The weekend of April 18th & 19th, 2009, was the 25th annual MS 150 ride from Houston to Austin. This year’s ride promised to be a great one, but unfortuantely mother nature threw a kink in all of the plans.

On Friday, April 17th, a cold front rolled through central Texas and parked itself over La Grange, where the overnight camping grounds for the big ride are. During the day on Friday conditions got so bad the MS Society cancelled day one of the ride.

While everyone was bummed, we wound up having extremely heavy rain all day Saturday so the ride would have been a horrible mess and likely would have kept the majority of riders from actually participating.

The logistics of the day 2 ride were worked out during Friday and Saturday and we were to start from La Grange’s town square early Sunday morning. From there, the route would follow the normal day 2 route into Austin.

Getting to La Grange early Sunday morning wasn’t too bad, and parking was no problem at all. Not surprisingly, a stiff north wind followed the cold front so we had to ride into the wind almost the entire time. It seemed worse than the wind of 2008’s ride, but it’s hard to know for sure. The only real respite from the wind was the section of the course between Buescher and Bastop state parks.

The MS Society said 11,000 riders rode on day 2, out of the 13,000 registered; that is just amazing given the logistics of getting up to La Grange and the promise of a very windy day.

I set a new low in training miles leading up to the ride, only 594 miles since January. For comparison, I did just over 1,000 for last year’s ride. But, this year I added spin class to the training schedule so I probably had more total seat time than last year.