Continued

By Thursday evening Brock was back to himself. Eating (some), running around, talking a bunch. Short lived bug that apparently has been making rounds at school with his teacher on the receiving end come Friday. Speaking of Friday, it was supposed to be in the low 80's in the afternoon and with lots of rain forecast over the weekend before temperatures dropping to near freezing with a snowflake possible I decided to take my d660 to work with me and take a couple hours of PTO to hit some dry trails.

After getting some drawings done and some orders made I headed out the door around 2p. I am tired. Like, I wonder if I have mono tired. So I knew I wasn't going to push it, but I needed the ride as much for the soul as the body. I rode down Hope drive to the Dow Lake Dam and up to Sundown Trail. Not far in from this end the trail climbs up and over some rocks. I have ridden this many, many times without issue. Today, taking it *easy* I spun the back tire over one of said rocks. This shifted me to the downhill side of the trail and over the edge. I got the right shoe unclipped but it was too late and head first I went sliding. No big deal. It was just a bunch of leaves, pretty steep, but I didn't hit anything. But wait, why does my calf hurt so badly? Ah, banged it pretty hard on the chainring. It will work itself out.

I kept riding. Met a kid and his dogs out loving the trails. Rode through some ramps. It wasn't working itself out. It became really painful to stand up and I felt every rough thing on the trail. I took the Scatter Ridge connector and connected with road to get back toward the dam dropping down the horse trail access back to Sundown and then back to the office.

Smells like Casa

I had to stop at my folks on the way home to fix their computer. Dad had somehow installed some Firefox add-in the was hijacking his searches. Home from there where I was supposed to get the boys before heading back out to meet my folks and my brothers family for some pizza. Got home to find E with a 103 fever. Shelly was gone for the evening so she dropped off Brock to my folks and I was going to get E to urgent care. He felt so bad he said he couldn't get in the truck. Ibuprofen and a nap then. After a while the vitamin I kicked in, dropped his temperature and he was ready to go. We just made it pulling in to Holzer at 7:57 (they close at 8). I really appreciate the staff seeing him, they could have turned us away. Interestingly they couldn't test him for flu because they have had so many people with the flu they ran out of tests. He had flu-like symptoms as well as suspected strep throat. Antibiotics and tamiflu. At CVS they could only partially fill the tamiflu. Again, so many people with the flu! Stopped at my folks again to get Brock, home at 10p and finally got to eat some dinner.

Everybody slept in on Saturday. The weather was still warm and sunny but it was going to be raining by the end of the day. I figured I better try to ride and work out my calf. Did a loop of back roads with a few big climbs. It felt OK until I hit a pothole or a washboard and it felt like I had a full on calf cramp. And the roads were not exactly in good shape. You could tell where the floods had been over the roadway in places of where it just washed out. One such road would have required a 4WD rock crawler to get through.

Hard to see, but it got a lot worse from here.

Back home and we tripped in to Athens to pick up Athens Marathon race packets. OVRC was packed! Shelly and E were supposed to run. But with E still recovering he just didn't have it in him. He missed his track meet on Saturday too. Felt bad since he had been working hard to be ready. Proud of Shelly though. A half marathon is no joke. Time and motivation to prepare is hard, especially when you are our age, job, kids, home. She stuck through it though.

And a smile.

Per Sonya Looney, 'Be Brave, Do Epic Shit" Epic is indeed relative.