Spring Cleaning, Spring Training

Don't you love when you write an entire entry and Blogger eats it? Damn. I'm never as witty on the second go round.

So, as I said in my last entry, there was riding on Sunday. It was a gorgeous day - 65 degrees and sunny. We spent the morning being good and making up for our homeowner slackness for the past, oh, three years, and did stuff around the house all morning in preparation for house guests who are coming to stay in a little more than a week. I really don't want my extended family to know the level of filth we normally live in, so stuff had to be done.

We managed to get a lot accomplished and celebrated with an afternoon ride. Our usual Sunday posse was out on their road bikes (not me. Hate traffic.) so we did our usual big loop, just the two of us. Poor K. Always having to ride with me. We're boring and could have packed up the bikes and driven somewhere different, but it's so much easier to just jump on the bikes and go, you know?

We did all the usual trails and crossed the loathed pedestrian bridge which was filled with weekend weirdos - all walking four-abreast and laden with dogs and radios and coolers and the like. We try so hard to be respectful and yield to pedestrians, but when they're rude and gross, it gets harder and harder. Hate. Ped. Bridge.

We finally got to the peaceful and painful Forest Hill Park trails. I've talked about the trails before, but not really the park. It's a big expanse of fields, with an inner ring of hilly woods. At the bottom of the ring is a big stone walkway that circles what used to be a lake and is now a weird swampy area. I miss the lake - they drained it a few years ago after the last bad hurricane, I think. Too much flooding. Forest Hill originally was an amusement park (which closed in 1925) and it still has a sort of haunted decrepit glamour about it. The park time forgot. I love it, even if the trails make me hurt. And they did. Forest Hill was also the location of the coolest thing we saw on yesterday's ride:

I was riding up a switchback turn and heard something moving fast to my left. I turned my head around and stopped dead - two deer were hightailing it at full speed through the woods. I'm not sure what set them off but it was fantastic to watch them go. So cool to see something like that in the middle of the city.

Anyway, I did much better than on Thursday. I'm still a little horky but it didn't slow me down as much. Please don't misunderstand - I'm still SLOW, just not as slow. Kenny made me lead on the way home and I found that I ride much better (technically and speed-wise) if I've got a little pressure behind me. I'm much less likely to walk something I don't like the looks of if I have someone behind me. It makes me a better rider and I really should take the lead more often. There, I said it. Now I have to do it.

It's going to be 87 degrees tomorrow (!!!) so I think that means I have to go ride. I'll let you know what happens.

Blaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh.

That's how I feel right now. Something is BLOOMING and I am an allergy nightmare. Ah, spring. Which isn't until tomorrow. This was made very clear to me yesterday when we went for a very, very brisk Sunday ride. In my mind I thought it would be a brief it's-cold-and-we're-all-still-sick kinda group ride but oh ho ho! Joke's on me.

Because of the torrential rain on Thursday and Friday, we decided to go to Powhite Park, which is about a mile (or so) from our house. Powhite is special for a few reasons: it's really nearby, it's not terribly popular, it drains like crazy. When every other trail in town is mushy, Powhite is dry as a bone, mostly because it's a small wooded park on the side of a hill with a tiny wetlands at the bottom.

I have no idea why it's not more popular, as it's the perfect little storm of fast flats, hill climbs and technical stuff, including a fun series of ravine drop-ins. It's also never crowded and you won't usually get spit on by hikers and trail runners. Here is a short list of cool stuff I've seen at Powhite:

- snakes
- a whole herd of deer
- beaver-chewed trees
- a snowy owl pouncing on a squirrel (that wasn't cool so much as horrifying)

Anyway, we have a regular group of friends that we ride with on Sunday and we all froze our asses off riding over to the park. I think the high was maybe 50 degrees and it was windy. I'd make a lousy road biker because I hate riding into wind. And near cars. We got to the park and did a warm-up lap that felt like slow death. Legs full of ball bearings. It was the kind of warm-up where I kept checking to make sure I didn't have a flat tire, so slow was my bike.

Ha, don't you love how I blame the slowness on my BIKE. THAT WOULD BE ME. Anyway, after a few laps I started feeling a lot better and we rode at a good pace for another hour. I led the group for a while and that felt good too, though I always over-compensate. Eventually I started getting pretty tired and the consensus was that we'd do one more lap. We did, and then they kept going, right past the gate. Wah? Wah! They missed the gate! It's RIGHT THERE, PEOPLE. OUR TICKET TO LUNCH.

I was (regrettably) getting a little whiny and also a little bit closer to bonk territory than I'm comfortable with. We hit a hill that I can normally climb pretty well and I was so far behind the group that I felt like I was going in slow motion. We rode another lap, and another. I started walking stuff I normally ride because I was so tired I was afraid I'd crash. We finally headed home and I was completely glad I'd skipped the race last weekend because clearly I was not anywhere near race-ready. I am soft, people, and it is sad. We were out for two and a half hours and I felt like I'd been hit by a truck when we got home. I can't wait until the weather gets warm and I can get to that perfect summer bike fitness where you feel like you can ride forever. I miss that.