I Hit A Chicken On My Bike...Or Rather The Chicken Hit Me!

Once upon a time there was a young girl around the age of 24, whom hails from the heart of the Willamette Valley, that fell in love with the sport of triathlon. Generally, she swims, bikes, and runs 3-4 times a week in each discipline. For awhile, she was swimming at a couple different pools, but lately it works out best to swim at the pool that is closer to her, which is the Lebanon Community Pool. Being that it is a community pool the lap swim times, with the biggest block of time, are in the morning from 5:30-8:00 am. She prefers these times, as it frees up more of her day to get her work done and have enough recovery before she proceeds to the second workout of the day. Plus, one great benefit to having an early swim is she gets to see the sunrise, which is always such a spectacular sight. As shared before in a previous post, she sleeps with a couple of manx cats every night. Her cat, Jasper, is very sensitive and does not like it when she leaves so early. Therefore, he is in a pouty mood until she returns. Sometimes it takes Jasper awhile to warm back up to her for leaving him in those early morning hours.

Lebanon Community Pool

A beautiful winter sunrise

Waiting for Her return and pouting

Being that she lives in Oregon, the weather is unpredictable. Sometimes she is able to ride outside when the roads are dry and if not, its an "enjoyable" indoor ride. On some days, the morning will start off absolutely gorgeous. The sun is shining brightly with only a few clouds in the sky. Then about an hour later the clouds role in and cover the sun giving it that wonderful grey color. Sometimes you can tell if the clouds are going to dump that lovely form of precipitation called rain, by how dark they are, but sometimes they will deceive you! As I have experienced this on several occasions. Then there are those workouts that are best suited on a stationary bike. It just so happens that those workouts sometimes fall on a day that is warm and dry. Therefore, it is time to be creative to have the best of both.

A dry and then rainy ride.

Enjoying the sun while getting in a quality workout

Beautiful daffodils with a little rain

Since she has been a runner most of her life and lived in the Northwest, it is no big deal to go out and run in the rain, cold, snow, frost, wind, hail, heat, sun, etc. Rather, it makes every run different and entertaining. The road a lot of times can be quite boring. That is why she prefers to run on trails, and she is in luck, for they are in abundance where she lives. Although, most all of the trails are quite hilly. A flat course does not exist out here, sadly enough. But hills build strength. Not only physically but mentally! Here are few pictures of the places she gets to run.

Early morning frost.

A lovely trail

After a rainy run

Old growth forest!

Now that you have read this far you get the idea of how a typical day/week of training goes. Sometimes however, there are things that happen that one would never plan on. And this just so happened to Kambria.

She went out one day riding her bike (Joon Pyo the TT bike) like she always does. That day's ride was a 2 hour adventure that started in Crawfordsville and made its way towards Sweet Home. Since Sweet Home is not super exciting she ventured out toward Foster lake. Normally she would ride about half way on the roads that are not traveled very often, but instead she decided to be courageous and ride on the highway. By doing this, she would ride all the way around Foster lake. A first for her, which always makes a ride more exciting to travel on roads that haven't been traveled before. And oh, what a beautiful ride it was! On one of the final roads on the way back home she saw a chicken in the ditch just a few yards ahead. The chicken looked calm as it was foraging in the grass and dirt. As she drew closer the chicken noticed her and didn't know what to expect and therefore, freaked out. Instead of freaking out before she was near him the chicken decided to cross the road as she was passing. This resulted in a blind panic to make it across the street where the chicken believed it was safe. By doing so, the chicken made contact with the back tire. Kambria tried to pass as quickly as possible to try and avoid a collision but was unsuccessful and felt a little thump. Thankfully, as she looked back the chicken was fine and did in fact make it across the road. We can now say we know where the joke came from "why did the chicken cross the road?" 

Foster Lake

Looks very similar to the chicken that hit her

The day of her ride was one of the famous Oregon weather change by the hour day. It rained on and off all day. It was actually quite beautiful at some points of the day when it would rain when the sun was shining.

Sunny with rain falling!

*I was very unmotivated when I first started writing this post. It started out quite sarcastically and evolved into what you just read. Hope you enjoyed it. :)