After not riding my bike outside at all in 2017, I did pretty well on the cycling front in 2018. Most of it was training for my August triathlon, but I kept it up until mid-October. Over the summer I did two rides with friends, a couple solo rides on the Capital Trail outside Richmond, a couple solo local rides, and that mountainous group ride as part of the Red Wing Roots Music Festival. After the triathlon I wanted to keep up my cycling fitness and build up my mileage to do a metric century, and some of those weekend training rides were spent inside attending two cycling classes in a row at the gym (plus a little extra after the second class, until I reached 40 miles on the bike computer).
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| Heading off for 60 miles around Culpeper County. |
Two weeks ago I drove up to Cupleper to attend my third Culpeper Century. I just did the metric century ride (about 60 miles), which went well. It's a pretty ride but it was really overcast all day and I didn't get to see the mountains in the distance.
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| About to start the Tour de Greene. This was probably my chilliest ride ever and I wore a jacket plus wind breaker. I warmed up plenty once riding though. |
I thought that would be my last ride of the season, but then I learned
about the Tour de Greene the next weekend and wanted to do another 60
miles. So last weekend I drove to Stanardsville for that ride, but about
11 miles in I found myself losing steering control and realized I'd
gotten my first flat tire ever. Knew it would happen eventually. I
pulled off the rode and up a little driveway to get away from the road,
and luckily a really nice lady spotted me as she rode by and decided to
stop and help me out. I was prepared to figure out how to fix the thing
myself (even if I had to use my phone to look up tricky parts), but it
was so much better to have someone helping who knew what she was doing.
It still took a while and involved her telling me I needed to clean my
chain more often and probably need new tires. Oops.
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| Getting ready to fix my flat rear tire. But look at that beautiful sky! |
We eventually got me back on the road and continued on another 9 or 10 miles. By this point we were way behind everyone else, however. I had already decided to drop down to the 40-miles ride after losing all that time, but then my knee started bothering me a little from my IT band. And since I'm also training for a half marathon that I've already paid a bunch of money for I didn't want to mess up my running legs with unnecessary end-of-season cycling. So when the SAG vehicle pulled up with the lady who'd helped me out hitching a ride to the nearest aid station so she could finally catch up with her group, I went ahead and asked for a ride to the finish. The SAG guy was super nice and I learned all about the Greene County amateur radio club. He was happy to give me a ride because it gave them all something to do and radio each other about. At the end I went ahead and stuck around to eat some finish line food (these rides all seem to favor barbecue) and the ride organizer there was super nice. The Tour de Greene is a no-frills (no t-shirt or swag) ride that raises money for Habitat for Humanity and only costs $20! That's way less than some of the other fall rides I was also looking into. And Greene County is beautiful, so I will definitely keep that ride on my radar in the future. I ended the day having only ridden about 20 miles, but I was still happy since the day had been so pretty and I had learned how to fix a flat. (And the next day my leg didn't give me any problems when I ran 10 miles!)
