yay, ride!

now that i've got me a "bike computer", i can say with some amount of confidence such things as, "i rode 28.9 miles today with an average speed of 12mph, taking about 2 and a half hours with lots of resting and backtracking to make sure the wife was still with me".

all right then, here i go already:

i rode 28.9 miles today with an average speed of 12mph, taking about 2 and a half hours with lots of resting and backtracking to make sure the wife was still with me.

that's right, second week with my bike and i rode nearly 30 miles. granted, 30 very easy miles from fester city to burlingame (doh, always thought it was milbrae!) with lots of stopping and so forth, but i'm easing into things. i did two minor hills (up to the captain's house at coyote point, and up to the top of the garbage heap on 3rd) and had no trouble climbing or shifting, both highly problematic ops on my old mountain bike.

sadly, i found a problem with my bike: on the way back, i stopped to ask a woman if her dog was a bouvier (it was! and it was grey. wtf?) and managed, somehow, to twist my seat around. now i'm not sure if it's at the right level, since it follows that if it's loose enough to twist, it's loose enough to descend. this led me to a realization: i ought to carry an allen wrench, at the least, when i ride. many more specialized tools are required to adjust my new bike than my old bike. no tools needed to adjust the seat on the mountain bike. an allen wrench isn't too much of a burden, and it's good for training to carry that extra weight.

speaking of training by carrying extra weight, when i was hanging back with hops some dude came at us on a bike with big bags of somehting hanging from the handlebars and the saddle. now, i was wearing my SPORTS SUNGLASSES, which are exactly like my regular sunglasses only slightly broken. actually, my regular sunglasses are slightly broken also, but my SPORTS SUNGLASSES are slightly broken in a slightly different way. the distinguishing feature of my SPORTS SUNGLASSES is that they are so covered in dried, salty sweat, that i cannot make out details finer than a small elephant or shetland pony. many times i have been out running with my SPORTS SUNGLASSES, admiring the figure of the hottie running toward me, only to discover once they were right next to me that they were less of a hottie and more of a 90 year old man with a peg leg.

you may thing a "but i digress" would be appropriate here, but you'd be wrong. i looked at the dude on the bike with the bags and pronounced in a loud voice, "he must be training!" you know, cuz why else would he be on a road bike with bags of crap? if he were commuting he'd have saddlebags. i figured he was on some weird, hardcore training regimen.

whelp, once he got into seeing range, it turns out he's a crusty old homeless guy with bags of cans or garbage or clothes hung from his bike. ha!

anyhow, aside from my seat twisting, all my gear performed admirably. i had one of those energy goo things and didn't know what to do with the empty. it has some feature on it that suggests there's a clever solution to this problem (a recycling handle or something, i'd go look but i'm apathetic) but i didn't spend the time to figure it out. i just tossed the empty into the bay.

ha! ha ha! i kid. of course i didn't.

my water bottles are too small. i rode 30mi and drank maybe 2 pints of water. not good. my toes freeze. this is partly because my shoes are well ventilated, partly because it's chilly out, partly because i ride fast, and partly because of genetics. yay, genetics! also, maybe my bike is out of whack. i dunno.

so, that was fun, and if i'm not all miserably sore tomorrow, it's off to cañada for a leisurely (wtf english! l-i-before-e-except-after-c-surely isn't a word? WHY BOTHER HAVING RULES AT ALL IF WE'RE JUST GOING TO LIVE IN TOTAL CHAOS ALL THE TIME ANYHOW?) 15 or so miles.