jschen

Part two: hills and wind (miles 28-77)
After a brief break to allow me to recover from that hammerfest a bit, chow down a Clif bar, and remove all my cold weather gear, dog hair and I went on our way. Heading eastward, there were lots of emergency personnel apparently dealing with a bunch of arson in the shrubs just off the bike path paralleling CA-76. We mostly took it easy on the trail; I figured dog hair needed a chance to warm up, I could use a chance to recover a bit from the hammerfest that CR had inflicted on me, and there was lots of socializing to be done. The headwinds were incredibly annoying, and it got worse once off the bike path. Being afraid of blowing up, I couldn't really keep up with dog hair when fighting the wind. (Actually, I had a lot more trouble in general keeping up this time. dog hair was in much better shape today than he was two weeks ago.) Our first climb, along West Lilac Road, had us basically riding together and doing some socializing. This wasn't part of the original plans, but with the headwinds so annoying, we decided that throwing in an extra climb was far more enjoyable than continuing along the way into the wind.

Many other smaller climbs followed, and having little clue where I was, I simply followed dog hair's lead. Except he often had to wait at turns for me because I would keep slipping back on the climbs. And he was pulling away on the flat sections, too. I felt a bit bad about holding him up, but I hope he didn't mind too much. I was going about as fast as I normally would, but dog hair definitely had picked it up a notch compared to last time. And I really didn't want to pick up my game too much since I still had to ride home afterward. I did my best to not hold him up too much, though when we started turning around and enjoying a strong tailwind, I had to let him go in order to not waste too much energy on flying along at really high speeds.

Then we got back on the bike path back toward Oceanside harbor, and a strange thing happened. Even though we had fought headwinds on the way out, we were now fighting headwinds on the way back! Hey, no fair! I was looking forward to that tailwind. We could still do 15 MPH or so pretty comfortably, but it just didn't seem worth it, so we mostly socialized on the ride back to the coast. The emergency personnel were still out there in force, with police helicopters now joining in. I hope they catch the guy soon.