Took a ride this morning on a backcountry farm road. It is charitably listed as a branch of the local rail trail but it is a Stapfam quality ride without the extreme hills. 2 tire tracks between the vegitation with a road surface that was gravel at its best and 3" diameter rocks where the maintenance crews are trying to fill wet areas. There were even a few stretches of 1" traprock (sharp and nasty) thrown in. Generally a great saturday morning workout here in CT. The ride was fortunately up on the outbound an down on the return and ran for a total of 24 miles.
After being thuroughly disheartened on the outbound trip by average speeds approaching a wopping 9mph (I was struck in the back at one point by a butterfly) I began to hammer the return with speeds in spots approaching (well, I'll keep that to myself). I had flipped the display on the computer back to total miles to see if all this effort was doing any good. Just about a mile and a half from the trailhead I began to hit the wall but was close enough to continue without slowing much.
At this point in a sort of pain inducd haze I began to struggle to get the milage on the computer to keep going up. No matter how had I rode it would creep upward at some glacial pace. It would click off another 10th of a mile every minute. It was the total ride time display.
Here I was killing myself at 20+ on dirt trying to get my clock to run faster. I hate those machines.