May 26 Rides

[Aggie_Ama]

We only did our 15 miles "Dog Ride". I am breaking in some new Aline Insoles and opted to obey their instructions of only riding one hour. My feet need some help but I really want to be logging a lot of miles this weekend.

[Crankin]

I did a 44 mile ride from Littleton, MA to Hollis, NH and back. The first part of the ride is the same as another one I ride more frequently. It starts out with a steady 5-6% climb for the first five miles. At mile 6 we stopped and used a bathroom. Once we get to about mile ten, it becomes pretty rural, through Groton, MA and into Pepperell. It was really hot, about 90, but it was partly cloudy, thankfully, with a breeze. Stopped to refill the Accelerade with Gatorade and then rode to Hollis, to the Kimball Fruit farm, where we stopped and ate a picnic lunch, overlooking the Monadanock Mountains. There's a pretty steep climb right before the lunch stop. Then we go down through some pretty roads, back into Pepperell and Dunstable, MA. We stopped again for water refills at a store and then took a road that goes by Lake Massapaug in Dunstable and Tyngsboro. In fact, we were about a mile from the first house I lived in when i moved back to MA from AZ. It's just beautiful here. Then, back into Groton, to do the Lost Lake climb. It's funny, this used to seem so hard to me, but now it's not. After this, it's only a few miles back to the start; we were held up by TWO trains at a RR crossing. One was a commuter rail, but the other was a freight train that went very slowly by. Then, he stopped, past the gate, but not far enough down to trigger the signal for the gate to go up. So after waiting like five minutes more, we saw no more trains coming and went around the gate.
As always, i start feeling good about 30 miles into a ride! I purposely did not push myself and ended up with a 14.3 average for 3200 feet of climbing in 44 miles.