[Updated stats at the end]

About three weekends ago now, I posted that I was getting back into the swing of things on the bicycle, and you could expect to see more updates from me again. Well, the next weekend I was waiting out Sunday morning for the weather to clear up, and before I could go for a ride, something slipped in my back. I was out of commission for a while. Even standing up was a problem, and I couldn’t remain standing for more than about 20 minutes before I was in sheer misery.

I know what the problem is. I’ve just had a crap winter from the standpoint of exercise and weight gain. I put on too many pounds and didn’t keep up a good workout plan, so time to get back to being more sensible.

Anyway, day by day things got better. I’ve was careful. By the next Sunday I was able to go out for an easy ride. I kept the mileage to about 12 miles and avoided all the hard hills, and kept the pace low. I got a similar mid-week ride in on either Wednesday or Thursday evening, I forget which.

So today I was finally able to get out for a normal ride. I met a cycling buddy of mine, and we did about 33 miles with an average around 15 mph. I can’t cite specifics because both of my sources of data had technical problems during the ride. I’m depending on info Scott gave me at the end. My Garmin cycling computer just turned itself off randomly twice in the middle of the ride. I think I went a couple of miles both times before noticing, and then when I did get it back on some of the info was whacked, showing an average speed of like 23 mph, which I knew wasn’t anywhere close to right.

And then for those of you who may have been following my twitter feed or my facebook updates, the “map my ride” software I was using on my phone to tweet my status during the ride also seems to have behaved oddly. I see it shows after the first hour of riding that we’d only made it a half-mile! I know I’m not at top form, but even with a bad back I can do more than a half-mile in an hour. I think it sort of corrected itself from there on out, but the whole ride was out of sync.

Anyway, the technology failed me, but the ride was still good. It was a hotter one than I’ve had in a long time, and I’m glad I had the sense to apply some sunscreen before beginning because the sun was definitely out and pounding. We also faced a really tough headwind on the return part of the ride. Whenever we turned westward the wind just brought us to a near crawl. We kind of bailed on a last few miles that would have brought us into my neighborhood from the other side, and instead took the shortest most direct route, but I’m still satisfied with the ride.

Next weekend is supposed to be a charity ride to support Parkinsons research. I’ve done the same ride the past two years and it’ll be a 50 mile route, with Caraway mountain at around the halfway point. It’s not an extreme climb, about a class 5, but it’s a good place to start getting the climbing legs working for the summer, and it’ll still feel plenty painful to me at this point in the season.

Hopefully I’ll get a couple of shorter rides in during the week, or even a commute into the office. I need to get that going again. 50 miles is going to seem really long right now, but I should survive it okay, and then I should start setting out for 40-50 pretty often after that.

Thanks for reading and stay tuned.

Scott must have seen my post because he sent me the actual stats. We did 33.74 miles with an average of 15.1 mph and elevation gain of 1,367 feet. Obviously, this is info from his cycling computer. I won’t claim his heart rate info, but these stats should be close enough to my own to claim them.