9/24/2003
A couple of weeks ago someone said to me, “one week we had like 18-20 guys then the next week, unexplicably we had 5!”. That night was last night. We were down to a foolish group of five. Fearless leaders, a DMOS guy who works for Garvis Honda (forget his name) and the weakest link (that’d be me). There were some Thunder Juniors but no co-mingling. Should have gone w/my gut and bailed at the start.
Chad says–since there’s only 5 of us why don’t we take a different route to mix things up a bit! Dave says, Whatever–and starts rolling down Urbandale. Less than 2 miles in a white utility truck rolls past us and mullet-boy driver yells something and, yup you guessed it–Dave gives chase. Only this time we catch up with him at that first stop sign top of the first small hill after turning off Urbandale. Dave rolls up to the window and starts lighting F-bombs, Chad marches around to the passenger side to give mullet’s girlfriend and earful and DMOS tosses his wheels toward me, walks up to the drivers door as he was starting to open it, slams it back on him and says “You don’t want to get out of that truck” Muse and I held up our end of the deal by parking ourselves right behind the truck just in case he thought he was going to back up. Yeah, right. This went on literally for 2-3 minutes of all sorts of unprintables traded off. DL down the gauntlet when he challenges Mullet to bring all his friends to the parking lot next to us next Tuesday night. I’ll be selling tickets and refreshments.
As he finally rolls away from us he sticks his head out the window and starts yelling back at us–further infuriating DL. As luck would have it, we ran into him 3 more times on/around Euclid until we passed the Target stoplight.
Once that exitement passed and my shorts dried we took the left onto 12th toward I-80. Here’s where the fun really started! We headed east on NW 54th street–first road after the I-80 overpass. Horrible road–needed an offroad bike. 1/2 mile in a bridge was out and reconstruction going on. We pull up to the sight and were ordered to pick up our wheels and walk across. So we walk across several meters of dirt, rock, mud, etc..early season cyclocross training I guess. Then we wound our way east/north east for what seemed to be forever and ended up east of Bondurant. No clue how we got there or really where we were. Just know my lungs and legs were blown from trying to keep up with the group. The DMOS guy and I were dropped a couple times but never more than 50 meters back. Chad came back a couple times to pull me back to the group.
Getting dusky by now and we’re still an hour out as we turn around. A few miles on the way back as I was fighting to hang on I turned to DMOS in defeat and told him I was done. We kept rolling and hit a hill and I felt the end coming. Next thing I know I feel DL grabbing my back and literally pushing me up a couple hills. Nice guy. He had to help pull me back a couple other times as well.
We entered town somewhere on the East-Side–no clue where and there was no sun left. Hit Hubbell, Euclid, E-24th street, and rolled by Grandview College. Finally hit Rocket Park so I felt safe as it was really starting to get dark. We jumped on the trail in the dark and a couple critters jumped out in front of us. At one point a ‘coon jumped out of the woods and right into the left of my rear wheel. Scared the be-jeepers out of me.
AniMal