Published on Thursday, May 12th, 2005 .
It’s been so nice here at night the past few nights, makes for great riding. My normal commute home is just under 14 miles. Last night it was so nice that I decided to take a long detour and turn it into a 20 mile ride with a stop at Waffle House about the halfway point. All told, I put in about 26 miles yesterday with 6.49 of them coming before work.. the rest after work. Amusingly, the 6.49 miles before work netted me a 13.1mph average speed.. by the time I got home (after riding the 20 miles) my average speed had actually increased to 14.0 so apparently I was hauling ass riding home. Needless to say, 65 degrees @ 3am is wonderful riding weather. It’s also nice because traffic is significantly less at that time of the morning. Amusingly, at like 4:30am on a side road somewhat near my house, I actually passed another person on a bicycle going the opposite direction. Douchebag didn’t have a helmet or a light of any sort… on top of that, he was wearing dark clothing. At least he was riding on the road and not on the sidewalk like most fuckwads around here like to do.
On a somewhat similar note, now that the weather has gotten better I’m seeing a lot more cyclists commuting around town during the afternoon. It’s definitely neat to ride downtown and pass 5 or 10 cyclists riding around various places. At least I’m not the only cycle commuter around here. However, it seems that most of them don’t ride 14-15 miles to and from work. Most of them seem to live in the general vicinity of downtown so they don’t have to ride as far. Still cool to see, though.
Published on Thursday, May 12th, 2005 .
So yeah, since our weather has been so fucking wonderful the past few days, I actually got a chance to get some good miles in the past couple days. I got 22 miles in with Sam on Monday on a route that I’d REALLY like to do again at a faster pace. Basically it was pretty hilly and I kept dropping him and having to wait. There was one section of our route that was just a megawhore, to say the least. One short, steep climb followed by a hellacious downhill (36mph on a mtn bike!) then a mile-long uphill climb yet again. It undoubtedly kicked my ass but it felt great. Knowing that I pedalled up that huge hill without stopping made me feel pretty good. Obviously once I got to the top, I had to sit and wait on Sam for like 15 mins but it was still great fun. He actually did damn well overall on those hills, riding well over halfway up both of them. The thing that amused me both was the disparity in the amount of liquid the two of us consumed. In the 22 mile ride, I managed to drink a 32oz bottle of powerade and some sprite @ Chick Fil-A. Sam drank three 32oz bottles of powerade and two cups of water (one at McAllister’s, one at Chick Fil-A). It’s rather fitting though since he is over 3x my size. Anyway, fast forward to Tuesday. I actually managed to get in 18 miles. I could have done more but I got lazy once I got home. I’m rather pissed at myself because I could have easily gotten in 30 miles total or more. To make up for that, I’m taking a really long weird route home tonight, I think. I don’t have any real reason to go straight home and I have a pretty damn good bit of energy I could stand to burn off. I just hope my headlight holds out. Time to consult Google Maps to plan out my route.