Saturday riding with my brother 52 miles

52 miles today with my brother. Avg. spd. 14.5. Several short, steep hills.
Total miles to date: 144 (an estimate)
Miles this week: 84 (Week starts Sunday.)

A beautiful day.

I'm worn out after this ride. My longest ride to date this year was 30 miles and that was Sunday of this week with friend Mark.

We rode a route that my brother plotted out almost 20 years ago, when he first started cycling - the Berry's Chapel ride. Back when he and I rode that 10-15 years ago, I was a new cyclist, and he was my mentor.

A couple of lessons he taught me in those days:
- no matter how much I eat before a ride, or how much store of fat on my body, I can only go about two hours without having to put some food in my stomach in order to keep pedaling and to keep from bonking (he taught me about bonking too);

- one help to climbing a hill when standing is to stand as upright as possible, to place as much of the body's weight directly above the pedals, so the downstroke is simply the weight of my body pushing the pedal down.

Today, traveling this old route - that neither of us has ridden to speak of in probably 10 years - brought back memories of the early days of our cycling. Positive memories. If you think joy of life is about great memories - I heard that on the radio the other day - then this was a great day for us. I thank the Lord that I have the hands, feet, eyes, legs and all to ride a bicycle, and a 50 mile semi-rural route at that.

One remarkable turn of the day was when we came to an old turn in the road, where we used to turn off Manley Road onto Harpeth Hills Drive. At that point, Manley used to transform from a paved road to a gravel road. So we took a left and made our way to Hillsboro and then up Hillsboro to Boxwood. Today, however, my brother was surprised to see Manley paved. That did not mean much to me, but he explained that when he had first mapped out this route - now almost 20 years ago - the maps had shown this gravel section of Manley the same as the paved section - so it looked to be paved. But on his first ride back then, he had to turn left there because in fact Manley became gravel.

Today, we went straight, and this provided a much better, safer route to Boxwood.

How interesting I thought. Somewhere someone - a government planner - had planned that road to be paved. Somewhere there's somebody who knows the story of the timing of the paving of that road. "The wheels of government grind exceedingly slow but exceedingly sure." That's a saying I borrowed from a long-ago acquaintance of mine who was in the business of keeping his clients in environmental compliance with certain regulations. He would say "but exceedingly fine," noting that though slow, when the end came, the government with all its records could bring about an exceedingly fine judgment. And so, anyway, my brother's cycling plans of 20 years ago came to fruition today.

Yesterday, I purchased the one-speed cog and had it welded not to freewheel, for my Quickbeam. I'll get that put on and see how it is to ride a fixed gear.

Question of the day:
What is wisdom? How would you define it and what does it mean to you?