So Far..

I think logging ride days and miles makes me even more conscious of how quickly time passes! Since a quarter of the year is up I figured I'd post some stats so far. I'm very happy with the miles, but want to build up speed. I've been too content with base miles and will have to push myself more. Hopefully I'll get there doing intervals and group rides with friends to inspire me.

Here's my table showing number of days and miles biked by month.

And, the miles by week chart that you are familiar with. My outside miles are catching up to the trainer ones as the weather gets better. (The most recent week showing is not complete.)

YTD Outside Ride Details
Solo Rides: 15 (set out alone, but found friends on 5 of these rides)
Rides With Jeff: 8
Group Rides: 1
CX: 19
Road: 4

Group Ride to Wrap Up Week

I thought today was the nicest day of the week and luckily Jeff and I had plans to meet up with a couple of friends, Ed and ribuck. We did a popular Tiverton route of 30.34 miles at 16.8 mph average.




For the week, I did 5 rides/130.35 miles. I'm still taking the cx bike out most as the roads are sketchy in places with sand and potholes, so 3 cx rides and 2 roadie rides.

I shouldn't be eating this...

There is leftover birthday cake in the house (Jeff's). Here's a slice, appropriately served on the piggy plate. Om, nom, nom... I really should have done a longer ride today!

End of a Week

Today was the second outside ride of the year on my road bike. It is feeling good from its last tuneup and has a fresh set of tires on it.

Jeff and I did 55.22 miles at 15.8 mph average on many of the same roads as last weekend's long ride, but we didn't go as far and varied it a little.This was a farm we passed today.

For the week, I did 5 rides/147.72 miles. Four on the cross bike and 1 on the road bike. This was the first week of the year with no trainer time!

Bird Sightings

Today, I spotted these snow geese along my short route. One of the fun things about biking around here is the diversity of birds you see, especially in the colder months when they are migrating or over wintering.

Of course we have the common ones as well, like these mallards I see just about every ride in the same place. Maybe there will be ducklings later on.

March Metric +

I left the Island for this one--OMG! There are 3 bridges off the Island, but somehow people here get this mentality that it's burdensome to leave. I didn't think I'd get as irrational as that, but it's happened!

On Thursday and Friday, when it looked like the weather for Saturday would be sunny and high 30's/low 40'sF, Jeff and I started thinking of possibly doing the ride for the Metric Century a Month Challenge. We decided to start in Tiverton, ride south through Little Compton to Sakonnet Point shown here:

From there we rode East through farmland and little villages to Horseneck Beach and accidentally did the loop into the wind...aargh!!

We crossed the Westport River on this drawbridge:

And continued through Westport past the historical town farm:

We planned our ride to go past Village Bicycle so we could stop and say hello, pick up a spare tube and get tickets for the owner's Race Across America Fund Raiser Dinner. It's a very friendly shop! We only stopped briefly as we didn't want to stiffen up. We still had some ground to cover to get back to the starting point.

Here's how it looks on the map:

And the elevation profile:

I felt just OK for the ride as I was on the edge of being cold for a lot of it even though I've ridden in much worse. Some of the roads were so bumpy, it wore me down and made me achy (for the locals, I'm referring mainly to Peckham Road!). My feet were either cold or a little numb, so it got interesting putting a foot down at intersections, like when the foot's asleep and you're not quite sure it will hold you up. It wasn't pain, just sort of nagging discomfort.

March Metric + Stats
Road bikes (first outside ride of '09!)
68.35 miles
4:30 hours
15.2 mph average
fuel, egg muffin thing from drive thru on way to ride, 2 bottles of Gatorade in my fav flavors at the moment, tropical mango and strawberry orange

Now, only 9 more to go ;)

PS. Today's ride wrapped up a week, so I'll report the weekly stats as well. I rode 4 days outside/138.43 miles and 2 days inside/30.44 miles, a total of 168.87 miles.

Brrr

It looked warmer than it felt out there today! Just did my short loop for 23.83 miles. These fuzzy wuzzies were so friendly, I had to pause for a pic.

My toes are warming up still and I know they aren't going to be very happy in a hot shower in a minute!

Random Fun

Thanks to Jumbly pointing out how to turn new pics into Polaroids, I have been playing instead of doing chores or trainer riding!

Some ingredients ready for tonight's dinner:

Another pic of Jeff from our ride on Saturday, love that purple snow and sky:

Funny thing is, I actually have real Polaroids I should get around to scanning and preserving sometime!

1st Week of March

March arrived with snow and frigid temps, but things got way better today and we got some sun and warmth due to us! It was so nice, I had Jeff grill lunch for us.

Burgers with secret seasoning, caramelized onions and mushrooms with thyme and a splash of sherry vinegar on a toasted english muffin with a little lite mayo. Very summery! We ate indoors though...too much snow on the patio!

After a little rest to let lunch settle, we felt fueled and ready to ride. Here's Jeff showing his pasty white legs! Yikes, makes the pic look overexposed! Those are a pair of the new shorts I ordered for him recently too. I think the gray looks good.

We rode out Ocean Drive and back past the glammy Newport Country Club. No danger of wayward golf balls today as the ground is so muddy.

It got up to about 61 degrees and felt very warm in general, though a bit chilly in the hollows and along the beaches in the sea mist.

The rides this week were 1 outdoor ride of 35.99 miles and 5 computrainer rides of 122.12 miles, a total of 158.11 for the week.

This week's computrainer total was really boosted by one ride in particular, 46.46 miles. It took me 4 hours as there was over 4,000 feet of climbing! Lately, I've been treating most of the computrainer rides as base mile rides and not worrying about intervals or speed work, but I will begin that soon. I will miss the relative ease of base miles, I'm sure!!

Base mile trainer time is the non guilty way to watch a lot of TV. A couple posts ago, Buttsy asked me what I've been watching. Most recently, I'm working through Firefly with Jeff watching that too. I've watched all of Dr. Who, Samantha Who, all sorts of movies. As for current shows, I like Big Bang Theory, Two and a Half Men, Ugly Betty, The Office, 30 Rock and Biggest Loser. Also two detective shows, Life and Life on Mars. I put the sound volume up a little louder than usual, but not too much. If it's a lot of talk, I'll have the captions turned on so I don't miss subtle things. Bike race footage has been good too, of course!

Sometimes, I do just watch the numbers and profile as I ride. When I do the intervals, I'll play a CTS dvd or something to follow. I'm not good at keeping track of time and what to do without the dvd telling me. When I start doing TT efforts on it, I'll just have the profile graphics so I focus.

I've just played around on the computrainer a bunch too. It's fun to see how fast I can pedal, most watts I can put out, etc... But I haven't done that sort of stuff in a way that counts as testing or training, yet.

Melty Snow

The snow is melting quite a bit today and I'm hoping there won't be more! But I have to say, it is fun to play in the snow with the dogs when the air temperature is relatively warm. The melting snow is the perfect consistency for snowballs.

There is all that snow in the yard, but the only snow they want is the snowball I'm holding!

One snowball is not enough! Saffy misses most of it as she tries to avoid a collision with Silas.

She's so happy when she finally gets one to herself.

We'll be back to mud season soon...just imagine what these two dogs look like after play time then!!