There was supposed to be a bike rally in Granbury, Texas, yesterday, but it was canceled by the organizer a couple of weeks ago for lack of sponsorship. Undaunted, my friends (Phil, Randy, Bryce) and I decided to ride the course anyway. We parked our vehicles at an intersection 3½ miles into the course and followed the map that I had downloaded from the Internet. Instead of 63 miles, we ended up with 56. The weather was tolerable. We never saw the sun, which was depressing, and we rode in a mist for a while, which made it hard to see through my glasses, but the temperature was fine and we had little wind to fight. The average wind speed for the day was only 4.5 miles per hour. I don't count it as windy unless it's 10 miles per hour or higher. Sometimes the average is over 20 miles per hour.
I didn't get much of a workout. My average heart rate for three hours, 26 minutes of riding was 105. I've seen it as high as 132 for a rally. My maximum heart rate was 146. I did burn some calories, however (a total of 1,501), so the ride wasn't a waste. My average speed was 16.26 miles per hour. Along the way, my home boys and I had two confrontations with dogs. In both cases, the dog came onto the road as we passed by. This is extremely dangerous. If you hit a dog, even while traveling slowly, you go down, which could result in a broken collarbone or some other serious injury. In some cases, if you yell at a dog, it will stop in its tracks; but these dogs kept running after us. I thought the first one was going to bite my leg. We got through it safely, fortunately. Early on in the ride, we saw a wild turkey run to the road and, upon seeing us, take flight. I don't know that I've ever seen a turkey in the wild, so that was interesting. I also saw a llama or an alpaca standing in a creek bed. All in all, it was an enjoyable ride.
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 
