Mmm, humble pie!

I love riding my bike. I've been riding the Tobacco Trail to work a couple days a week and I really like that. Getting in a workout AND getting out of traffic -- it's like heaven to me!

Honestly, I am the worst person ever to have to commute an hour each day. I get so cranky when there's traffic and by the time I get home, my blood pressure is probably in the stratosphere and I'm all fired up from having spent 30 minutes yelling at people for being stupid, even though they haven't really done anything wrong and I'm just being cranky because I don't want to be stuck in the car and there's nothing I can do about it.

So, yeah, any time I can get out of the car is a good thing for me. I just wish I could ride the whole way from my house, instead of having to drive for 10 minutes and get out of my car.

Randy and I went out for a ride last night. We did, for the first time, the ride that originally motivated me to want to start road biking in the first place. We cruised out of Carrboro, took this rolling route through the country, green fields stretching out at either side. At one point on the route, you have to pass a dairy farm with its very own country ICE CREAM store! (Fortunately, we were riding at 9am, so the store was closed. But I plan to be wreaking some nutritional havoc on an evening ride in the very near future.) The whole ride is smooth, rolling hills and it was a perfect day for riding and I was so happy.

For the first half of our ride, though, we accidentally ended up in the middle of the Powerman NC duathlon. Oopsies. So we were just cruising along amidst all these people wearing numbers and riding for dear life.

Randy keeps insisting that I learn to draft, even though I don't like it because a) it kind of freaks me out to be six inches from his back wheel and b) I want to get a workout and having him drag me up the hill kinda defeats the point, if you ask me. But he insisted, so we practiced that for a while. At one point, we were chugging up a hill and this lady in the race rode up next to us and started yelling at me!

"You're DRAFTING!!!!" she accused. "THAT'S NOT ALLOWED!!!!!!!"

I just looked at her very calmly and said, "Well, I'm not racing." And then returned to chugging up the hill. But it gave me an excuse to not have to practice drafting, as I told Randy, "I don't want to lower the racers' morale by making them think someone in the race is cheating." Hee.

Later on, though, I found myself very quietly drafting him up a big hill. Funny how easy it is to stop protesting when you are nearing exhaustion.

Because riding with Randy is HARD! He's a good rider and he's not afraid to say it. He always pushes me way harder than I would push myself, which is good. Usually. But sometimes I end up working harder than is good for me. Usually, I just suck it up. But not yesterday. Because yesterday, I made the mistake of wearing my heart rate monitor, which meant I knew exactly what kind of damage I was doing. And at one point, I looked down at my monitor and saw that, even with drafting, my heart rate was kicking at like 187. And I had to swallow my pride and say, "Baby, you go ahead. This is too fast for me."

I hate that!

(And a quick swimming note: I'm now swimming 100s consistently under 2:15. I know that's not nearly fast enough. I won't feel comfortable until I'm swimming under 2 minutes. Which means that I'm back to drilling every workout before I start trying to log the laps. Learning curves are no fun!)