What's a Delmer Look Like?

Which is not a bad thing.

It was windy along stretches of the ride -- fields with month-old corn and soy beans don't really offer a lot in the way of windbreaks.

At one point I was doing a pretty effortless 25 mph down a stretch of road that was in really good shape. As good as this sounds it is an indication of future problems. I was pretty sure that I'd eventually be riding into the headwind that was, at that moment, pushing me along in the form of a tailwind. Sure enough -- about 20 minutes later it was all I could do to crank out 12 mph.

It must have been about 8 p.m. when I decided I'd better head home regardless of the number of miles I was going to make. At this point I was more concerned that getting lost was going to shave miles off the trip and that I'd come in at something under 50 miles. I'd probably cranked out 30 miles by this time.

And I was sort of lost. Not oh-my-god-perish-in-the-heartland lost. Just off course. I was wearing a GPS and I think, there is a function that will help me get home in there.

And I knew to keep the sun at my back. This was part of a larger plan -- with the sun at my back on the way home, traffic coming up behind me will not be blinded by the light -- or cut loose like a deuce -- and would be less likely to hit me.

And really, I wasn't all that far from home.

Just below the u in Mechanicsburg you'll see a spur that seems to go nowhere. There's a smaller spur off that -- a route I almost took before deciding to undo some pedaling and backtrack. You men will understand just how hard it is to backtrack -- it is always more exciting to plunge forward into the great unknown than it is to go back and undo something.

The urge to explore the great unknown is easier to control on a bike.

If you were so bored that you took a look at the Google Map, chose GMAP, and you zoomed in on the southern-most leg of my trip (the straight line) and followed it along, you will actually see the blip in my path where I stopped my bike, spoke with a local guy and refilled my water bottle from his hose (the GPS is on my wrist ... not mounted to the bike.) The whole thing is pretty cool, really. The guy told me that Rt. 38 was just up the road -- I was going the right way.

I should probably mention that the first thing I did yesterday was go to the gym. Yesterday was an upper-body day. I worked my chest, shoulders, back and triceps. A lot of those muscles are the same muscles used in keeping a person upright on a bike. A smart person would give his body more than 8 hours to recover before heading out on a 50-mile ride.

At 35 miles my shoulders were killing me as was my neck. My quads were also burning and I was disappointed to discover they burned more when I coasted than when I was pedaling.

It was getting dark when I hit the bike trail -- a signal that I had a mere 6.5 miles left. Per the bike computer I was going to make the 50 miles. I was tired enough that you couldn't have paid me to try for another one mile, let alone five.