Bye, bye April!
I’m 19⅔ miles short of my 400 miles goal for the month, and that’s okay, especially considering that ten days ago I was 250 miles short.
Given how crappy the weather was for the first two-thirds of the month, it’s amazing that I got this close. Even being 20 miles short in April, good weather in January still has me 70 miles ahead on the year.
Yesterday was great cycling weather, except for the winds being a little stiffer than I would have liked. But it made for a good workout, so there is that.
I rode with ‘Tude for a little over 14 miles on a 42 mile day. We were going to ride the route of the ride she’s leading on Saturday May 19. I misinterpreted the map and we rode something different entirely. (Page two, which I thought was just an inset for a section of one of the five longer rides on page one, was the ride she actually wanted.)
She doesn’t have her climbing legs yet for the season, and the mistake route had good deal of that. Frustrated, she told me to go on without her. I know better than to argue, especially when it was my mistake that got us there, so I went on.
It wasn’t the first mistake I made on the club maps that day either. When I put the day’s maps in my map case, the map from a ride I wanted to go on earlier in the month was there. It rained or something that day, so I stayed home. My route home would intersect with that map, and that ride goes somewhere I wanted to go, so I rode an improvisation from map 230 to map 178.
As it turns out, a crinkle in map 178 when I moved it to the front of my map case, caused me to miss an important intersection. I turned right when I was supposed to bear right a half-mile further on. So I turned a loop into an out-and-back.
My destination was Mendon Ponds Park, where I stopped in a pavilion at the edge of the Hundred Acre Pond and ate my lunch. I later discovered, much to my consternation, that the restrooms are still locked. Hundreds of people at the park, and not a place to pee. At least not when there are no leaves on the trees, there seems to be hikers on a trail every 100 feet, and one is wearing a bright yellow cycling jersey.
Anyway, the winds and rolling hills just about wore me out. I think 35 miles instead of 42 would have been just about right given the conditions, but I didn’t really have a choice if I wanted to get home.
What was really nice, other than the brilliant sunshine, was that on the way to and from the park, I encountered dozens and dozens of road cyclists—mostly riding solo, but occasionally in couples. One couple was on a tandem.
That route, with its wide shoulders, Bike Route designation and roller after roller through farm country is quite popular with cyclists. It’s safe, scenic and a heck of a challenge.
Today’s ride
That left me with 35 miles to ride today to meet the April goal. It’s easy to say that if it wasn’t for even higher winds today (the forecast was for 25–30 with gusts over 40) that I would have made it, but the truth is, I was a little tired and sore from yesterday. Still, I got in 15 miles.
As you may recall, back in March I went with a friend to buy her first bike as an adult. She hasn’t done much riding and I decided to change that today, and loaded Yellow Bike into the back of her car when she came to pick me up. I was supposed to do some work on her home LAN, but the computer store didn’t have one component we needed, so we went to Park Ave Bike Shop instead, where we picked up a cyclometer.
Back at her place, I unloaded Yellow Bike while she got ready to ride. I pumped up her tires as best I could. Her husband has one of those mini stick pumps, and I don’t have the arms to use it. I tried my Road Morph, but somehow I couldn’t get it configured properly for her Schrader valve tubes. Later we found an electric pump in her garage.
Anyway, we did some riding, and I did some fitting and coaching. We raised her saddle quite a bit, and I introduced her to the concept of spinning. An hour later, she’d ridden her longest ride to date, and had conquered several hills that had beat her before. Afterwards, she felt great instead of sore.
My ride home was over rollers then a long grinder, all directly into northwest winds of 20–25 gusting over 30. I got home with enough time to rest a bit, and have dinner before riding out to the Monday Night Small Ring Ride, but I was just too pooped. I took a long nap instead. It’ll probably screw up my sleep tonight, but it sure felt good at the time.
The Season starts tomorrow
May through September is the official cycling season around here. I’ve set, what I hope are, conservative goals. Except for September, I’ve set 500 miles a month as my target. June should be a shoe-in with the Great Finger Lakes Bicycle Tour. My parents are still fixing a date for my Week of (Metric) Centuries in Ontario. That week alone will count for most of the miles in either July or August.
May could be a challenge, what with still having to work on Saturdays, but these past two weeks I’ve ridden at a rate just over what I need to do for a 500 mile month, so it’s not likely to be a problem.
Unfortunately, in May it seems like all the club rides I can do conflict with my work schedule. Rides on my days off all seem to start 20 miles from home. The only club ride on my calendar for the entire month is on the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend. I’ll be doing the 58 mile Ten Parks Tour before bellying up to the buffet for the club’s 40th anniversary picnic.
So I’ll be on my own for most of the month. Much of my riding that’s not commuting will have to be training for the Great Finger Lakes Bicycle Tour on the second weekend of June. It’s a very hilly century (100 miles) and I don’t really want to drop and SAG back on that ride. In order for that not to happen, over the next six weeks I have to train for both the hills and the distance.
I plan to ride the rolling hills to the south and east of the city in preparation. I feel pretty good about yesterday’s hilly 42 miles. If I can do a couple of those a week, and extend the distance a bit each ride, I should be okay.
