Riding, Riding, Riding

This weekend I still was under the assumption that the Paul Bunyan Double Century hadn't been cancelled (Darn MNDOT!) and rode my tail off. I didn't ride exceptionally far, but over the course of the weekend I put in around 130miles (a few more than that, but who's counting).

Friday I was supposed to be meeting some friends for breakfast and so when the alarm started playing the midi version of U2's Beautiful Day at 4:35, I hustled to turn it off and hopped into the shower.

The nice thing about heading out onto the road at 5am is that there isn't any traffic anywhere, the bad thing is that I couldn't seem to trigger ANY of the stoplights and thus ended up waiting at light after light after light waiting for my opportunity to hop across the intersection and continue my ride.

The thing that had me a little concerned with the morning ride was that I'd never ridden all the way back north after diving downtown. When I ride to church on Tuesday nights Ang is always there to haul me and the bike back up to the apartment. But I sucked it up and figured that there wasn't ever a really good time to make the first trek back north.

Suprisingly, the ride north wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. It's a steady climb, but there are really only two semi-nasty pieces of climbing and both of those are short. I found that it takes about an hour and forty to go from the north side of downtown Colorado Springs up several hundred feet to Monument 23 miles north. I would have ridden home, but towards five there were electrical storms... never a good thing to ride through here where in the plains to the east of the front range there's a good chance you're going to be the highest thing around. 36 miles for the day though, wasn't a bad thing.

Saturday I was up bright and early for the clubs weekly training ride. This is kind of the hammer head ride of the week (next to the Sunday hill climbing and my newly launched "Thursday Night Mileage Marauders" ride... (where I didn't get to put into effect my 'tour de hurt' route last week. This week though, this week!)

last week the ride was up on the north side of town, but once a month it moves locations and this time we were just outside of Fort Carson on the south side of town. I've never ridden through a military base before. It's odd seeing randomly placed tanks.

We cut through Fort Carson and headed south to the Pike's Peak International Raceway. Supposedly, if they ever pave a chunk of one of the roads we were riding there'll be a nice road bike route from Colorado Springs to Pueblo, but for the moment all we have is I-25 (which is actually legal to ride on in most places on a bicycle.... not that you'd catch ME doing it) or the rail/trail that bisects the state.

It was a pretty good day for a ride. Not too hot, not exceptionally windy. Plus, on that side of town there isn't a LOT of climbing, though what climbing there is is on the way back north. The highlight was probably being chased by an emu on an emu farm. I guess it decided it wanted to race a couple of us. We won, I think.

Anyway, 48 miles later that was done for the day and I was off to church to fix some things up during a "pimp my church" day.

Sunday was the same as any other Sunday... if it's Sunday it must be a ride day. The difference was that I ended up riding down to Acacia Park downtown and back up again afterwards. Click another 40+ off for that.

I think I would have been ready for Paul Bunyan if it had happened. It's kind of frustrating that it's cancelled, but I've been searching out some other double centuries. There's one here in Colorado that I'd always talked of doing called 'Denver-Aspen' that has 13000' ft of climbing over it's 200 miles... and I might do that, but I'm really just reevaluating. What do I want to do? What can I afford to do? Things will be much better when Ang has a regular job and we're not on nearly as strict of a budget. For now though it's a matter of picking and choosing.

I've been thinking of bagging the half-ironman I was talking of doing later in the season so that I can continue to save for Ironman Florida. As interested as I am in the race, I'm more interested in getting back to the long course. I'll never be as much of a triathlete as I am a cyclist and really the long-course is the thing that interests me. For me, I think, it's the insane mix. The shorter distances aren't nearly as insane, and someday I fear, the Ironman might not look nearly so insane.

Thankfully, for the moment, there's still a romance with the Ironman. When we were back in Minneapolis a couple weeks ago, I dug a highlight tape out of a box of videos from the 02 Wisconsin race. When we were cleaning things up and putting things away back home a couple days later I put it in and all the emotions flooded back. I thought I had lost the passion, but it was buried back in the recesses of my brain.