My first ‘real’ ride of the year was last Sunday. Steve, Grant and I jumped on our bikes and headed for Gatineau like we had done so many Sundays before last summer and fall. I was pumped up for the ride, thinking I was in way better shape this year than I had ever been before – I mean afterall I had just run a marathon a couple of weeks before. Anyways, my excitement quickly turned to shock and dismay a short way into our ride. We headed out from Grant’s place and across the bridge into Quebec. It was quite windy but since I was fresh, it was more of an annoyance than anything. We entered the park and before we even got to the section of closed roads, I was already hurting. There is one hill (and not a large hill either) just before the parking lot by the gate and as I’m climbing it I’m thinking, “What the hell is going on?! How am I ever going to finish this ride if I’m feeling like this already?!” I put the thought out of my mind and finished the short climb to the parking lot where we stopped to look for Steve’s friend. Incidentally, he never showed up but I still got a short break while we waited. :) [...]
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 I’ve been meaning to blog this for a while but am only now getting around to it. A couple of weekends ago, on a Sunday afternoon, I drove down to Brockville with my new road bike to go for a ride with Trev. The photo on the left shows our route – which was from Trev’s place, along route 2 to Prescott and then across the 401 and back along some other road. It was a nice ride. As you can see from the photo, either the map is bad or the data from my GPS is bad. I didn’t have ‘lock to road’ turned on so that probably didn’t help. [...]  A new road bike to add to my list of recently purchased toys. Picked this bad boy up on Easter weekend at Bushtukah. They were certainly friendly there, but they didn’t set the bike up for me. I still need to look into doing that. Anyways, I got Steve’s help in making this decision too. He had pointed me to Cyclogik and told me to take a look at the Kona Zing they were selling for $1350. I talked to a guy at work, Paul Smeulders, who is a big road biker, and asked him for his opinion. He said he thought I’d be happy with it, but suggested that since I was going to be going to Cyclogik anyways that I may as well take a look at the Opus Andante while I was there. The Andante was $2000. [...]  Steve graciously offered to scour the internet in search of a bike for me. It’s all part of his plan to get me to do a few more adventure races with him this year. Anyways, he found the bike pictured on the right, a Trek Fuel 90. I picked it up the weekend after we got back from Panama. I’m not sure what year it is, the guy said it’s either an ’02 or ’03, but in any case, it’s in fantastic shape! I’ve only taken it out for a quick spin down the TC trail (I still haven’t found my helmet since the move) but it felt good. It was my first experience with clipless pedals so that was yet another reason to take it easy on the first ride. I really like the disc brakes on it, they seem to work way better than old style bike brakes. They may add a bit of weight, but since this bike is soo much lighter than my old mountain bike, I don’t notice. [...] 31 Kms in about an hour and 10 minutes. Heart rate was above target (164) for most of the ride. Didn’t see any attack beavers on this ride… [...] Did an hour tonight. Got to try out my ‘new’ heart rate monitor, which I bought off of Steve. I didn’t read about it at all, I just strapped it on and went. It was beeping like crazy for the first little while and the largest number I saw was 208. I don’t think that could have been my heart rate, I figure the thing was still calibrating itself, but who knows. Here are the vital stats from the heart rate monitor: Exercise Time: 1:02:00 Average HR: 161 In Zone: 00:38:22 (when I wasn’t in zone, I was above) I’m not convinced that it has the correct max heart rate for me but after I read a bit, I’ll know for sure. [...] I put my new GPS Receiver mount on my mountain bike handlebars tonight and went for a spin. Talk about sweet! I left the display on the ‘trip computer’ the whole time which gave me: distance, moving time, stopped time, overall average speed, speed, max speed, moving average speed and total time. It was easy to read which made me happy. Numbers: 20 km (plus a short cool down); just under 48 minutes; 25.2 km/h average speed with a max of 31.7 km/h. Nothing stellar, but I got to try out my new GPS mount AND my new biking shorts. I like them both. [...] Another Sunday, another ride in the Gatineau Park with Grant. Actually, this time there was four of us, Grant, Steve, Trev and myself. By the end of the ride though there were only three of us left…but I’m not going to get into the details of that. Anyways, as usual, it was an 8 am start from the Lawson’s place. We started our ride under some heavy cloud cover and things didn’t get any better as the day went on. We got rained on a bit, but nothing serious. The plan was to do the ‘loop’ down to the base of Camp Fortune and then up to Champlain Lookout. In total, from door to door (at Grant’s place) the loop is 56 kms. Due to the above mentioned loss of one of our riders, Steve and I ended up doing more like 60 kms. [...] I went for another bike ride yesterday, but this time I went with Grant. He goes every Sunday morning over to Gatineau because the roads are closed off to cars. I had already bailed on him the weekend before so there was no way I wasn’t going to make it this time. I met Grant at his place around 0800 Sunday morning. The plan was to leave relatively early so we weren’t riding during the hottest part of the day. The route was to Champlain Lookout and back, a distance of around 51 km. Originally Grant had planned a 72 km ride for himself but when he heard I was coming along, he changed it. What a guy! [...] It’s been a long while since I posted anything so I figured I owed it to myself to post something. I went on my first bike ride this year, in fact my first bike ride in a long while. I had to dig the bike out of the garage and then after a trip to the service station to pump up the tires (I really need to get one of those cheap air compressors from CT) I was good to go. There were a more than a couple of reasons for my bike ride. First off…I’m just coming off three weeks of watching the Tour De France so lets say the idea was well planted in my mind. I was supposed to go biking with Trev and Grant yesterday but I bailed on them because I was way too tired. I was feeling pretty guilty about that so there’s reason number two. Reason number three is my general lack of being in anything that even remotely resembles ‘good shape’ since my marathon training. [...] |
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