Tuesday, June 23, 2009

hills

this one hill that is 10 minutes from my house, it's a beast, of sorts. Only about .75 miles long but somehow takes me over 3 minutes to get up. When I'm at the tippity top I can begin coasting (no pedaling what so ever) and get up to 45 mph coming down that thing

Saturday, June 13, 2009

i'll be darned

On my road ride in Frankfort today I happened across a cycler's cafe water bottle on the side of the road, probably leftover from the MS150. Anyway, score, it'll be a great bottle once I scratch off cycler's cafe from it.

and no, I didn't drink the gatorade that was still in it, although I wanted to. Worst part about riding out here is finding a place to refill bottles, no stores that I've seen on my route, and the two churches I've checked don't seem to have outside spickets. Bummer.

Monday, June 08, 2009

2 or 3 things

1.) Friday I had a good short road ride, bout 1 1/2 hours. I had a really good experience with motorist who was following me on one of the winding hilltop roads. I waved him around at a stop sign and he pulled up beside me and started talking about how he wishes he were still in shape to do what I was doing. When I thanked him for not being a jerk about being stuck behind me on the road he said, "Oh, I'm in no hurry, I didn't care if you let me around or not." Even though he was obviously coming home from work. For some reason that made me happy. Seemed most people were waving to me, rather than flipping me off.

2.) Saturday I went for a longer ride, rode out to my old church camp at Cedarmore, that brought back a lot of good memories (so many new girls to try to make-out with). One problem though was that mapmyride told me to take a right on one road that I was 80% sure I need to make a left onto. I saw a curious amount of cyclists down the road to my right though and thought maybe I would go see what was going on, plus I needed to find a school, store, or church to fill my water bottles. While sitting at the stop sign debating what to do (follow mmr or trust my instinct) a truck pulled up next to me with 2 shirtless dudes in it. Before I turned one said, "he man, do you like animals?" I turned and looked at him and he had a snake wrapped around his right-hand. It wasn't a pet snake, it was something he had obviously just caught, my guess is a regular garden-snake variety. I told him I wasn't that into animals and probably had a petrified look on my face cause his buddy was laughing his ass off. I was afraid he was going to through it at me, whether it was poisonous or not, I don't want a snake thrown at me. Too bad Big Country wasn't there to drop some knowledge on them. Especially when the guy started trying to tell me that it was a cotton-mouth, which I knew for a fact it wasn't, partly because it would have eaten him up.
After they drove away, laughing, I decided to go see what all the helmet mirrors wered doing down the road. Come to find out I was only a couple hundred yards from a MS150 rest stop. Sweet, so I pulled in, got some free water and a cookie, I didn't take a piece of pizza cause I didn't want to be greedy. I even got to meet JC, aka tan-man, who seemed much more normal than I expected. So it was all good, except the MS150 route used a lot of my training route roads so I think I made a lot of the riders second-guess whether they were going the right way or not when they would encounter me riding the opposite direction, or turning when the sign told me not to.
2 miles from home I was coasting down a hill trying to rest my chode a little bit, out of the saddle and about 8 miles beyond the point of cramps threatening a coup, my left hamstring locked-up hard and wouldn't stop. I stopped on the middle of the downhill, on the side of the road and couldn't get it to stop, saw some ms150er's walking up the hill, and decided I needed to pedal it out, which worked after I clicked into a gear that required a little effort. I think the mistake I made was that I was dehydrated before I began the ride so I couldn't get caught up while sweating on the bike. I'll try not to make that mistake again, I was afraid I was gonna get stuck on the side of the road, only a few up-hill miles from home.

Friday, June 05, 2009

map my ride

I haven't used map my ride much except for the other day to figure out a route from my house. Here is the newsest version click here for you that are familiar with it, does this route looks like it has a fair amount of climbing? Am I reading it right that there is over 1100 feet of ascent and around that for descent? I don't know if that is a lot or not but compared it to one of my routes, that I thought had a lot of climbing in it in Lexington, which said it was somewhere around 700ft of ascent