It's All About The Bike

At least lately it is!  I finished off week #1 of my big bike block with - shocker - a long ride.  But first I had to pry myself away from the Texas 70.3 coverage - it was an exciting weekend of races to really kick off the season in North America and I didn't get to spend nearly as much time tracking as I wanted to.

Kristi and I were finally able to coordinate to ride together!  She's doing Canada as well but she's also doing Honu, which is about 3 weeks ahead of my 1/2IM, so she's a bit ahead of me on volume too.  We know that when it gets to the longer stuff in a few months we'll be on the same general track together and not have to do our really long rides alone.  She's coming down my way for an organized metric century in a couple weeks so I went up to her part of the Bay Area today for something different!

We got some heavy rain showers yesterday and had been anxiously watching the weather report hoping today would not be ruined with nasty weather.  While it was quite windy and it was cold to start the ride, it turned out to be a beautiful day!  I'm grateful to Kris for setting me up to start a wonderful trailhead so I could get my warmup run done somewhere pretty while she was doing the first part of her ride.

The advantage to all this rain is that everything is GREEN now!

Note to self: buy a new helmet.  When the insides start creeping out, it's really time.

I can't get enough of these kinds of views, even if I am crawling along pedaling downhill into headwind :-)

We ended up doing about 45 miles with ~2250 feet of climbing.
I am certainly learning to love the hills again after a few years of racing flatter courses.

And now I've got to recover fast, because week 2 in this block kicks off first thing in the morning with my long run.  So far, I've survived a big load of biking with tired but not thrashed legs (thank you compression tights, food, and ART) and a mostly happy rear end (thank you Trislide).  It's April now too, which means the weather is only going to get better and better - right, Mother Nature? Right?!