Rosedale Ride and Autism Ride 2016 ride reports.
We weren't able to make it out to Easter Hill Country Tour this year, so we just made our own the following weekend!
On Saturday we met up with Karen to ride 60 miles at the Rosedale Ride. She's training for Ironman Texas, so this was a short ride for her (on the heels of the 3 hour trainer ride she'd done the day before), but our longest outdoor ride in the last year was 46 miles last Saturday, so I was a little apprehensive! Mostly about how my butt would feel about the whole thing.
Turned out fine! It was chilly to start.. 48ish, but also windy. Ask me how much I love wind. (Not very much.) I didn't intend to wear a jacket, but with the wind, I couldn't make myself take it off before the start. And I didn't end up taking it off for 3 hours, so I'm glad I wore it!
We stopped at my favorite aid station in Norman's Crossing, where they have (Don't Touch The) horses, wonderful cookies and incredibly friendly volunteers, then again in Coupland, where we had MORE cookies. Otherwise we just had a lovely time riding and catching up with Karen and looking at adorable animals.
Karen's schedule called for a 30 minute run off the bike, and since I don't even own a schedule, Matt and I agreed to join her. It's been a few years since I did a brick workout at Samsung.. I'd forgotten about running off the bike there. We ran down the side road down to Yager and back, and it was barren and exposed and no longer cold outside and while there is a bike lane for most of it now, you're still running right there next to fast cars. Not my favorite venue. But a solid brick workout, and my longest one since Ultraman, probably!
Then home, shower, nap with dogs, pizza and wine for Laura's birthday, and up again at 5:30am for ride day 2!
We'd never done Autism Ride, but Kate wanted to check it out, and we were excited to do Kate's first group ride event with her!
It started an hour earlier, and was even colder than it had been for Rosedale: 43 this time. But no wind! So I managed to leave the jacket behind and just wear a short-sleeved jersey and arm warmers. The first few miles were coooold. The body wasn't so bad, but the fingertips, exposed by my bike gloves, felt like they might be developing frostbite.
Eventually the sun came all the way up, and we warmed up, and there was still no wind, and it was just the perfect day for riding. We'd been hoping to use this ride to get Kate a little bit of experience with mass starts and riding around other people, but we started with the 60 mile folks, even though we were only doing 40, and we started a couple minutes late, so it turned out that we started out completely alone, the three of us, and she got no experience with a mass start. Oops. On the plus side.. it was a lovely start experience!
The ride was great. There were some bad roads out there.. a section of gravel followed by a couple miles where we thought maybe we'd missed a turn, because the road we were on was SO bad, we couldn't imagine they had us riding there on purpose. But then we saw a turn arrow, so evidently it was on purpose!
Normally on a 40 mile ride, we'd probably stop once to refill bottles, but we stopped at an aid station to pee and found that the "cookie stop" that we'd promised Kate at mile 20 had NO COOKIES. They DID have full pb&j sandwiches individually wrapped in baggies, which was amazing, and of which we partook, and a portapotty, and the world's nicest volunteers, so we were glad we stopped. But then we had to stop again at the mile 30 aid station, where they DID have cookies!
The wind picked up a little at this point, but it was very tolerable, and we coasted on in to the end, maybe stopping once for a donkey photo.
Then we crossed the finish line, feeling great for having done 100 miles of riding and 3.5 miles of running over the weekend! The finish line food wasn't available for half an hour after we were done, but it was delicious: either P Terry's or Schlotzsky's, and Kate's husband and kids came and had a little picnic in the grass with us, and we pet a service dog and a service horse.
A really great ride and a great day!
Oh, I guess there was the one issue. On Saturday, I asked Matt to help me remember to check out the cable on my right shifter. It was poking out some, and it kept stabbing me in the finger when I shifted. After the ride, I completely forgot (and, in fact, couldn't figure out at dinner that night why my finger was so weirdly sore). Then when Matt was putting my bike in the car this morning, he stabbed himself, we remembered, and he went and grabbed some wire clippers to clean it up.
As he was snipping, he noticed the cable was pretty badly frayed, and said we should take it in this week to have it re-run, before it resulted in catastrophic failure. This is foreshadowing.
Meanwhile, Matt's clipping, clipping, clipping, and then (DON'T READ THIS PART, KELLY GREEN) he clips and wire bits fly up and go into his eye. We rush in to check it out, and he has a spot of blood on one cheek, and a spot of blood in the opposite eye. He didn't feel like there was anything in there, and it didn't seem to be getting any worse, and it wasn't causing him pain, so we deemed him okay enough to continue on, and headed out to the ride.
And everything was great! Until around mile 15, where Kate was pedaling along on a flat, and I couldn't keep up with her. I shifted into a harder gear to give myself something to push against, and I didn't go any faster. Harder gear. Harder. I was just spinning. Then I looked, and it wasn't changing gears at all.
Remember that catastrophic failure Matt anticipated? This was that. But while it meant that I had exactly one gear the last 25 miles of the ride, it wasn't too bad! If you're gonna just have one gear, this was a pretty good one to have.. it was a middling gear, which meant I could still make it up hills if I got out of my saddle, and sure, it meant I went really slow on the flats and downhills, but Matt and Kate were very patient with my madly spinning legs which took me nowhere.
So bike goes into the bikedoctor, but husband seems to be in good shape, and it could have been much worse all around!
Overall an A++ weekend. Bikes were ridden, cookies were eaten, a horse chewed on my shoulder a little bit.. good stuff.
On Saturday we met up with Karen to ride 60 miles at the Rosedale Ride. She's training for Ironman Texas, so this was a short ride for her (on the heels of the 3 hour trainer ride she'd done the day before), but our longest outdoor ride in the last year was 46 miles last Saturday, so I was a little apprehensive! Mostly about how my butt would feel about the whole thing.
Turned out fine! It was chilly to start.. 48ish, but also windy. Ask me how much I love wind. (Not very much.) I didn't intend to wear a jacket, but with the wind, I couldn't make myself take it off before the start. And I didn't end up taking it off for 3 hours, so I'm glad I wore it!
We stopped at my favorite aid station in Norman's Crossing, where they have (Don't Touch The) horses, wonderful cookies and incredibly friendly volunteers, then again in Coupland, where we had MORE cookies. Otherwise we just had a lovely time riding and catching up with Karen and looking at adorable animals.
Karen's schedule called for a 30 minute run off the bike, and since I don't even own a schedule, Matt and I agreed to join her. It's been a few years since I did a brick workout at Samsung.. I'd forgotten about running off the bike there. We ran down the side road down to Yager and back, and it was barren and exposed and no longer cold outside and while there is a bike lane for most of it now, you're still running right there next to fast cars. Not my favorite venue. But a solid brick workout, and my longest one since Ultraman, probably!
Then home, shower, nap with dogs, pizza and wine for Laura's birthday, and up again at 5:30am for ride day 2!
We'd never done Autism Ride, but Kate wanted to check it out, and we were excited to do Kate's first group ride event with her!
It started an hour earlier, and was even colder than it had been for Rosedale: 43 this time. But no wind! So I managed to leave the jacket behind and just wear a short-sleeved jersey and arm warmers. The first few miles were coooold. The body wasn't so bad, but the fingertips, exposed by my bike gloves, felt like they might be developing frostbite.
Eventually the sun came all the way up, and we warmed up, and there was still no wind, and it was just the perfect day for riding. We'd been hoping to use this ride to get Kate a little bit of experience with mass starts and riding around other people, but we started with the 60 mile folks, even though we were only doing 40, and we started a couple minutes late, so it turned out that we started out completely alone, the three of us, and she got no experience with a mass start. Oops. On the plus side.. it was a lovely start experience!
The ride was great. There were some bad roads out there.. a section of gravel followed by a couple miles where we thought maybe we'd missed a turn, because the road we were on was SO bad, we couldn't imagine they had us riding there on purpose. But then we saw a turn arrow, so evidently it was on purpose!
Normally on a 40 mile ride, we'd probably stop once to refill bottles, but we stopped at an aid station to pee and found that the "cookie stop" that we'd promised Kate at mile 20 had NO COOKIES. They DID have full pb&j sandwiches individually wrapped in baggies, which was amazing, and of which we partook, and a portapotty, and the world's nicest volunteers, so we were glad we stopped. But then we had to stop again at the mile 30 aid station, where they DID have cookies!
The wind picked up a little at this point, but it was very tolerable, and we coasted on in to the end, maybe stopping once for a donkey photo.
Then we crossed the finish line, feeling great for having done 100 miles of riding and 3.5 miles of running over the weekend! The finish line food wasn't available for half an hour after we were done, but it was delicious: either P Terry's or Schlotzsky's, and Kate's husband and kids came and had a little picnic in the grass with us, and we pet a service dog and a service horse.
A really great ride and a great day!
Oh, I guess there was the one issue. On Saturday, I asked Matt to help me remember to check out the cable on my right shifter. It was poking out some, and it kept stabbing me in the finger when I shifted. After the ride, I completely forgot (and, in fact, couldn't figure out at dinner that night why my finger was so weirdly sore). Then when Matt was putting my bike in the car this morning, he stabbed himself, we remembered, and he went and grabbed some wire clippers to clean it up.
As he was snipping, he noticed the cable was pretty badly frayed, and said we should take it in this week to have it re-run, before it resulted in catastrophic failure. This is foreshadowing.
Meanwhile, Matt's clipping, clipping, clipping, and then (DON'T READ THIS PART, KELLY GREEN) he clips and wire bits fly up and go into his eye. We rush in to check it out, and he has a spot of blood on one cheek, and a spot of blood in the opposite eye. He didn't feel like there was anything in there, and it didn't seem to be getting any worse, and it wasn't causing him pain, so we deemed him okay enough to continue on, and headed out to the ride.
And everything was great! Until around mile 15, where Kate was pedaling along on a flat, and I couldn't keep up with her. I shifted into a harder gear to give myself something to push against, and I didn't go any faster. Harder gear. Harder. I was just spinning. Then I looked, and it wasn't changing gears at all.
Remember that catastrophic failure Matt anticipated? This was that. But while it meant that I had exactly one gear the last 25 miles of the ride, it wasn't too bad! If you're gonna just have one gear, this was a pretty good one to have.. it was a middling gear, which meant I could still make it up hills if I got out of my saddle, and sure, it meant I went really slow on the flats and downhills, but Matt and Kate were very patient with my madly spinning legs which took me nowhere.
So bike goes into the bikedoctor, but husband seems to be in good shape, and it could have been much worse all around!
Overall an A++ weekend. Bikes were ridden, cookies were eaten, a horse chewed on my shoulder a little bit.. good stuff.