Saturday May 28, 2005 was the first
day of the long Memorial Holiday weekend. Both Bob and Pete were out of
town, so with my two most regular riding partners gone, bike rides this
weekend were probably going to be on my own. I am planning to ride the 30
mile route in the Tour deCure on June 12, 2005, so I need to keep riding
to stay in decent shape. When I got up Saturday morning no one was awake
yet in my house so I decided to go for a ride. I hadn’t been to the fish
store in a while and I was thinking about getting a few new fish for my 60
gallon aquarium. We have a local Petsmart on Rochester Road just south of
Avon. This would make for a nice short ride going to Petsmart and back.
I had recently been listening to Tom
and Nevin Bailey’s
internet radio show on tropical fish. They have a web
page with all their previous shows archived and I found the one on clown
loaches of particular interest. Ever since I got my 60 gallon tank I
started checking out clown loaches and thought they would be interesting
fish. After I did my usual research and found out they grew to 12 inches
I decided they would be too big. Well, after listening to Tom and Nevin
I changed my mind and decided to get a few clown loaches. Tom and Nevin
said in home aquariums clown loaches typically don’t get bigger than 5 or
6 inches. The only time they have seen these fish bigger is when they are
pulled from the wild already this size.
With a destination and purpose I got
on my bike around 8:00 am and headed toward Petsmart. Previously I have
ridden my bike to Petsmart to buy fish supplies, but I have never actually
bought live fish while on a bike ride. Because I was riding by myself and
the distance wasn’t going to be long I also decided to go at a faster than
normal pace. This would ensure I get my heart rate up and also work out
my legs.
Once I arrived at Petsmart I checked
my half way point statistics. I traveled 6.6 miles at an average speed of
14.3 mph in 27 minutes. This is a quite a nice pace, but it is more down
hill than up hill while heading south. I knew I could never maintain this
pace on the way home going primarily up hill. Once I saw my average speed
I knew I had a good chance to break the club record for average speed on
one ride if I at least maintained a decent pace going home.
In the fish store I was lucky they
had a good supply of healthy clown loaches. I asked the young man working
the fish department to get me three of them. He got out his net and in
the tank with the best looking fish he netted out three with one try.
Looking closely at them they appeared to be fine. When the guy was
bagging the fish I asked him to be careful not to include too much air in
the bag otherwise the bag might not fit in my burrito basket on the back
of my bike. He told me he had never sold fish to anyone who rode in on a
bicycle. I took a couple pictures with my phone camera of the fish in the
bag and also in the burrito basket. See the end this write up for the
pictures.
With the fish on board and the ride
north primarily up hill the pace home was slower than the ride there.
Following are the statistics for the entire ride, 13.2 miles, 25.5 max
speed, 1 hour and 1 minute on bike and a new club record of average speed
of 12.8 mph. Even with the fish onboard I was able to destroy the single
ride average speed record. The other good thing about the new fish is
they are additional candidates for pet of the month.
David Lindquist
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