Thursday, July 17, 2008

Pushing It

Last night my riding buddy (you know Jenny) and I went for a quick 20 mile ride while the kids were at mutual. It sure is great to have older kids. Since we were only riding 20 miles and we had to go to a dreaded scout committee meeting after mutual we both agreed that we would push it and ride as fast as we could.

The ride started out at our house and we headed straight up the hill on 64th to highway 9. This is typically a pretty miserable hill to climb but it wasn’t too bad this time. I’m not really quite sure why. It might be that we had BBQ ribs for dinner right before we rode. You never know, that could be the new energy food. Probably not though. Anyway, on the way up the hill I actually passed someone. OK, he was riding a heavy mountain bike and he was wearing jeans and had a backpack on but I still passed him.

Once we made it to Centennial Trail Jenny and I tried to keep up a good pace. We didn’t do too bad and it helped that the trail to Machias is slightly down hill.

When we reached Machias we stopped to fill our water bottles and took a quick rest. There were a couple of wannabe pro cyclist standing there that we listened to try to one up each other telling stories. It was pretty funny. Both of them had full racing uniforms on which looked pretty goofy but they had really nice bikes. I guess I’m a pretty big bike nerd when it comes to knowing what people are riding. I can’t help myself.

On the trail back there are tons of false flats so it’s a mentally tough ride. We really pushed it and kept our speed up although there were some long slight uphill sections. We passed a lot of other bike riders so Jenny and I practiced doing “The Look” by Lance Armstrong.

If you’re not sure what that is check out this video. You’ll recognize it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7THIhZEP4QM

I know, kind of dorky but it was entertaining.

We were able to finish up the ride in just over an hour and a half. This beat my time on this route by about 10 minutes.

All in all it felt really good to push it on a shorter ride.

Stats
Miles: 22
Duration: 1:33
Avg Speed: 14
Max Speed: 33
Avg Cadence: 78

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