Welcome To My World On Highway 61

Out On Highway 61…

A lot of thinking goes on when you’ve logged over 50,000 miles on a bicycle.  Sometimes as much as I enjoy riding my bike I can get bored and need to do things to keep myself from going crazy.  I try not to let my mind wander too far and start thinking about my imaginary childhood friend.  Wow, two weeks in a row my imaginary childhood friend gets a mention on my blog.  He will be as popular as Jimmy Sad Eyes if I keep this up.

To make things interesting, I will occasionally target an elapsed time to hit when I am partially through my ride.  For example, I might be 12 miles into a 30 mile ride and I will try to complete the ride in a specific time like 1 hour 38 minutes and 25 seconds.  If I do it faster than that time I win the Tour de France, if not, I come in second.  The biggest kick I get is to come as close as possible to the exact time.  I have done this probably 50 times or more over 23 years and usually can get it within 20 seconds.

I will sometimes listen to music when I am riding my bike.  When I listen to the music I try to make connections between the song that is playing and my location on the bike.  Let me give you an example.

Once, when I was riding my bicycle on the Silver Comet Trail I passed under Georgia highway 61 and Bob Dylan’s song; Highway 61 Revisited was playing on my MP3 player while in shuffle mode.  This has happened only once in the 15 months I have been in Georgia but when it did it was a special moment.   I have recently created a playlist specifically for riding my bike and I have included that song in my list of 120 selections.  This has improved my odds significantly by stacking the deck but it’s my world out there and I make the rules.  I never really liked that song all that much but once that serendipitous confluence of music and geography meshed I ranked it a little higher.

I hope you enjoyed a glimpse inside of my world… out on highway 61.  I even use the time on my bike to come up with topics for my blog or to figure out ways to Turn Things On End To Achieve Results. 

Have a great week.