Twice as nice

The actual spring like weather the past couple of days inspired some time on the bike. After last week's time off and the fiasco's of this weekend, it was nice to jump on and go.

Monday was a nice 2 hour hard effort down the Great Western trail and back. I fought some decent headwind most of the way down and took salvation when it would turn slightly cross wind. At some points I was struggling to maintain double digit speeds, but I soldiered on. With about 17 miles on the clock I decided it was time to head back and fairly well flew home. Flew might be a little strong as I cooked my legs by the time I reached city streets and fairly well suffered up the hills back home fighting the headwinds as I turned back south again. Overall a great ride and my knees were in agreement with the effort put forth.


Sorry for the stock photo, but it's about all I have of our elusive tandem. We decided to break it out for the first time this year last night. After a bit of a rocky start considering I had to switch out pedals to my new crank brother smarties, we were off. With the wind being beyond breezy yesterday, I opted out of an out of town route and kept it completely urban. This really was a great choice. We rolled into downtown and swung by the orphanage's new project, the bike kollective. Alas, there were a couple bikes hanging out in the front of the shop, but the lights were off and nobody was home.

From there we rolled down Grand to see if anyone was at Ritual and it too was deserted of bikes. I remembered that the local TNWC was now in full swing so most everyone would probably be out there. I will make my way out there one of these days to see how badly I can get shelled. We jumped up to Ingersoll to make a pit stop at Zanzibars coffee and have a nice little warm-up. Miranda's ears were hurting pretty well at this point due to the wind so she enjoyed the time off. Our route back home was a bit more scenic with a jog through Gray's Lake, up through Mcreay Park, and then back home. There's definitely some work to be done with the secondary motor on the tandem, but considering it was her first ride since Cranksgiving I'll cut her a little slack....

In other news, we stopped by Rassy's on Saturday and picked up our "Little Punk" t-shirt for our own little punk. Here's a few of her modeling the goods.



Thanks to DQ and all the gals over at Punkrock Cycling for making these up. We'll definitely be out to some of their events to cheer them on this year.