Activity: road cycling
Location: Bowie, MD > Deale, MD > Bowie
Distance: 38.4 mi. (flat to rolling)
Duration: 2:14
Weather: sunny and cold, northwest wind, 24-29 degrees
Climbing: 2,200′
Avg HR: 150 (max 180)
Type: aerobic

I’ve been taking time off the bike a lot in the past 6 weeks. A lot of it was due to overtraining and burnout during the 2009 season, with the rest due to holiday preparation and other things going on in life. I managed to go riding on New Year’s Day, riding 32 miles in the annual “Circle of Cycles” at Hains Point, but I was nursing a sore leg from a high-speed, high-G recovery while skiing after Christmas.

So this ride today was my first ride in 2010 where I felt more-or-less ready for it (save for the fact that I’m far, far from peak riding shape). I was nursing a bit of shoulder pain, my previously injured left shoulder having been tweaked early on Saturday and the resulting pain remaining ever-present since. But I had to ride: to get out of the house, and I was one of the co-leaders, so off to Bowie I drove.

The weather was quite brisk, as the DC area has been in a cold snap since the end of December. A dusting of snow arrived heading into Friday, and that meant the possibility of some ice on back roads. Fortunately, the ice was minimal, save for an intersection where a spring-fed creek routinely floods the road. In this case, the result was an inch-thick coating of ice. So the seven of us walked carefully across the ice and continued (we’d see this patch twice, the second crossing being easier as some of the ice had melted during our ride).

The ride was done at a moderate pace, nothing crazy in terms of sprints (though I did take the final county line sprint, wanting to stretch my legs a little). Conversation was plentiful, and we made the most of a short-distance, off-season ride. It was a great first “real” ride of the year.

(Note that, as I restart the workout logs, I’m noting the sport in the post title. This is being done partly to make the Twitter links cleaner, partly to make them a bit more specific for folks who read the blog via RSS – all three of you.)