It will likely be next Saturday or the Saturday after that for the big 50 mile Tour de Madeira. I haven’t ridden much lately, just due mostly to time constraints. I went out for a ride this afternoon and it went fairly well.
I had talked some with PJ this week to try and coordinate a ride, but didn’t come up with anything. I believe he is riding also this afternoon. He is going to ride with me in the TdeM. Most of his training rides seem to be “real” rides – you know, where you actually go somewhere, whereas most of my rides are crazy ones where I loop in and out of various side streets, similar to the TdeM. It will be interesting to see if that makes any difference – if there’s any intrinsic difference between the two styles of riding.
I ended up on a route that went north of my house – mostly through Indian Hill, though also through parts of Madeira (obviously), Sycamore Twp and Montgomery. Cycle computer distance was 18.08 miles, which I completed in 1:33:03, which is about 11.7 mph.
I did set my new max speed, at 28.8 mph, which was coming down Lyncris Dr in Montgomery. Of course, as is the case with most rides of mine where I’m doing a lot of circles and ins and outs, what goes down must come up – coming up the flip side wasn’t much fun… I probably could have gotten even faster had I realized the topography over on Blome Rd. I came flying down that hill at around 25 mph, but had to slow down to turn right into a subdivision. Then when I was done, I again got up to 25 or so continuing down the hill. If I had realized it, I would have done that subdivision a different way (from Finley) and just busted down the hill. At the bottom of the hill is the one lane covered bridge going over Raiders Run. This was actually the 2nd time in my route I had crossed Raiders Run (previously on Keller near Montgomery), so to celebrate, I will comment that it is very difficult to find any information on Raiders Run while doing a Google search that does not talk about football.
I did have to walk up some of the flip side of the hill coming up from Raiders Run, but one interesting thing I found was on the subdivisions off of Blome – at the end of them they have sort of traffic circles (with a grassy area in the middle) instead of regular cul-de-sacs – perfect for a rider like myself.
I amused myself through most of the ride while humming one of the catchiest songs I’ve ever heard. Oh and thinking of things to entertain you in my blog posts :-). The other thing I saw was that one of the places I had previously visited while GeoGolfing
All in all, a fun ride – as always check out my cycling log which is off to the side