<p><span style="font-size:medium;"><span style="font-family:calibri;">With the rain coming on and off this morning [varying in intensity between sprinkles and downpours], I thought I might be able to get a nice drizzly 20-miler in today.</span></span></p>
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<p><span style="font-size:medium;"><span style="font-family:calibri;">It was sufficiently cloudy when I left the house [Team Tania jersey in FULL glory] that I didn’t expect it to be long before I was soaking. Yeah well, my weather-reading skills aren’t what they used to be. Although the air was thick & humid, it was still too warm for it to shift over to precipitation. What was worse, at about the 8-mile mark, the sun actually came out, warming the roads and what puddles & dampness were left from earlier in the day. The upside was that the woods were spectacularly lush this afternoon.</span></span></p>
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<p><span style="font-size:medium;"><span style="font-family:calibri;">It had been a while since I rode this particular route; it’s NOT one of D’Wife’s favorites and there is a considerable bit of climbing [“climbing” being a relative term, down here in Farm Country]. So it was understandable that I didn’t turn where I should have gone left and added a nice 2-mile loop to my journey. When I re-found myself at the intersection where I’d made this mistake [by SHEER Dumb Luck, I must add] … wouldn’t you know, I almost made the same turn AGAIN???</span></span></p>
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<p><span style="font-size:medium;"><span style="font-family:calibri;">This is where the oddities of my own “special” Zen-Core Dork Brain come in</span></span></p>
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<p><span style="font-size:medium;"><span style="font-family:calibri;">“Okay, looks like your 20-miler is gonna come to 22 … but that’s kind of a funky number; it won’t look good on your log … let’s go for 24”</span></span></p>
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<p><span style="font-size:medium;"><span style="font-family:calibri;">I reached the 24-mile mark about ½-mile out from home.</span></span></p>
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<p><span style="font-size:medium;"><span style="font-family:calibri;">“Might as well make 25!!!”</span></span></p>
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<p><span style="font-size:medium;"><span style="font-family:calibri;">I pedaled around an adjacent development.</span></span></p>
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<p><span style="font-size:medium;"><span style="font-family:calibri;">“You know,” my Zen-Core voice told me “Using 1.5 points per mile your VRAA score for the ride would be37.5. Why not go to 26 and make it an even 39? Plus, you don’t want to go LESS than 2 hours do you?”</span></span></p>
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<p><span style="font-size:medium;"><span style="font-family:calibri;">I rolled into the driveway EXACTLY 2 hours after I’d left.</span></span></p>
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<p><span style="font-size:medium;"><span style="font-family:calibri;">I did 100 push-ups to bump my VRAA points to 40 on the day.</span></span></p>
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<p><span style="font-size:medium;"><span style="font-family:calibri;">It never rained.</span></span></p>