In the Saddle Again

After a several month long hiatus from bicycle riding, I have started up again.  Last weekend, my husband and I joined our biking buddy and did the Farm Park.  This is really not the thing one should do after being off the bike for six months, but we took it slow and I managed to do all the hill climbs without getting off the bike.  I was pretty proud of that.

I expected to be pretty sore the next day and was surprised to find not one muscle hurting when I woke up.  I felt really good, albeit a little tired.  I felt so good, that my husband and I decided to go riding later that day.  We got our gear on and our bikes out and as soon as I sat on the seat I realized that something did hurt!  It took a good half of the ride before I could sit on the seat without wincing.

So we took a few days off and I went riding this weekend and the saddle felt ever so much more comfortable.  We did, however only did 16 miles.  Babysteps.  Before I know it my saddle time will be up and we will doing 20 miles or more every time we ride as we did before.

To start things off, first there is cycling. Within the last three months my husband and I have started riding our bicycles. At first it was a way to burning a few hundred calories and spending time together (more his reason than mine). Now it’s become almost an obsession. It has also become training for riding half of the MS150 in October. We live very close to the Schuylkill River trail in Pennsylvania so consequently that’s where we spend the majority of the miles we ride. In addition to that, we also ride the connection to the Farm Park when we need to practice a few hills. Since we have started, we have logged over 1000 miles. See I told you; an obsession.

Yesterday we rode to the Valley Forge Park, which is accessible from the trail over a rickety wooden slated bridge that parallels RT 422. It’s a terrifying ride for me. First I have an unexplainable fear of heights and have a mental image of the bridge letting loose and me and my bike falling into the river below. Second because it’s only really wide enough for one person and I can only picture a rider coming from the other direction crashing headlong into me and causing a several bike pileup in the middle of the bridge over the river and then having the bridge let loose and all of us fall in to the raging river below. Some picture, eh? My fears are unfounded, my husband says. He is not in my head.

The bridge is one thing. The trail through the park is another. It’s hilly. Very hilly. It burns. A lot, and my lung capacity is not the greatest (yet) and I get very winded. I suppose that will get better, but for now it was hard. But I did better than I expected. Last night I only had to get off my bike one time in the begininng long climb so I consider that an accomplishment. After that we went back on the SRT and went to Phoenixville. 25 miles in all. Nice ride.