I"LL TAKE THAT ONE BACK

i said the hard work on the bike isn't what's hard about his job (see below). .
i take that back.
today was hard.
Levi and I went out alone. . he said all his other dude's backed out .. they "wanted" to go mountain biking. . . that's when the first alarms should have gone off.
rather (and rather optimistically) i was like, "wow, just me and Levi"
as if i had been selected for Make a Wish Foundation ..
we started out with an hour behind a motor scooter, moving at 35+ mph. .
then we hung a left up a climb. . 2000' of elevation later . . we decended into the valleys,
stopping off at Middletown.
Levi was like "wow, that normally takes 3 hours. . we did it in 2:05"!
then we (Levi) punched it through the rolling hills,
then another climb up and over into Napa Valley ..
later, and a gazillion calories later, we stopped in the town of Calistoga.
I asked "hey, how we going home?"
"Spring Mountain Road."
"Oh" (i meant "sheeat, that's steep")
I got dropped. ..
To sum everything up.. . we made it back to Santa Rosa,
as a wave of relief came over me, Levi rolled past the turn off to his house.
?
I asked where we were at?
he said: "4.5hr, 33km avg speed, 7000+ ft of climbing (he has a GPS system) .. . "
"you want to do another climb?" he asked.
I lied, "sure!" revealing what ever sense of enthusiasm i could muster.
the second my front wheel hit the climb my bike began to weigh a 100 lbs. .. or so it felt.
it was all i could do just to stay in site, to not get dropped too bad . . i didn't want Levi to worry, to think i was dead,
in a ditch,
or both. .
..
I managed though. . to take it like a champ. . making sure that, in the least, my mood or attitude didn't fluxuate with how i felt on the bike. .
i think my concealing the pain ability will benefit from riding with L.

i was so smoked. ..
that dude deserves a million dollars a year.