I see so many posts of new cyclists who have fallen in love with the bike, and it makes me so nostalgic.

About 3 years ago, I got my first bike since being a kid, and girl, I fell hard in love with the two wheels, and the feelings of freedom and joy. In that first year, I did about 6000km, and was always happy to get on the bike. The next year, I had less time for cycling, but loved it just as much, and I bought a fancy new road bike (Specialized Sequoia cos I know you'll be wondering!). Up until then, almost all my cycling was alone - long distance commuting or just plain fun trips and just cycling everywhere.

Then, this year (around March), I decided to join a cycling group. These guys were "leisure" cyclists, so wouldn't be as fast as racing cyclists. However, they were still much too fast for me. I used get joy out of "speeding" along at ~25kph; so, then hanging off the back of a group flying along (and up, up, up more hills than I'd ever done) at ~30kph just was too much for me. March was a "warm up" month, so that was fine and I was so excited about cycling, April started getting harder and I was really pushing myself to the limits, and only barely keeping up, and by May it was all starting to fall apart. I started to dread training sessions and stopped going out on my own and just constantly felt like I wasn't good enough or fast enough. In early June, I did a metric century in the mountains, and pretty much just hung up the bike after that.

I always thought of myself as a speedy enough chick, so it sucked to find out that when I was cycling with *real* cyclists, I'm actually pretty d@mn slow.

How do I get over this? How do I get the love back? Anyone else experienced this sort of disillusionment, and got over it? I can barely bring myself to look at my bikes these days.