Wait, is this really a cycling blog?

I wasn't going to post about this, but it ended up being quite the event last night. Check out all 8 of us ladies huddled in the bathroom at Cherokee Park, seeking shelter from last night's thunderstorms.



Here we are before the ride started.

Note the blue skies in the background. Unfortunately, we were not riding that direction. We thought we had time to get in a quick 13 mile ride + 3 mile run before the storms came, but that was not the case. I saw a few flickers of lightning as Bridgette and I were climbing the first of the two climbs on the route, and headed into a shelter to wait for the group to catch up. We had just all arrived, and the full storm came. We huddled around the picnic table in the middle and were still getting wet. Ryan called, and wanted to know where I was. He was glad we were relatively safe and not out on the road. Ginger had the radar on her phone, and it was not looking good. We just kept an eye on the sky to try to catch a break. We knew of 2 more shelters we could potentially use if our breaks were not long enough. We rode to the next one with no issues. We were just about to pass the area when the storms started to come again. Forgetting I was on a road bike and not a mountain bike, I was trying to figure out how to best get back to the shelter on some sort of path, but at that point, just rode up to the bathroom that was past the shelter on the road. We all tried to squeeze underneath the overhang, but then just figured why not go inside. It was so funny, we found a couple of guys to take the above picture. They were pretty embarrassed to be in the ladies room, and thought we were pretty silly. Don't you always where your helmet to the bathroom? You can see that I was one of the few that didn't. That was because I was the dork testing out my aero helmet since this was a rather short ride. If I didn't like it, at least I didn't have to put up with it long. I couldn't stand up against the wall without bonking it, but aside from that, I really liked it. We finally caught another lull in the storms, and had a slow descent down from where we were. There was tons of water over the road, including an overflowing sewer drain- ewww! So much so that we felt like this was more of a swim/bike brick than the bike/run. We finally made it back to the store. We debated on the possibility of still trying to run, and then it started pouring and storming again. There was our answer.

They don't call this ride the Monday Night Mayhem for nothing! Hopefully next week I can get in good ride. At least I had some good company, and our breaks gave us the opportunity to get to know each other a little bit. It will be the last Monday night ride I do before the race. Boy did I feel better being back on the treadmill again today. It was raining this morning still.