a bit of grit

Sunday: 1 hr run with my husband and the dog, then weights: arms and shoulders.

Saturday: bike ride.   Figuring out the gears almost made most of the hills accessible.  I am really out of biking shape!  And things here are a bit further apart than I'd guessed: the spot that I'd thought was about six miles away was really past nine, but my route was a bit circuitous too: still learning the bike-friendly routes here.  The road network is poorly-designed in some respects: the town itself has a grid system, a very small grid system, and the rest is either windy hilly suburban neighbourhood roads or less windy and less hilly highways and quasi-highways.   And the scenic detours I plotted at home fell by the wayside but I found others, and some larger roads with bicycle signs--one highway is part of a state bicycle route which rocks because it's the only road that will get me to a certain place without miles of detours, but I wasn't sure I could actually go on it--and I also found a trail system and that my bike, though it doesn't handle sand well, but which bike does?, it's actually surprisingly steady on packed dirt/light gravel.  Yeah, I was on the wrong bike, but I had to check things out.  Some of that sand is still on my gears, plus I still have to reinflate a new inner tube on my other bike: my folks are in town so things have been busy.  Hopefully later today I can get to it because I'm itching to ride again.  total: over 22 miles in about 2 hours of biking, including walking and bumping through a fair bit through sandy portions--I guess there were about 1.5 miles of very slow trail "riding".   Altogether, this was my longest bike ride in a long time. 

I still have to get used to the lower hand position, but I was shocked at how easy it is to balance on this bike.  Somehow I'd thought that it would be more finicky than my mountain bike, it being more streamlined and delicate and all, ha! no, this thing is much steadier.  I just have to remember that I can't turn so tightly anymore, even when I'm going very slowly, and I think turning out quickly prior to turning in--hard to explain, but it gets the bike turned in a tighter space--isn't something I can do on this bike.  But it makes the hills ever so much kinder!  Near the end of the ride, I chose the scenic option, a road that I've run in that direction only once because of a certain hill I'd completely forgotten about.  Once I saw it again, a couple of bad words escaped my lips, but I actually made it up on a granny gear. I'd thought I was going to have to walk it.  I was so tired by that point.  So that was a minor triumph.  And then a few minutes later I biked into the subdivision next to mine.  LOL

Though the road network isn't the best, the local attitude is top-notch.  Not one person yelled at me.  It helps that there are horses here: drivers are more used to sharing the roads.

Friday: short run in the morning, then picked up my bike and biked a few miles but couldn't figure out how to shift back up cog sizes.   Turns out that pushing the lower set of brake levers outwards shifts up.

My apologies for poor sentence construction: I woke up in the middle of the night and decided to update because composition is sometimes sleep-inducing, and it's working again.  Not the best indication or or inspiration or impetus, but heyyyyyyyyy