I feel like the last day of the month is a good day for me to post about June adventures on the bike, as other than a big mountain ride yesterday, day-to-day hasn't had much to write home about (or to the forum about...) but the cumulative effect has been worth something.

Mostly through commuting and errand-running, I've put about 300 miles on my bikes in June. I have some big rides coming up, both in terms of length and degree of challenge, and I meant to do more in June, but... Getting ready for a big new career challenge, busy with existing work, a fun little bout of food poisoning, etc. The usual excuses.

But often during June on my little rides--especially on my commute home--I've been picking sections to to go all-out on, sometimes more just as a way to burn off stress at the end of the day than any purposeful training plan (and there were still plenty of times I crawled home as pitifully slowly as I could). But my commute essentially turned into a bit of an unorganized interval training session. And I've been feeling good. Really good!

I decided that feeling good wasn't just wishful thinking when I set a new personal best of 5:07 on one of the hills on my commute home--having biked it over 100 times, I was pretty thrilled. And then a few days later, biked the same hill in 4:45!

And then yesterday I biked up Mt Baker (the ride went from 1000' to 5000' with about 4500' total elevation gain because of some rolling hills)--since I hadn't been doing longer rides, or sustained climbs for a while, I wasn't sure how it would go, but I had so much fun! I felt great the whole way up, and like I could have kept riding for much longer.

So, long story short, June's rides individually weren't that interesting that I wanted to write about them. But I feel like despite my disappointment with myself about not getting more riding in, that the sum total of the month was actually a noticeable improvement in my fitness, aka my fun capacity!

And it's a good thing too, since I have the STP double century on July 11th, and the big RAMROD ride on July 29th, and a few other similar challenges planned for next month... Whee...