March Forth
We’re now into that time of year when you get about one day per week where the temperature breaks 50 degrees, so I’ve done that 36-mile Blueberry Hill loop I mentioned in the last post two or three times. I like it; it’s a nice ride, not too long, but a good workout. The roads are a bit rough in places, though.
Saturday Jay dragged me out for a ride, which wound up being a 60-mile exploratorium. There were two sections of road that were new to me. From Waltham, we went down South Street past Brandeis, then back up to Route 20 via scenic Summer Street. That really didn’t accomplish much, but then we went out 20 to Weston, where we took Concord/Tower/Lincoln roads to the Lincoln 5-way. From there, instead of doing Baker Bridge, we took Bedford Road to Hanscom.
The familiar bit was taking Virginia Road to Concord Center, then Strawberry Hill and both Cross and Curve streets and back to Ferns in Carlisle. There we met up with Paul D., who tagged along as we followed the Quad ride route down Lowell Road, Virginia Road, and Mill Street, where we forked off for the day’s second divergence.
To get back to Waltham, we cut across Shade and Spring to get to Wyman Street, which brought us back to Totten Pond and home.
It was a good day out, and at 60 miles nearly doubled my longest ride so far this year. I had good legs for most of the ride, as noted by Jay, who said I didn’t have “little Ethiopian girl legs this year”. And since it was Paul’s first ride of the year, he lagged us a bit, which made me feel better about my winter training, since last year I found myself lagging more often than I’d like.
I’m really hoping for good weather next Saturday, which is the grand opening of Quad Cycles’ new location, and also a ride celebrating Bobby Mac’s 60th birthday, so I’d hate to miss that. After that comes the annual tune-up, I think.
I checked out a couple cycling movies this winter. “The Flying Scotsman” is the story of Graeme Obree’s hour record, and was pretty decent. “The Triplets of Belleville” was a fairly amusing animated film, though cycling wasn’t the focus of the movie. And I tried watching “Breaking Away”, which is presumably the classic cycling movie, but I just couldn’t stand it and only lasted about 15 minutes; the whole redneck teen angst thing just irks the hell outta me.
I’ve also been working on putting together a short video for this year’s PMC appeal. I think I’ve got the script set, and I’m just putting finishing touches on it before I sit down and record it. Hopefully it’ll turn out well. It’s nice to have the time to devote to something like that.
And I should mention that I’ve moved just about all of my PMC fundraising database onto php and MySQL, and hotwired it to the Excel spreadsheet that does all my data visualization. That was rather a lot of effort, but hopefully worthwhile.
So things are starting to pick up, and in two days it’ll be April, when my average monthly mileage nearly doubles from March’s 125 up to 230. So begins the ramp-up for my ninth Pan-Mass Challenge!