After sitting around for a few hours after getting home, I got up the courage to go for another solo ride, just so I didn’t feel like today was a complete waste.  I ended up doing 12.33 miles in almost exactly one hour.  I’m pretty impressed by that.  I know that 12.33 mph is not a fast speed at all, but given that I just got back on the bike on Wednesday, I think it’s quite the accomplishment.

Another accomplishment of the day is that today is the first day since I started weighing myself again that I lost weight.  On Wednesday through Saturday, my scale showed 266.4.  It was surprising and then frustrating that my weight wasn’t budging a bit.  Then, this morning when I weighed myself, my scale popped up the number 263.2.  I was quite pleased.  It’ll be interesting to see what happens tomorrow morning.  I’m hoping we don’t have a return to 266.4.

We headed out and things were going rather well.  I wasn’t the slowest in the group, which is nice.  For the first half of the ride, I was either at the front, or close to it.  As we were at the intersection of Getty’s Creek and Kerr Creek regrouping, another cyclist came down and caught up with us and continued on ahead.  We started back up, so I decided to catch the guy for a chat.  It’s fun riding with riders who are faster than you are.  He was definitely one of those riders.  After about a mile of 18-20mph, I had to call it quits and drop back.  In retrospect, riding with this guy was not the smartest idea in the world.  About a mile after I started to drop back, we came upon the one big hill of the day.  It was a doozy, too.  I was not able to finish this hill and had to walk up it with another rider.  It’s not like I was even close to finishing it.  I gave up early and walked about a half mile uphill.  I’m not horribly proud of this, but it is what it is.

After we caught up with the rest of the group, we headed back towards town.  This particular route took us right down Smith Road and right by my apartment.  Instead of riding the ~4 miles back into town with the rest of the group to pick up my car, which I had driven to Bryan Park, I decided to call it quits and just head home.  This left me with a total of 13 miles in a little under an hour and a half.

All told, it wasn’t a complete disaster.  I felt pretty good through most of the ride up until that large hill.  I’m also sort of glad that I left my car over there since I now have to ride back over to pick it up.  I’m considering just leaving it there until tomorrow since there is the Sunday Nice N’ Easy ride.

On the plus side, I did ride for about a half an hour on my trainer after I got home.  I got all sweaty and tired.  It was awesome.

Tomorrow will be my official return to group rides with the Bloomington Bicycle Club.  I am quite excited.

Last night’s commute back home actually went rather well.  I figured it’d be pretty bad since about half of the trip home was a long slow uphill road.  It turns out that I managed to find a nice pace and be able to keep with it the whole way up.  Of course, as I was going home, my bike was making all sorts of nasty noises, so I knew that I had to make some derailleur adjustments.  As soon as I walked in the door, I put my bike on the trainer, which has become my bike workstation.  Apparently my fall the other day really messed things up with my front derailleur.  It was crooked, so there was no straight path through where the chain didn’t rub.  I adjusted that and then noticed some noise still coming from the RD.  I took that off and completely disassembled and cleaned it.  Now it’s quiet as can be.  Interesting note, one pulley in the RD has ceramic bearings and the other has steel bearing.  I found that neat.

After not being on a bike at all since October 2009, I decided to get back into things.  I took my bikes out of my closet, cleaned them off, and tuned them up.  Then, at 1am on Tuesday morning, I went for a quick spin around the neighborhood just to make sure things were adjusted properly.  About 3 minutes into my little ride, I went to transfer between some uneven pavement and went down.  My arm hurt quite bad so my plans of commuting in yesterday were shot.

Now, it’s Wednesday and my arm is feeling better enough to ride again, so I commuted in.  Apparently my heart and muscles completely forgot what it was like to ride a bike.  After a 4.2 mile commute, I was completely shot.  It’s been a bit since I’ve commuted in and I did recover much faster than I usually do when I felt that tired in the past.  So, pretty much what this means to me is that while my body wasn’t used to cycling, it did remember how to recover after a ride, which is good.

I’m going to try to commute every day that it’s not rainy (because I’m a wuss) and hopefully this will become much easier.  I’m also going to start going on the Nice N’ Easy rides again with the Bloomington Bicycle Club, which I now officially joined.  Apparently there is also a new Saturday ride called “Slow Spokes” that should be in the same spirit as the Nice N’ Easy rides.  Hopefully I’ll feel up to doing both of those rides starting this weekend, although my confidence is a bit shaken after this afternoon’s performance.

Anyways, it’s great to be back.

I was also running a bit behind schedule on Tuesday so I really had to book it to make it to the start of the ride on time.  As soon as I made it into the parking lot, the group started out.  We were heading out to the Waterworks and then doing Schwartz hill.  We were really cruising on the way out to the Waterworks.  For the 7.5 miles out there, we averaged about 17.5mph.  That is absolutely blistering compared to what I normally do.  My normal average speed for just about any ride in Bloomington is somewhere between 13 and 14mph.  As soon as we got out there EVERYONE went down to the boat launch.  I succumbed to peer pressure and went down as well.  Once we all got down there, Alan took a picture of us all standing in front of the lake then we started the 6.5% climb for half a mile.  It wasn’t absolutely horrible, but it certainly wasn’t a joy.

I figured that I was then going to be shot for the rest of the ride.  That’s usually what happens on these Tuesday/Thursday rides;  I’ll be keeping up fine until we come up to the first big hill, then I’ll lose it and have to limp back home.  Well, surprisingly enough, that did not happen today.  The next 5 miles after the hill we averaged 16mph and I wasn’t feeling bad at all.

Then we had a nice long downhill which meant that a big climb was coming up again.  This was Schwartz hill.  It averaged 8.5% for half a mile.  At the very start of the climb I was directly behind Alan.  He dropped down to his inner chainring (he has a triple) and just slowly started making his way.  Instead of just pushing until I couldn’t push any more, like usual, I stuck behind him for the first couple hundred yards which was the steepest part.  While I was going slower than I normally did, I was apparently saving myself for later.  I then made it up the rest of the hill with no problem and caught up to the group.  For the first time this year, I was NOT the last person to catch up to the group after a long climb.  It felt pretty awesome.

After that the ride was pretty uneventful.  We just rode back into town with no more big hills or anything.  Overall, my final average speed was 15.4mph.  This is by far the fast average speed I’ve had in Bloomington on any ride over 2 miles.  I felt quite accomplished after this ride was done.

So I was rather looking forward to today to see if I could do a repeat performance, but it wasn’t to be I suppose.  Today was interesting in its own right though;  I got a couple new things for the bike.  I went to Revolution Bike and Bean and picked up a Specialized Toupé.  This is a ‘real’ saddle.  I’ve only ridden it about 10 miles since I’ve gotten it, but it feels much more comfortable than even my broken-in old saddle.  I’m quite excited to see how this saddle turns out.  I also ordered and picked up a 12-27 cassette to replace my 12-25 that I used to have.  I figure that the extra couple teeth can really come in handy on those steep hills during the Hilly Hundred.  Hopefully next week the weather and my schedule cooperate and I can try out this fancy new equipment.

Over the past couple weeks, I’ve only gone on group rides or commutes.  I did manage to find an awesome group that rides just a hair faster than I do on Tuesdays and Thursdays so they present a good challenge and also keep me on the bike 3 times a week now along with the Sunday Nice N Easy ride.  With commuting this puts me up to about 70 miles a week.

I really feel like this sort of schedule is working for me.  I don’t lose entire days like I used to and I also don’t get discouraged when I’m not constantly pushing myself for more, more, more.  I’ve been doing it for four weeks now and I’m hoping that I can keep this up until the rides stop at the end of October.  That should put me in great form for the Hilly Hundred which is at the end of October.  Of course, if I don’t feel like I’m ready, then I’m not going to feel horrible if I don’t do it.

So, on to today’s ride.  Today’s ride was great.  Both Tom and Matt were there which meant that they went off the front so I had someone to chase.  For some reason, I was feeling incredibly strong so I went with them.  It was exciting to be pushing that hard.  We stopped at the turnaround point for about 20-25 minutes, which probably wasn’t the best thing since I didn’t really get a chance to warm up again.  On Bottom Road, Tom took off again and no one was going to catch him.  I figured I’d have a bit of fun and tried to catch up.  I kept up 26mph for 2 minutes, but then had to drop back down to 20mph since I had pegged my HR.  Eventually I caught up with him and we both slowed down to about 15mph.  The whole reason he went off was just to see who would come with him and to just get his HR up.  I’m glad he didn’t keep pushing once I caught him since I wouldn’t have been able to keep up for much longer.  About half a mile after I caught him we came upon a series of three hills.  They killed me.  But we all rested for a couple minutes at the top so I recovered pretty well.  After that it was a pretty uneventful ride back.  I did my best to stay up front and keep up with Tom.

Overall, I’m very happy with myself after this ride.  I’ve gotten much stronger over the past month or so and it is really starting to show.  When I first started getting back into these Sunday rides, I was consistently one of the slowest ones.  Now I’m to the point where I am quite sure that I am actually one of the fastest.  I’m still the slowest on the Tuesday/Thursday rides, but I am getting stronger and hopefully I’ll be able to keep up with the middle of the pack pretty soon.  If not, then there is always next season.

I am finally becoming a real cyclist and getting much stronger.  I really love this feeling of accomplishment.

Anyways, all that looking at cycling stuff on the internet got me quite motivated today.  So once I was done at work, I headed home, geared up and headed out on my bike.  I have this one route that I normally do with a couple variations and today I did it backwards since I’m thinking that this may be my new ‘long way to work’ route.

After talking with a couple of people and reflecting on my previous rides, I decided to try to put in very little effort at the beginning of this ride since usually I peg my heart rate at the beginning and drain all my energy.  I was going to try something different today.  I tried my best to ride as light as possible and keep my heart rate a good deal below my anaerobic threshold.  That worked for the most part, but I had to go a bit over a couple times on some hills.  However, that’s to be expected.

When I take this route the normal direction, there is about a mile stretch of road that has a gradient of anywhere from 3% to 7%.  This time I was going the other direction, so that meant that I had a great descent coming up.  This is when the first strange part of the ride happened.  Instead of lightly pedaling at the top of the hill then just coasting while tucked in the aerobars like I normally do, I decided to push the entire way down the hill.  I didn’t go all out or anything, just a moderate effort on my largest gear ratio (50/11).  Well, at the bottom of the hill, I hit a speed of 43.49mph.  This is the second fastest I’ve gone since I’ve had my Garmin.  My top speed is 44.96 on a different hill, but in the same area.  When I went 44.96, I was absolutely terrified.  I thought I was going to crash.  In fact, I tried to go into the aerobars, but just couldn’t because I didnt want to be away from the brakes.  This time, I went ~1.5mph slower, but I was pushing the whole time and also in the aerobars the whole time too.  I also wasn’t scared at all.  In fact, I wished that I was on my TT bike so I had a bigger gear to turn!  It was quite the strange feeling going that fast (for me) and still wanting more.

Well, after the big downhill, I’m sure you can guess what came next.  That’s right: a nice big uphill.  This wasn’t nearly as steep.  But it was nearly 4 miles long.  This is the type of hill that I normally dislike.  It starts of rather shallow and then gets steeper and steeper as it goes on.  By the end, the gradient was just north of 5%.  This is when the second strange part of my ride occured.  To be honest, I was getting quite tired of this hill, and I just wanted it to be over.  So I did what anyone else would do with the same thought process;  I upshifted and got out of the saddle.  Now, normally I can’t be out of the saddle for very long on an uphill because my heart rate shoots through the roof and I’m very quickly drained of energy.  This time, I got out of the saddle a little earlier than I normally would, but I was quite determined to make it over the top.  And make it over the top without sitting I did.  The strange part wasn’t that.  The strange part was that my heart rate at the top of the hill was 197.  Now, this probably means nothing to you at all, but let me put it in some perspective.  The highest I’ve ever seen my heart rate (with any cycling computer I’ve had) is 190.  To see it at 190 is quite rare in fact.  What I normally consider to be my ‘max’ HR is 185.  Once my HR hits 185, it’s quitting time for that push.  Hopefully now it’s clear how ludicrous 197 is.  The strangest part about it was that I wasn’t completely drained of energy.  I was tired of course, but usually once my HR hits 185, I have to just about stop pedaling.  I had to decrease my output, as is expected, but I could still pedal at a somewhat normal pace.

At this point, my route took me back through town and was rather uneventful.  The whole time I was thinking about my heart rate though.  As I got within about a mile of my apartment the third, and final, strange part of the ride occured.  Since I had spent the last 5 or so miles thinking about my new super max HR, I was a bit motivated it seems.  There are some small rolling hills on the approach to my apartment complex that I normally drop down and slowly pedal over.  For some reason, I was possessed and decided to upshift once again and get out of the saddle.  My heart rate never went quite as high since these hills where shorter and less intense; although, it did hit 190 on one of the hills.  It was still quite abnormal for me to push myself so much, especially at the end of a ride.  It was also quite abnormal in that I once again wasn’t completely drained like I normally am whenever I get my heart rate up like that.

So I guess there are a couple reasons such strange things happened on today’s ride.  It might simply have been that I was feeling extra motivated and really on top of my game today and pushed myself harder than I ever had before.

I don’t think that’s what happened though.  Now, this is going to sound silly.  I think that today was the first day in a little over a year of riding that I realized that full benefit of warming up before a ride.  Like I said before, normally I push from the start and find myself quickly drained and then just put in the minimum amount of effort to complete the ride.

If this in fact was me seeing the benefits of warming up, it’ll be quite the great thing.  It seems that I had reached some sort of plateau in my training.  My mileage wasn’t going up a ton, and neither was my speed.  Here’s hoping that I just started my next great leap forward in my cycling.

The ride started in the Wal-Mart parking lot in Columbus, IN.  Let me point out here that this was the first time I have ever done a solo ride that did not start either at my apartment or at my office.  I actually drove somewhere to start this ride.  The main reason for that was that I wanted a nice long and flat route.  Unfortunately, flat routes don’t exist near me.  So, I packed up my bike and gear and headed east.  After reassembling my bike and getting my shoes and gloves and such on, I started out on the road.  It was about 3pm.  The forecast wasn’t great for that day, but there was supposed to be no rain in Columbus after 3pm.  As I started out, there were very thick clouds overhead, but they were keeping their moisture to themselves.

Since I’m not that great at planning routes in areas I don’t know very well, I stuck to main roads.  I’ve run into the issue in Bloomington before where I’ll plan a nice route only to find out that one of the roads I’ve never seen before turns out to be an unpaved road.  That is quite annoying.  So I figured if it was a yellow colored road on Google Maps then it must certainly be paved.  That reasoning hasn’t failed me yet.  One benefit of following such main roads is that there are generally less turns, and that means less places to get lost.  Of course, keeping track of things like distance and time get rather difficult without constantly checking your cycling computer.  As it happens, I missed the very first turn I was supposed to take after I left the Wal-Mart parking lot and got on my first ‘yellow’ road.  For some reason I expected these main roads to somehow look different than the regular ‘white’ roads from Google Maps.  That is not always true.  About half a mile after where I was supposed to turn, I got to thinking that I might have already missed a turn.  I stopped, and checked my hand-made cue sheet.  Yup, I had missed a turn.  Oh well, all that meant was that my longest ride was going to be a mile longer.

It was about that time that the rain started.  Yes, the rain that wasn’t supposed to be there.  Normally, I detest the rain.  If it even looks like it’s going to rain, I usually won’t go out.  I didn’t have much of an option in this case however, so I just had to deal with it.  To be honest, it wasn’t all that bad.  Sure, I got all wet and had to wipe my glasses rather often, but it wasn’t as horrible as I usually expect riding in the rain to be.  That being said, I still don’t like riding in the rain and will most likely continue to avoid it.  Thankfully the rain only lasted about 20 minutes and didn’t make another appearance for the rest of the ride.

After my first hour on the road I decided to stop for my first break. My plan was to stop just about every hour for 5-10 minutes for a quick rest, and a bite of a Clif Bar and then keep on going.  My first ‘rest stop’ had me stopped on a relatively quiet road at a stream crossing so there was a guard rail to sit on.  It still amazes me how quiet things can be when there are no people around.  I was by far the loudest thing on this road, except for the few cars that would pass.  Such quiet gives you lots of time to reflect on various things.  That’s usually a good thing, but about 5 miles after my rest stop, I remembered that it can also be a bad thing to have so much ‘me’ time.

Usually, after about 20 or so miles, I inexplicably want my riding to be over NOW.  It’s not that I’m tired or anything.  I think it’s just that I’m starting to get bored.  This has been happening to me ever since the end of last season.  I think that this is also one of the main reasons that I am not out there cycling more than I am now.  It gets rather discouraging when you constantly think about ways you can cut this ride short.  This is also the main reason I didn’t ride until the end of the time limit on the Tour de Cure ride.  I knew that I wasn’t going to get to 100 miles, so I figured ‘why bother?’ and gave up.  This is something I seriously need to work on and any tips are certainly appreciated.

After a little bit more on that nice and solitary road (which was still a ‘yellow’ road, by the way) I made my next turn (successfully) onto a more major road.  This road had a great surface and a nice 2-3 foot shoulder.  I was pleased.  Pretty soon, the two hour mark came up and I stopped once again.  This time it was at the intersection of two main roads once again so I could sit on a guard rail.  They are quite comfy.

After my break was up, it was time to turn onto my next main road of my route.  Just for a reference, this was around mile 28.  This new road was a divided ‘highway.’  It was quite busy, but I had a shoulder that was the size of a car lane to deal with, so I felt rather safe.  Thankfully, most of the length of this shoulder was rather clean as well.  I’ve run across some shoulders this size that are almost unrideable because they are either poorly paved or covered with dirt and debris.  There was only a section about a quarter mile long where most of the shoulder was obscured by debris.  All in all, I was rather pleased with this portion of the road.

Then I came to mile 32.5.  This was roughly the halfway point.  It was also the point where I made another turn and started heading more or less back in the direction of Columbus.  Although this route so far had been fairly flat, there was pretty much a constant incline the entire way.  It wasn’t much of one, but my average speed at that point (13.7mph) was telling me that it was enough of an incline to affect my speed.  From this point forward everything was going to be more or less ‘downhill,’ which was a comforting thought to me.

The road that I turned down to start my return journey was much quieter than the major highway I had just left and had very few cars on it.  The surface was quite nice however, so it was smooth sailing for quite a while.  Until I hit mile 46.  This is where I made my second navigational mistake.  When I was planning my route, I thought that I had to follow this road all the way through until it hit another major artery of the area.  As it turns out, this was not completely true.  The road I was on had a three-way stop at mile 46.  I could either go right or left.  I went right.  I was supposed to go left.  After another half mile, I saw a road sign that told me that I was not on the road I wanted to be on, so I turned around.

After getting back on the correct road, I rode for another 3 miles and then made my third stop.  It was now 3:30 into my ride.  I was still feeling rather good at this point.  I may have been a bit tired, but after 49 miles, what else could be expected?  Once again, I stopped so I could sit on a guard rail.  This time it was next to a bridge over a stream.  It was obvious by looking at the surroundings that when Indiana had some flooding recently, the stream had completely covered the road.  This was no small task either, since the stream was 15-20 feet below the bottom of the bridge.

Anyways, after my rest I once again headed back out.  The only interesting thing for the next while was that I rode by a church on Locust Road with the slogan “I’m burning for you” on their board.  It made me chuckle.

As I turned onto my second to last road of my ride, I started feeling very tired.  I knew I only had about 5 more miles to go, but I just HAD to stop.  I saw a nice looking guard rail, so I stopped.  It was 4:19 into the ride and at mile 63.  After about 3 minutes of rest, I pushed on.  About half a mile after my stop I came back into the town of Columbus.  I made my final turn and headed back to my car.

When I got back to my car, I had spent a total of 4:37:25 on the bike for a grand total of 67.78 miles.  According to my wonderful data analysis program, I burned 4852 calories during the ride.  When I got back to my car, I wasn’t completely drained.  Unfortunately, it was starting to get late though, so it was probably best if I called it a day at that point.  As I started loading my stuff back into my car, a great feeling of accomplishment came over me.  I’m not one to be overly emotional about much of anything, but I really had to work to supress the urge to pump both of my fists in the air and scream “I DID IT!!”

Overall, it was a great ride.  I completed my longest distance to date and still felt great afterwords.  I think that this has been my most successful ride yet.