Limp In, Leap Out

According to its Chamber of Commerce, this is the motto of Hot Springs, Montana.  I can't actually find any proof, but according to Elisa, Hot Springs has the second most healingest waters anywhere.  Well it's hard to beat that.  Thus, we rode bikes to Hot Springs on Saturday, taking a rather arduous back road route.  I mean, there's no point in "tapering" when you haven't "trained" for a race, right?  Am I right? 

Because it's Elisa, she taped speakers and an iPod to her bike.  We couldn't possibly do this ride without Madonna.  She tried to tell me that the only song on the iPod was "Lucky Star" by Madonna, but she wasn't facile enough with the iPod to put it on repeat so the truth was quickly revealed.  It was actually really great fun having tunes the whole time.

The road basically climbs for about 20 miles then goes down for about 5 and is then flat for 20 more miles.  Hardly seems fair but the road was pretty bad in places which made the downhill a little scary.  My brain was shaking so hard I couldn't see.  So I rode my brakes quite a bit.

My favorite thing was that of the things Elisa was carrying in her small backpack, she had a bottle of homemade raspberry wine that she reported "tastes terrible until the second sip."  She brought this in case we found ourselves stuck in a ditch killing time, waiting for a ride or something (we saw almost no cars and there's no cell service so the wine would have helped for awhile I'm sure).

Alas, there was no sitting in the ditch and instead I drank the raspberry wine, to which I added water for rehydration purposes, in one of the hot springs pools.  I certainly came in limping and left leaping but I'm not sure if it was those healing waters or Caleb's homemade raspberry wine...

I'm sure that it's all good preparation for the Slickrock 100 this weekend.  If nothing else I'll enjoy the company of friends and get to enjoy some desert before hunkering down for winter.