First 'real' road ride: success!
So, I've been getting bored with riding at the park and the sub across from there, doing the same loops (and variations thereof) over, and over, and over... Doing a section of a not-too-distant railtrail over the weekend just made the park boredom worse. So, since today is a BEAUTIFUL day (low 70s, sunny, with 7-10 mph breeze), I figured I'd try for a honest-to-goodness on-the-road ride. DH was not happy when I told him about this, but I figured it was a foregone conclusion when I came home from lunch and my new Shebeest shorts (thanks for the sale, TE!) were waiting on the porch.
I picked a fairly easy route, or what I thought would be fairly easy. Six and a half miles through subdivisions, a business park, and semi-main roads. The first half was a pretty steady climb with a few short coasting sections, the last half is a lot of up and down and back up again within a few hundred feet -- MapMyRide says the whole route only has 120' of climbing, but I really think it's more. Anyway. Despite DH's worries about the jagoffs on the road (two bikers were victims of a hit-n-run down in the city during the weekend, and so he thinks that ALL drivers are going to gun for bikers and take off...), I had a great ride. The hills really did kick my butt, but I got up all of them, only had to use my lowest two gears once (on the biggest hill), and I bombed out 27 mph on the downhill of the big one! That's DEFINITELY the fastest I've gone! I averaged a little over 10 mph over the entire ride, which I'm pretty happy with for my first non-super-flat ride. :)
The worst part was that I dropped my chain once I got into the first neighborhood, about 3 minutes into my ride. I was shifting from my smallest to middle chain-ring, in a middle gear in the back, and off she came. Apparently I stepped in the wrong spot when I went to fix it, because when I went to clip my right foot in, it wouldn't budge. Looked down, saw a bunch of grass sticking to the bottom of my shoe... apparently there was tar still sticky from the heat earlier in the week that was hiding under the grass clippings of the house I stopped in front of, and my cleat was covered and packed with tar, grit, and grass. I unpacked it the best that I could so that I could clip in without sticking my shoe to the pedal permanently... I'll go out tomorrow and scrape the rest of the tar out of the pedal (It's only on the outside -- I checked the whole thing real carefully because I just got these!). Shoe is in a bag in the freezer to harden the crap still stuck to the bottom so I can try to chip it out tonight. Other than that, though (and the crap that I got on my hands from the chain and tar), it was a great ride and I can't wait to do it again (even the hills)!
