may have used a\u00c2\u00a0bad word or two), but we got the dock in and it held my weight, so it should hold anybody. All the time we were there\u00c2\u00a0I was drifting down memory lane. That’s the cottage my Grandfather built when I was three and we went there every summer when I was growing up.<\/p>\n
Today Jean suggested that we go out for “a recovery ride” and I agreed. The wind was blowing 12-15 mph and gusting, we rode 39 miles…not the 25 I expected, we added on eight miles of hills in the middle (THAT’S NOT RECOVERY), and I didn’t take nearly enough fluids. I know Jean, so why would I ever believe that her idea of recovery and my idea of recovery would be\u00c2\u00a0the same. While we rode the last couple of blocks she had the audacity to say “That was a pretty good training ride”, to which I responded, “It would have been, had we been doing a training ride instead of the recovery ride you said we would be doing”. Do you think what I said made any difference?<\/p>\n
Just (Tuckered Out On The Holiday Weekend) Jack<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
After taking Thursday off from training for the Muncie Endurathon, I spent Friday running\u00c2\u00a0five miles, mowing the lawn at the lake, trimming the lawn at the lake, doing three loads of laundry,\u00c2\u00a0driving three plus hours to Traverse City for dinner with Becky and her sister Judy, and then driving on another 45 minutes to Torch […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-249","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-weekly-email"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jackswriting.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jackswriting.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jackswriting.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jackswriting.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jackswriting.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=249"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.jackswriting.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jackswriting.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=249"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jackswriting.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=249"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jackswriting.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=249"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}