The Ride: We should have see the warning signs that the fates had it in for us. Before we even got started, Betsy had a flat. As she changed it, she had asked me for my expertise on headsets. I began explaining in quite a bit of detail on how you wear them on your head and music comes out of them, which is quite pleasant, when she politely informed me that she was referring to a bicycle headset. Turns out, Betsy had just returned from a trip to Phoenix with her bike and she herself had reassembled the machine. It looked quite nice to me but she was concerned about the headset. I gave her a reassuring shrug of my shoulders and went back to talking about myself to make her feel better. With the flat fixed, we confidently set off on our ride. In our naiveté, we figured that we just got the worst part out of the way with the flat before the ride had even started.

I had informed Betsy that today's keyword was "hills". Both of us, for various reasons, have not been training as much as we would have liked lately. With great gusto, I decided what better way to get back into training than to jump right in with a hill workout. We carefully picked our way through traffic, but within a couple miles, Betsy realized her stem was misaligned. A stop at a shady spot and a few twists of the multitool quickly resolved the problem. Back to the ride, we slowly began to lose the traffic and approached our first test, Mont Bonnell. We both got up and over with relative ease, a nice surprise to both of us. As we made our decent along the steep, twisting road, Betsy discovered a great secret of bicycle maintenance: it is very important to make sure the handlebars are securely fastened to the stem. Unfortunately, the way she discovered this was that her weight on the handlebars combined with the bumpy road and loose screws caused the bars to twist downward in such a way that the brakes were nearly impossible to operate. Luckily, on that sharp turn near the bottom of the hill, Betsy was able to observe the "yellow line rule" by an inch or two, which the on-coming traffic was very grateful (as was Betsy). A quick stop and more multitool action and we were off again.

We both knew that the big test of our day was to be a Sides' favorite, the Col de Redbud. Feeling the challenge wasn't difficult enough for riders coming off a long break, we made sure to attack the hill in full Texas sunlight and on empty stomachs. We tried to shout encouragements of "Allez! Allez!" to one another but it somehow got lost near my eye bulging max heart rate and Betsy wondering if she was going to lose yesterday's lunch too. Eventually, we did triumph, and we sat at the top of the hill congratulating one another and deciding our reward. Unanimously, we proclaimed we were taking the easy way home. We picked our way through downtown and decided to get in a little cyclocross training by following the Shoal Creek Trail. Our relatively uneventful trip north again buoyed our confidence. We found ourselves sitting on 360 and I asked, shall we take the easy way home or the hard way? After a great discussion, we agreed to tackle one last hill for the day, Le Alps de Bluffstone. However, an ill timed flat on my front tire caused us to pull over on 360 for a fast repair. With a new tube, we sailed down 360 toward our objective. The sun was very low in the sky and our bellies were full of Gu and Fig Newtons. We had forgotten the earlier pain we felt and attacked the hill. The hill responded by quickly reacquainting with the earlier pain and adding some more for good show. Again, we took a page from the pros and tried to encourage our teammate. Both of us had great lines about spinning and tempo but all that came out was "Nyyaahhh!" and "Uhhhhgg!" Near the top of the climb, I heard the sickeningly familiar sound of a tube popping. All to happy to pull over, I again set about repairs. After inspecting the tire and seeing no damage, I installed a new tube and again shot it with CO2. It too exploded. I had missed a large tear in my side wall. Down to our final tube and my last CO2, we carefully booted the tube and gently filled the tire. The boot held. By this time, the sun had long set, but we only had to work our way through a neighborhood to get to my apartments. Several hills later, we were one block from my apartment. We were practically being carried up the last hill on joyous thoughts of a hard ride won and Fig Newton wrappers when this serenity was broken by a soft pop and the words no one ever wants to hear:

An act that can only be described as more cowardly and base than a Frenchman standing on a mountainside booing and yelling "Dopé", an unknown assassin had shot brave Betsy in the leg with a BB gun. Being the chivalrous male I am, I proceeded to shout loudly into the bushes lining the road the horrible acts I would commit upon their person if they would so kindly come out into the open to receive it. Not surprisingly, the assailant did not take me up on my offer and we were forced to ride on without satisfaction. We did finally make it home, a little after 9pm. Our hour and a half training ride had become a three hour epic journey.