rethinking success and failure

adam's got a pretty good write-up of yesterday's ride. short version is we headed out for a gravel metric and came up about 8 miles short ending around 54 miles in around 5 hours. it was cold, much colder and windier than expected. other than the second triple d i'm pretty sure this is the first time i've planned to ride a metric and "failed". as we were riding back in and discussing how close we'd be and whether or not we could ride around town to finish up the metric i mentioned something about failing which led to a pretty interesting conversation. we had planned to ride at least 62 miles and didn't. that's what we didn't do. here's what we DID do...rode 54 miles of gravel slightly underprepared for how nasty the cold and wind were. we rode into the dark and felt the bottom drop out of the temperature even when riding with the wind. we ate a lot, talked and laughed a lot and got in 5 solid hours of riding on a day when most people probably chose to sit inside and watch t.v. we laughed at aaron's comment about needing a full epic set-up to ride with us, then laughed again when we realized he was right (though he unfortunately wasn't able to make it for the ride). i learned that poptarts don't freeze. i laughed at adam having a pretty deep conversation with some turkeys while i got my bacon and orange slices situated, suffered from my worst case of frozen feet since the first year of triple d and adam brought me my new pugsley wheels he just finished building. yeah, we didn't ride 62 miles. but we didn't fail either. perspective...