Today was a fantastic day for a ride. I was a bit slow to get up in the morning. When I did, the temperature was just right. In the low 50's. I ended up wearing 2 base layers, arms and knees. I brought my skull cap and face mask, but didn''t use them. The wind was from the north. I felt good right from the get-go. I didn't realize how good I was doing until I reached the summit of Banducci. Well under 38 minutes. When I got to the end of OTR, I had to adjust my headphones because the walkman was out of batteries from the beginning of the ride. I ended up using my smartphone to listen to music. That took me about 1 minute to iron out. I think I stopped once or twice before that, for a few seconds. As usual, when I reached the summit of Banducci, I switched my camera mode to video. As I was descending, in the first few hundred yards, there were some deer that crossed the road. I ended up turning around in the hopes that I would be able to photograph them. They were too fast for me, and by the time I got close enough, they had already made it down the mountain side, away from view. I got it on video and will check it out after this log entry. I felt real good on this entire ride. I would say that there were some heroics today. I made it to the SS entrance under 50 minutes and was able to make the loop in about 10 minutes, so I was about 1 hour and change at the exit of SS. I took a bit of a breather on The return leg on Banducci. Doing moderate tempo. As soon as I reached Pelisser, I decided to up the pace. The wind wasn't perfectly tail, so I wasn't going as fast compared to other rides. I was able to keep a high tempo, mostly above 20mph. I reached Boss hogs well under 1:20 hours. I was getting fatigued as I approached the last climb. I decreased the tempo to conserve some energy for the last climb. I was just at my limit of gatorade provisions. If this ride had been 15-20 minutes longer, I would have had to consume my bail-out bar. Fortunately that wasn't the case. I pushed it hard over the summit of CVR and continued with the high tempo all the way back to the door-step. My concentration was real good today. I don't think I experienced any gremlins. Which was a surprise to me. I'll take that any day, for sure! Balance was good. For some reason, on the return trip across Banducci farmlands, I just get that weird misbalanced feeling. Otherwise, it was right on the money. Ailments consisted of some minor knee pains, nothing that would detract form my pace. I stretched here and there and I think that staved of some soreness's such as in the lower back. Gear is working good. I tried my smartphone with the new charging case. It worked as advertised. The phone stayed charged at 100% for the entire ride. The charger lost 1 LED of charge (out of 4). There were some anomalys. The Charity app failed to finish. The Livetrack feature stopped tracking at around Boss Hogs. It reacquired a signal about 10 minutes later. I'm not sure if this a coincidence with the use of the charging case, but will have to see in the next few rides. Other notes, I saw Marcia on the way up OTR to Route 202. We were going the same direction.