Annoying Beagle encounter

[BleeckerSt_Girl]

Lisa -- how long does it take you to do your "usual" 21 mile ride? (Sounds lovely.)

Pooks... I am not a fast rider. I laugh when the other gals here complain about their "slow" averages of 15mph on rides! (you are probably thinking YOU are a slow rider right now, but you'll feel way better after you read about MY average speed)...

To be fair, we have a LOT of steep hills everywhere here. My bike weighs 30 pounds loaded (luckily I am not overweight myself), I'm almost 53, and I've only been biking since last year. All this adds up to a really slow average speed of 9 to 10mph. I've never ridden in flat areas so I'm not sure what my average speed would be in that situation.
I've come a long way since I started last summer, panting and gasping along back then. I am much stronger now, and I'm trying to further strengthen my leg muscles with some harder longer rides now that winter is over, and I've started some stair climbing sessions at home as well.
Once I get more muscle I should be able to cut a bit more time off my hill climbing- that's what pulls my speed mph down dramatically... sometimes I'm actually climbing the steeper hills at 2.5mph! It usually takes me about 2 hours and 10-15 minutes to do my regular 21 mile ride. But I'm working on it, and meanwhile I do have a great time and am getting fitter!

And yes it IS lovely riding around here- rolling hills and fields and farmland and little villages. I feel VERY lucky that way. We ride a lot of wooded gravel back roads and we purposely got bikes that could take heavier tires so we could do a lot of that kind of riding. There is a 30 mile ride DH and I invented that we like to bike sometimes- we call it "The Five Chathams"- because it takes us through all our local hamlets of Chatham, North Chatham, East Chatham, Chatham Center, and Old Chatham!