76th ride of 2016 - Monday, 5/23/2016

Today was, in many ways, the nicest ride I've done to date, including in 2013 when I rode over 1700 miles on my regular bike, before repeated falls and injuries (due to my balance issues) caused me to switch to riding a trike. The weather today was certainly a big factor in my evaluating it as "nicest" -- it was 54° and brightly sunny when I began at 9:30, and 72° when I finished, at quarter to one. Additionally, it was my longest ride to date on the trike—4 round trips to Marsh Park, and I completed the 34 miles in 3:13:03. I had ridden 4 round trips twice previously (last August 1 and September 26), but that was before I added on the now-obligatory concluding half-mile lap in our condominium complex that boosts my Marsh Park rides to a whole number of miles. So those earlier rides were both 33.5 miles, making today my longest ride on the trike.

Today's ride was noteworthy for two encounters with friends. In the latter part of the first round trip, as I rode north alongside Lohr Rd., my dear friend Paul Davoux and his wife Kay passed me and honked to be sure I'd notice them. Then later, in the first half of the third round trip, I approached a road that crosses the trail, and a car pulled up, the passenger window opened, and a blond woman called out, "Looking good, Allen! Are you having fun?" I smiled and gave a big thumbs-up, but my distance vision (even corrected) is weak enough so that I couldn't be sure who it was. I later thought it could have been my friend Doris Granum, who is blond and lives down that way, but I could not really determine if it was her or not.

Early in the ride, to show the beauty of the spring morning, I got this picture (going south beside Lohr Rd., between Oak Valley and Ellsworth):

And for comparison, here is a picture of a similar portion of the route (although looking the other way—north) when I rode last November 21, a Saturday morning after our first snow of what would turn out to be an extremely tepid "winter."

My friend Doug Tidd (who got me started on cycling, back in 2012) has told me that a common challenge for cyclists is to ride a "century," or 100 miles in one day. I'd like to gradually build up to that challenge, even though it's harder on the trike than it would be on a bike, I believe. It would take me 12 round trips, or 3 times the length of today's ride (!), so I'd be riding a pretty full day of almost 10 hours of riding. I figure if I could add one round trip to my weekly long ride (on Saturday) every two weeks, I'd make my goal this fall:

5 round trips - mid-June
6 round trips - end of June
7 round trips - mid-July
8 round trips - end of July
9 round trips - mid-August
10 round trips - end of August
11 round trips - mid-September
12 round trips - end of September

We'll see! It's a tall challenge, but I've always been one to set big goals.