Allen and Gates Ride Again!

Believe it or not, it still feels like winter here most of the time, but we've been busy making plans for the summer anyhow.

Our first event was the Northwest Dragon Slayer, last Saturday. This event benefits Sarcoma research. Do you know what a sarcoma is? Probably not. Check out the link to learn.

We're also doing the Seattle Danskin triathlon again in August. There is a funny story about this. We both almost missed out on getting registered. The event filled up in record time and registration closed before 11am the same day it opened. There were a lot of unhappy potential triathletes that day.

But fortunately for us, a couple weeks before registration opened, while researching the potential of participating in one of the Danskin tris which is held back east, Deb observed that their headquarters are in New York. So she speculated that when they said they'd open registration at midnight, that they didn't mean midnight Seattle time.

Deb was right, and just like last year, if we weren't a team, we both probably would have missed out. To make a long story short, we both got busy and forgot, but she reminded me via a related voice message on my office line and thus when I logged on and found out she was right, I called reminded her so that when she got back from the city late that night, she registered before going to be.

Sunday we went on our first bike ride of the year. This was a Team Survivor outing led by Annelise Digiacomo (Infitness Training and Coaching) and Coach Kim Brasfield, with help from Analese's husband and some of her friends. It is so nice of them to give us these opportunities to get out and become more confident with athletic activities.

Sunday's ride was an 18 mile round trip on the Cedar Creek trail in the Maple Creek area, which is a rural area southeast of Seattle. It was a pretty area, with nice trees and some interesting bridges. It was fun to look at the river on the north side of the trail, and it was easy to ignore the highway on the south side of the trail because most of the way there was at least a small greenbelt buffer. The trail is paved and pretty flat. It has some gradual slopes, but we never needed to get out of our middle gears.

But still, 18 miles was a long ways for me, so this was great for building up saddle time. This was easy for Deb, she has a lot more free time that I do and she routinely went 50 miles or more with a friend in hilly SeaBeck last year. SeaBeck is also where I trained last year, so with a background of being used to climbing hills, even though it had been 8 months since I'd been out on a bike (not counting the indoor trainer), I enjoyed it.


I have to confess, I had an accident about a third of the way through the ride. I fell while stopping (the whole group had stopped to regroup). The worst part was that I fell into another rider, Linda, and so she also fell. We both ended up bruised so not only do I feel stupid, but even though she was pretty forgiving, I feel terrible about it. I'm still not good at stopping and starting on this bike. I haven't gotten used to the fact that I can't touch the ground with both feet while sitting in the seat, like I used to when I was a kid. But at least by the end of the season last year, I'd gotten to the point where dismounting was graceful at least some of the time and I've never fallen before. What a wimp! I hope Linda felt better than I did the next day.

But Tuesday I went on a second ride anyhow - with the AAUW biking special interest group. They started riding this winter but I've been too busy with school and work to join them. But school is out until fall for me - yeah! We're still trying to think of a clever name for our group. 'Biker chicks' doesn't quite fit. If you have any good suggestions for something that goes with cyclists, especially if it's a literary reference, please feel free to make suggestions.

Fortunately the Tuesday bike ride was not eventful. We rode for almost 9 miles on the Larry Scott trail, which is in the Port Townsend area, much closer to home. There were a few rolly hills, which was nice, because I needed the practice with shifting gears. My goal is to be able to ride to our Monday exercise class, which would be a roughly 25 mile round trip, and would include some rolly hills. It would also include a couple stop signs, so I need to get comfortable stopping real quick unless I want a ticket because those stop signs are right in the middle of Port Hadlock where the police like to hang out. Considering that a 3 mile ride was a big deal last year, I'm pretty happy.

Hope you've enjoyed our first blog entry of 2008.