Winnertime Love
A couple posts back I wrote: “Unless January and February get back to setting temperature records, you won’t see much from me in the next couple months.”
Well, sometimes miracles do happen! January had five days above 50 degrees. Then February also had five days above 50°, plus five more days above 60°! And you can bet your sweet bippy that I took advantage of them.
So far in 2016, I’ve done 11 rides, which included some neighborhood explorations, plus:
- The mostly ceremonial New Years Day Icycle Bicycle ride around town. (GPS log)
- A processional ride in honor of a local rider who was killed. (GPS log)
- A northside expedition out Fox Chapel, returning via Old Mill, Squaw Run, and Guyasuta. (GPS log)
- Another expedition up the southside slopes, including stops at all the overlooks above the Monongahela and the ridiculous climb up Greenleaf. (GPS log)
- Local explorations of Duck Hollow, Johnston Ave to Glen Hazel, the swoopy and dangerous Swinburne shortcut from Oakland to Greenfield, and discovering Parkview Blvd as a superior route to Homestead Grays.
- A 65-mile riverside ride including Bunola River Rd up to Mon City and back with the Pittsburgh Randonneurs. (GPS log)
- Another northside ride, going out Dorseyville and back via Saxonburg (GPS log).
- Trying out my first and second Dirty Dozen hills. Tesla, the last hill on the Dirty Dozen route, is only a little ways from home. It’s mostly an easy hill until the last quarter mile, which shoots up painfully. But it’s short and doable, unless perhaps you’ve already covered a dozen insane climbs already… (GPS log)
- And I also did Ravine/Sharps Hill, which is the second hill on the DD route. It’s much longer, starting out steep, getting much worse through its middle section, then ending with a long, straight uphill grind. That middle section was pretty damned hard. (GPS log)
It’s fun seeing the Dirty Dozen hills and conquering them, even if I’m taking them in isolation, rather than altogether.
So my stats for the past two months are actually really good. In the five preceding years back in Boston, I averaged only 4.2 rides and 94 miles by the end of February. But this year I’ve done 11 rides totaling 275 miles. So you can see that it’s been a great start to the year.
More significantly, by this time I normally would have accrued an average of 1,300 feet of climbing. My total this year is no less than 18,228 feet! Which reinforces the implication from my last post: that every ride in Pittsburgh is the equivalent of going out and doing hill repeats in Boston.
And I’ve been posting ride photos regularly, some of which appear here, but you can see more-plus new ones as they come in-on Instagram, Flickr, or Strava.
But now the calendar has turned to March, and genuine early season things are happening. The pros have opened up the European season with the Het Volk and Kuurne-Brussels-Kuurne cobbled classics, and the local randonneurs are ramping up for their characteristically early 200k and 300k brevets.
It might not be quite time to break out the SPD sandals, but I’ve gotten enough sun exposure to begin making progress on what the little woman calls my “distinctive markings”.
Hopefully March and April will bring more of that, please!