Happy trails to you...

Celebrating the arrival of $2.21/gallon gas in Monument, CO yesterday... I made the first ride into work of the season. Riding into work is one of those things that I cherish that I can do. There's something about the hour of immediate riding in the morning that charges up the rest of my day. But, depending on which way you go, the trip to work is almost ALWAYS a pain. Ang and I live at around 6300', give or take... and my office is closer to 7000' or a little above. In between that is a trail that traverses the Air Force Academy that slowly and steadily climbs up that elevation difference.

The trail is a joy to ride down and a pain to ride up. Combine that with muscles that aren't awake yet and temperatures that are generally still considered cold and sometimes what should be a joyous ride is a pain in the ass. Now, whenever the trail is wet, you also greatly increase your rolling resistance making every stroke it's own. There's no sharing of power among the strokes... with the remainder of the coast from one stroke playing into the start of the second stroke. No, there's solidarity amongst the strokes, making each upward propulsion just a little harder.

At one point in the adventure northward, the trail tempts you with a slight downhill grade as it torments you with a jaunt a mile to the west, making the trail longer and the freeway disappear in the distance. You're happy because of the speed increase and sad that this trail is longer than you thought it would be. Even after riding the trail many times, it never ceases to disappoint you when you make that turn to the left. The other thing that disappoints you is the fact that you can see some of your landmark goals in the distance but because you're on a plain you can't quite tell how far away they are.

I like riding through treed or even built up areas because you get a sense of motion. You can tell that you've made progress. When you're riding through an open field, even though your computer tells you you've made progress, you can't necessarily tell... it all looks the same. Parallax scrolling changes the angle of things in the distance, but you're still not quite sure how fast or how far you're actually going. The trail to Monument is almost ALL open field.

I eventually did make it to work and after work headed south to attend a ride planning meeting for the cycling club. There are some exciting ideas this year for one off events on top of the regular rides. The one that I'm most excited about is one I'm hoping to coordinate. I want to put together a "Ride In Movie" with the Col Springs Film Society of Breaking Away. Hopefully I can find a business in the area that would let me turn the side of their building into a mobile theater.

The pain with riding to the meeting was that the trail south on a good day is a really fun ride. Today was not a good day. Today was a day with a wind I shall name "El Suckiento". El Suckiento doesn't want me to have any fun. El Suckiento would rather I just go home and drive. El Suckiento sucks! You always know it's going to be something other than a good ride when the wind is so strong that you can't hear anything else. When it's so strong that your headphones are drowned out. The wind on the ride down made it almost seem like you were climbing again. To make things worse I was on the mountain bike which is just not aerodynamic at all and thus the flabby ironman's upper torso was acting like a sail and making everything all the worse. What should have been a 45-50 minute ride was almost an hour and a half. I'd be lying if I said it was fun. My muscles, which are generally fairly resilient... just ACHED when I got off the bike at the coffee shop.

Just looked at the time. Off to work. I'll try to post some workout songs at lunch. I've found four or five more that I think really work quite nicely.