Seven Zero

Maywood 2009 I decided to take the 70 mile route. I thought it would be tougher than it turned out to be. I think I'm in better shape than other years when I've only done the 50 mile route. The big hills I remember from other years didn't seem as big this year. Plus I finally got a new bike like I've been planning on for several years. I did the second annual Ronald McDonald House Charity Ride a month before and that was only 40 miles but more hilly and I thought much more difficult. I even walked up part of a hill on that ride. It was kind of embarrassing. This hill was steep and long and partway up it turned and went up some more that you couldn't see until you made the turn. It didn't help that I clicked into the larger chainring instead of the smaller one partway up and had to work my way through that and get back to the low ring. I got to a point where I couldn't breath any harder and I had to stop. It was such a steep hill where I stopped I didn't think I could click back into my pedals and so I just walked up the rest of it. I haven't walked my bike up a hill probably since I was 12. I've got that hill in my mind and next year assuming it's on the route I'll beat that hill. It's on Peerless Road just north of Ridge Road in Dane County. The whole route was hilly and there didn't seem to be very many flatter portions to recover in before the next hill. I stopped a bunch of times just to get my breath before moving on. Not a lot of rides I go on make me feel out of shape, but this one did.

In the first part of July I picked up a Trek 7.3FX in red just like the picture above. It's a hybrid bike. If you consider all of the hybrids on the market as falling on a spectrum with "practically a mountain bike" on one end and "practically a road bike" on one the other end, I think this falls closer to the road bike end. For me it was as big of a jump as I wanted to make right now after having ridden a hardtail mountain bike for so many years. I couldn't see myself moving all the way to a road bike yet. I swapped the saddle out for one of those anatomic relief saddles after my first 70 miles, but other than that I haven't changed a thing. I got used to riding this bike pretty quick and I've been on my old bike just once and I can hardly believe I used to ride that thing so much. My new bike is so much better, and better suited to the type of riding I do anyway. It's not all that much lighter, but the roll is better on these tires than the fat mountain bike tires I had been riding on. Plus I use a larger range of gears instead of just 4 or 5. This was definitely the best money I've spent in a while. I got it at Emery's of course.
Maywood 2009 was one of the best I've done so far. I consider the Maywood Earth Ride the highlight of my riding season every year by far. It's more about the ride than the cause...which I'm not exactly sure what that is. The earth??? They changed the 65 mile route to a different area this year and made it a 70 mile route instead. As I was doing it I considered just taking the turn and going on the 100 mile loop, but I didn't. Maybe next year. I had a ton of energy left at the end. That might have had something to do with eating 3 Powerbars and a couple gel packs along the way. At the end I had some really great soup, "Chicken Tortilla" or something like that. I hung out for a while and watched the Beef Tea String Band which was pretty cool.