Ride Part I, the part where I reckon I was faster than last week for no reason whatsoever.
Last week I took my road bike out for the first time in 2014. I had written that I felt swell during the 41 mile ride but was sort of pissed to come home and check my files (which serve no real purposed to a schlep like me) and see that I was over ten minutes slower than my best effort last year. Thankfully things got a tad better today, even with a slightly gimpy-ish neck and back.
Even though I felt good on that ride last week, I really wasn’t pushing my speed. Hills rollers that I normally stand on, I sat and motored up pretty well, putting my knees and back to the test as well as seeing if all those leg presses in the gym paid off. All was good, in that my leg strength was good (big deal), but the trade-off was that I was now slower by not accelerating as I had in the past (still not a big deal).
Slow, big gear seated climbing be damned, today I chose to get back to my old style of riding and get my lard ass (and the slightly smaller ham-sized, black and blue welt on my gigantic love handle) out of the saddle and turn the pedals over quickly quicker. The result was that I was seven minutes faster than last week. Having said that, it was still five minutes slower than my best time in 2013… and having said THAT, I am an estimated ten pounds heavier than at the time of that effort last summer. So, you do the math. Seriously, do the math, ’cause I know fuck all how to but I’m sure there is some formula that they teach in math classes that I never took, that has to do with time and weight differences, masses multiplied by accelerations, divided by forces, carry the two, blah, blah, blah, rocket scientist type shit.
Another improvement of sorts (at least until I go on some beer and pasta bender is that I am down 6.2 pounds since last Monday… as I have said thrice now– big deal.
Ride Part II, thankfully nothing to do with my performance (or lack there of)
Sadly, mid-Michigan’s brief flirtation with spring took a step back today and we have gone from the high 70s, to thunderstorms and now back into the 50s. Ug. I am pretty sure the skin color of my legs will become translucent any day now due to the lack of sun exposure. Oh well, at least my arms briefly burnt last week. A bit warmer would be nice but I really don’t mind these temps, the only thing that bothers me is that over the winter I lost one of my arm warmers and keep holding off buying another pair, thinking that any day now I’ll find the missing warmer. So I have to keep wearing a long sleeve base layer that is a size too small, I can barely get over my fat head or take it off without nearly throwing my back out and ripping my hairy ears off.
Ride Part III, the part where I ramble on about some Michigan dirt road.
99% of today’s ride was on paved roads, the 1% of gravel came in the form of the road above. This is all speculation on my part, but to me it always seemed that it used to be a paved road, then it seemed to have fallen apart. Rather than fix the road, the county threw down a small amount of gravel in hopes that the 500 pot holes on it would just go aways quietly. Well, that changed since last week and now it’s a full on gravel road. The strange thing is that for miles and miles up to this point the (same) road is smooth (for Michigan) pavement. Then for two miles it’s (now) gravel. Then it becomes paved again for a mile before it finally comes to a T. It’s all very odd. The good thing was that the Maxxis ReFuse tires handled it well enough. I wouldn’t want to do a full on gravel ride with them, but for a mile or two they were OK. Another bonus is that about 490 of those 500 pot holes are now filled in with gravel. Yeah Michigan!
That’s it, no more talk about a slow, chilly 41 mile road ride done by some slow, jobless, aging, ever fattening, amateur cyclist with a blog and a camera that he doesn’t know how to use properly. Speaking of the camera, I tried making an adjustment with the low light setting today. It didn’t really work out, so I ended up jacking around in Photoshop, attempting to make an improvement of sorts to the photos. Pretty sure I made them worse.
Later.