Raining and Training

I managed to get myself caught in a light shower on the way home from work today... on my bike.

Today was one of those days that the challenges of riding regularly started to become frustrating. Not overly so, but... trying to play slalom between thunderstorms is a pain, as is changing a tube on the way in to work, only to find there were no tire levers in my pack.

Ah well, it's all part of the experience, I suppose. Wrinkles like that will be ironed out as I get further into the season.

I've signed myself up for a free account at Bike Journal to log my rides. It also provides the nice automatic service of ranking your mileage among the other 5000+ cyclists using the site. Not unexpectedly, my feeble mileage of 238 miles (year to date) has me in the mid 3000 range. I hope to improve on that. After 3 weeks of light-ish riding, I'm hoping to bump my weekly average up to between 100 and 150 miles a week. Below I've posted the recommended long ride schedule from pmc.org. I'm ahead of schedule at the moment, having already been out for close to a 40 miler. This probably isn't a bad thing, because an increase of 10 miles a week is actually pretty steep, in my humble opinion.

Long Ride Schedule (2 day events)

1. 30 miles May 17th
2. 40 miles May 24th
3. 50 miles May 31st
4. 60 miles June 7th
5. 50 miles, 40 miles (Sat., Sun.) June 14th/15th
6. 70 miles June 21st
7. 80 miles, 50 miles (Sat., Sun.) June 28th/29th
8. 60 miles July 5th
9. 90 miles, 60 miles (Sat., Sun.) July 12th, 13th
10. 80 miles July 19th
11. 50 miles July 26th
12. PMC August 2nd, 3rd

Although, once past the fourth weekend, the increase is a little less with the addition of double day weekends. I'd be interested to know how many people actually follow this guide. I'm guessing not too many. If I manage to do all these recommended rides, the PMC will be cake. Hopefully I can, despite having quite a few other tasks and commitments lined up this summer.

Tomorrow I ride into work again, and hopefully Thursday as well. I'd like to see how my bum knee (skiing injury from this winter) reacts to multiple days of successive riding.

And hopefully before too long my fundraising efforts will be ramped up. Just as soon as I can get all my website issues straightened around with GoDaddy.