Fifteen seconds of drinking pleasure

Thursday in Lake Placid started with my daughter's taxi taking her to her plane in Plattsburgh. That all went smoothly.

Somehow, in the course of her departure, I tweaked some muscle in my leg. I'm not sure how that happened; all I was doing was walking up and down a few steps, but it affected how I approached the day. My intention was to try to tackle a hill that I had been unable to successfully climb on previous visits. It's a vicious little thing, coming after about 1000 feet of climbing from low point to high, there's a fairly steep uphill followed by a short flat followed by a 200 foot rise in about half a mile. That may not sound like much but you try it.

I decided that a wiser course would be to nurse it through a more forgiving course (though there are no flat rides to be taken here of more than 3 or 4 miles and I am not here to do laps) and see just how bad it was. The idea was that if it was actually injured that I only had one hard ride left in me and I didn't want to do it 3 days before the last day. I did around 15 miles and it was sore at times but not awful. The rest of the day was pretty uneventful, I think. I kayaked a couple of times (including an unusually close encounter with a loon- they really are beautiful birds) and had another long swim.

I think my Favorite Fifteen (and I'm not going to blog about these forever though I will continue to think about them) was fifteen seconds this time. It was my first sips of a very delicious beer at the restaurant where we had dinner. It was a really delicious farmhouse ale, which is one of my favorite varieties, and it just hit the perfect spot at that moment. I just read that, thanks to the microbrewery explosion, there are now more breweries in the US now than there have ever been, and as someone who has been a beer drinker since 1973 (drinking age was 18 when I was in college), I really appreciate the quality of many of these small batch beers and ales.

I had such a busy summer that I was counting on my time here to actually unwind and relax. I don't like staking so much on any one thing, but in my experience, Lake Placid rarely fails me. I've slowed down but kept my sharpness. I've slept more than usual and spent the vast majority of my time outside in this marvelous air. I don't want to go home. But I'll be back.

And by the end of the day, my leg wasn't hurting at all. A 60 year-old body is such a weird thing.