Bookending

Riding home from work is pretty straightforward. You close up shop, get on your bike, and ride home. Riding to work is trickier. I can get home any time I want, but there is a certain time I have to show up at the job, and both calculating when to leave home and deciding what to take are the morning's challenge. Since I had not only not ridden home from work since 2009, but also not ridden to it since then, I had to spend the whole weekend thinking about this. Fortunately, I had a lot of beer and a rather big football game to help out the thought process.

However, a ride to work means being awake to hear the crack of dawn. In fact, you should be drinking your first cup of coffee when it cracks. Fortunately, I was pretty excited by the whole thing, and I'd been training my early-rising mind-set for a while. Getting ready to leave home was an issue--there were complications. A 5:30am departure was delayed until 5:45, but that's still pretty early.

So, this Monday, I set out in the dark towards the coast, and met it and the dawn proper in Carlsbad.

What was left was the relatively flat ride to San Diego which I spent thinking mostly about what gear I should choose to go up the Torrey Pines Grade (I picked the 36x21). Once over that, I could get a better idea of how much commuting I could do, and for the next couple of weeks, I'll be bookending them--ride all the way to work Monday and all the way home Friday.

And since it is now indeed Friday, I'll be riding home tonight. I will be helped by the attractive force provided by the cold beers I have stocked in my `fridge. That should keep the morale up this evening!