Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Trains and Trailers

Today my legs were a little bit sore from my hard run yesterday, but that didn't stop me from crankin' out my 2-hour bike ride today:
B: 120 minutes spinning at RPE 3.
I thought about waiting to do it in the evening so I wouldn't have to take the bike trailer because I'm getting a little sick of the rides I can do with that thing. There are pretty much 3 options for good places to ride without much traffic or huge hills:
  1. The bike path by the river. Yeah, if I want a thorn in my tire. No thanks! Plus it's not really an option because it only goes for about 3 miles.
  2. The bike path ajacent to Beck Street that goes up to North Salt Lake.
  3. Or the bumpy yet farm townish 2200 West that also leads to North Salt Lake.
Then I thought about how much faster I went on Saturday after doing so much bike trailer work. I wouldn't mind getting even more faster so I decided to go with the bike trailer again. 

I chose option number 2 and, after I dropped Ethan off at school and stopped back at home to put some more air in my tires (for some reason they were low which made me nervous, but they were ok after I filled them up), I headed out to the Beck Street bike path. Elle was asleep by the time I stopped to fill my tires:


We made it another 20 minutes or so, then we had to stop for the train:

Luckily it was a short train so I didn't have to wait too long or choose a different rout. I also was very lucky to have a dump truck pull up to the light at Beck Street at the same time as me to turn the light green. That's one good thing about riding up there on a week day. The down side is that you've got to put up with all the dump trucks triving by you for part of the way.

Anyway, I went up the bike path and came back down when I got to the top. I went back up and down 2 more times, each time taking me about 9 minutes. I could have gone up it one more time, but I got sick of it so I headed back towards home. There was a truck spraying water on the road as I rode down, and he stopped the spray as I rode by. I thought, "That was so nice!" A few minutes later, though, I was riding on the wet road and thinking, "So much for my nice, shiny new chain and cassette! Why do they have to spray the road anyway?" I was a little anoyed, but tried not to worry about it too much.

When I got back down to the train tracks, there was a train there again. This time it was actually stopped right in the way:


I was just turning around to see if I could find another way around, when it started moving. Elle woke up just in time, and was very excited to see the train! When we got to our neighborhood, we still had 20 minutes so I headed over to the spot where the ducks usually are, but they weren't there today. I just rode by and looped around to come home. I was a few minutes under 2 hours, but I was kind of in a hurry because I wanted to stretch and shower before picking the kids up - which I was able to do!

I didn't really push it as hard as I could have today, and I didn't pay attention to my heart-rate very much. I hope it did me some good, though.

6 comments:

  1. What a cute picture of Elle.

    And I'm so impressed by the two hour bike ride.

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  2. Thanks, Angie. Elle is such a little sweetie!

    It's funny, 2 hours used to be my long ride, and when I told Pete I did 2 hours today, I was like, "So, pretty short." He had to agree because he remembered thinking like that when he was IM training. Crazy.

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  3. Welcome to the blog, Carol! And yes, bike rides are always good aren't they?

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  4. I can't agree that all bike rides are good. Though I can say I've only had one really bad bike ride in the last year. And really there were just about 3 seconds of it that weren't great.

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  5. Ok, maybe that bike ride didn't end up good, but up until those bad 3 seconds, wasn't it an awesome ride?

    I was thinking maybe that ride I did in the rain wasn't good, but then I decided that it was probably good for me in some way. Even just as a learning experience.

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