I got back on the saddle, so to speak, last night, riding my bike for the first time in quite awhile. I decided to take a different route yesterday, eschewing Madeira and riding down to the Little Miami Bike Trail. The total ride was about 11.8 miles, which was kind of long, and I finished in a little over an hour. The route was kind of a big circle. Indian “Hill” lived up to its name – lots of hills as I rode through there (for out of towners, this is to the east of where I live). There was one hill that I knew was going to be a big one, so I arranged the route to go down this hill instead of up it :-). I had a hard enough time going up the backside of it. Still, going down was a bit scary, just because you’re going down SO fast, that anything that busted out at you could mess you up. Luckily there are no stopsigns or anything at the bottom, and it’s a pretty un-populated area. To give you an idea of the hill, I looked on TopoZone, and it goes from about 820 feet above sea level to about 570 in the space of not very long at all. It took about 22 minutes to get down to the bike trail (at Cunningham Rd), which is about mile marker 2.0.

Rode about 2.7 miles on the trail, northbound, which took about 15 minutes. The nice thing about this bike trail is that because it’s an old railroad bed, it’s fairly flat. There was a grade to it (I think probably the whole time was uphill) but it was a flat uphill, if that makes sense. The downside is that because it’s an old railroad and right next to the river, there’s lots of industrial areas nearby, which doesn’t do much for the smell. Not to mention the river itself isn’t exactly a springtime breeze, iykwim.

I knew as I flew down the aforementioned big hill into Camp Dennison that at some point I’d have to come back up, and the trek back to my house on Loveland-Madeira road. It was maybe 4 miles or so and essentially completely uphill. The grades weren’t that bad (for the most part) but it was very tiring. As usual, the worst hills were the ones coming back to my house – had to walk it again. It’s not that those hills are THAT long or THAT steep, but they are kind of steep and they come right at the end of the journey when I’m very tired…

We watched some of our Seinfeld DVDs last night – good times. We watched “The Handicap spot” and “The Implant“, the latter of which we watched with the writer’s commentary on. It was interesting (though at times confusing trying to follow everything at once). I did not realize that “double dipping” was originated by Seinfeld – this particular writer was mentioning that he had only written a few eps, but was listing off all of the pop culture phrases that he had essentially invented. Double dipping, yada yada yada (though that might predate Seinfeld), anti-dentite, etc. It’s crazy to think of all the phrases that seem like they’ve been around forever but have really only been around for 10-15 years.