This is the End, My Only Friend the End

The last race of the series!  This weekend in Helen Ga.  I go into it tied in points for first in my class, The Kid sits solidly in second in his class.  The season's been a mixed bag with two wet races at my two favorite trails.  It wasn't as much fun as the last two seasons.  Looking back I probably should have gone a little harder earlier in the OMTP but that's hindsight.  I didn't get sick or injured during the past 26 weeks and for the most part I enjoyed the work.  I am however, looking forward to not following any regimented plan as far as my riding goes.

Another Day on the Clay

"It'll only be about 2 hours".  I swear I heard that sometime Friday evening when we were making plans for a clay road ride for the next morning.  I know I heard "This will be hard" so I was prepared for some suffering.  What it all meant was that we would be going hard for 2 hours, plus a 1.5 hour warm up and cool down. 

The three big dogs dropped me at the first set of rollers, leaving me and Dirt Hippie to find our way by ourselves.  Now Dirt Hippie is faster and stronger (and much younger) than I am but he's got that "love your brother, kumby ya" thing going on so he hung back to ride with me.  I thought he knew the route, he thought I did, we figured out we were lost when we saw the Thomasville Highway.  We were supposed to be going south, we had been going northwest.  Well that took the fight out of us pretty quick.  We were on a scenic cruise after that.

Anyhoo, we ended up at Momos for beer and pizza afterwards.  I love days like that.  I went home and took a nap.

Not About the Bike

I don't talk much on here about the other side of my life.  Here in Beautiful Downtown Havana we can't afford all the things you big city folks have.  Like full time paid fire departments.  So, we have the all volunteer deal here, of which I happen to be the assistant chief.  I've been on the department for 17 years and in that time I've seen a little bit of everything.

When people call us they are usually having a pretty bad day so it's nice when things turn out with a happy ending.  Last week we were toned out for a house fire, when we got there smoke was pouring from all sides of the wood frame home.  The first thing the homeowner said was "Can you find my dog in there?"  Now we have very limited manpower on these things so we have to make the decision quickly, do we do a search first, or attack the fire.  We did the search and were able to locate the dog in a bedroom.  He was in bad shape, the smoke was so thick we only found him by hearing his breathing, we got him out and a bystander took him to the local vet.

We saved the house (most of it anyway) and the dog lived.  The homeowner was thrilled we took the time and the risk to save the dog.  When I ask myself why I do this (and I ask myself that a lot) I just think about calls like this one, and I remember.