Thursday, April 9, 2009

Sunday Ride is Teh Awsum

I spent most of last week down and out in tooth-pain misery, so when Sunday turned out to be sunny! and! warm! I was dying to get out and ride. Never mind that my husband had ridden in (and won!) a race the day before and was tired, we were GOING TO RIDE and I wanted to do AOTT. YEAH. I was ready. In an unexpected move of non-introvertedness, we planned ahead a bit and met up with some bike friends and teammates we don't get to see very often.

They were a very chatty bunch (seriously, you guys talk a LOT) but that made it fun and I got to catch up with my friend Lisa, who is going to confuse people by wearing my cool Twin Six jersey in the photos we took. That's Lisa in the houndstooth, for a change. (To be fair, she owned it first. She has good taste.)

So, we met up at Crossroads and I took a couple really grand photos:



(anyone need orthodontics? Glad I managed to get that in the shot.)

We started in Forest Hill which is...hard. Lisa and I were feeling less than speedy, so we took our time in the back of the pack for a while. Here's Lisa coming off the steep switchback:


We finished Forest Hill and moved on to do a section of Buttermilk and Belle Island:

(talking.)

(more talking.)
Richard riding the stairs!


Then we fought our way across the pedestrian bridge (always my least favorite part of any ride) and headed down the Northbank trail to meet up with Joel.






I don't have much commentary on the ride but I really enjoyed it and was surprised at my relative lack of suffering. I was tired at the end but my legs felt strong and I was just so happy to be out riding.

Monday, April 6, 2009

I love Powhite in the springtime...

I rode my bike! More than once! I actually have a backlog of photos, so I'll post today about a recent ride and yesterday's ride will go up later this week (I promise! I swear!)

The beauty of Powhite Park, the small wooded hillside sandwiched between neighborhoods, wetlands and highway, is that it stays dry as a bone even when it's wet everywhere else. A few weeks back we got the usual gang together for a casual ride. The day was beautiful and we all were just so happy to be OUT. In the sun! After I took a couple of my famously bad photos, Kenny took the camera away from me and saved the integrity of my blog by taking some really sweet action shots.

This entry is really all about the photos because a Powhite ride is usually just about getting out the cobwebs and having a good time. I remember feeling pretty good. I was pretty slow, but I wasn't suffering. There is one pretty gnarly climb right up the middle, which was nicely documented:



I don't always make it, but I did that day. This photo shows how steep it really is (hopefully Paula won't kill me for posting this):


We also enjoyed some of the new trail features:


I'm still heartbroken that my favorite switchback climb was sacrificed for it, but the new stuff is lots of fun to ride. I'm slow to accept change, what can I say.


This is my favorite drop-in to the ravine run:


Whee! Don't we all look happy? What a nice day: