Garmin Data: http://connect.garmin.com/activity/50366140

Believe me, I know first hand just how short the days are getting. I raced home today so that I could squeeze in a bike ride before the sun disappeared behind the foothills. I left work at 5:00 pm thinking that if I could get out a few minutes after 6:00 pm then I could get a good hour of riding in. Well, things never go as quickly as I would like. The drive home to a tad longer than is optimal and then it took a bit longer to change and get ready to roll. I called Sara and invited her to join me —  she was game. By the time I left the house and met up with Sara it was 6:17 pm and my Garmin said that sunset was at 7:01 pm. UGH! We raced off. Probably faster than we should have. We should have made time for at least a 5-10 minute warm-up. Nope. Both of us felt the pressure of time. We literally raced off and hammered for all we were worth to do what — beat the sunset? Believe it or not, that’s what we were doing. We only got about 4 miles out before the sun sank and the sky started to darken and take on an orange glow. Even with red-blinky-lights and Scooter’s headlight, our desire to live to ride another day won out and we turned around and headed home with the same intensity. We rode 8 miles in about 25 minutes. We slowed down quite a bit after we turned onto our “home stretch”  as an attempt at a cool-down. Not that it made up for having no warm-up. Sara and I agreed that getting out for a short ride was better than not getting out at all — and we really did make the most of the time we had.

Can’t wait for the days to start getting longer again. Geesh, that’s quite a ways off though, isn’t it!