I don't want to burn out on the ride home from work, so I decided to do a road ride down the peninsula after work.

Left work about 5:00 PM and headed for the parking area at the intersection of Edgewood and La Canada -- bicycling country. Strapped on the gear, assembled the ride, and by 5:30 I was headed north into the face of a stiff wind.

As I headed up Canada towards 92, I got my first inkling that this ride was going to be special. I was pulling a slight uphill, into the wind, and I looked down at the cyclometer and was immediately pissed. It read 16.4 MPH, so I stopped and started fucking around with the cyclometer magnet. Fucking thing, never fucking works, what the fucking hell, fuck, fuck, FUCK! This is all I need is to waste time fucking around with the cyclometer (yet I'm addicted to it, so there was no way I could go on without it). Finally, I convinced myself that it was fixed and started riding again. But there it was again, only this time 17.6 MPH. Was this possible? I felt like I was barely even pedaling.

I've been expecting this kind of ride to happen on The Blade sooner or later, because I experienced the same phenomena on the Buenos Aires. Road riding takes a different cadence and stroke, and it just takes a while to get back into practice. Once there though, the base fitness level kicks in and suddenly I've made a huge leap on the bike. The last couple of rides on The Blade have been very encouraging.

This ride was mostly flat, but I was hammering pretty hard for most of the ride. A heavy wind out of the west helped push me down the peninsula, through Woodside, up into Portola Valley, back down through Palo Alto, and on into Los Altos. In Los Altos, I cruised by the old cottage on Mountain View Avenue that JB and I rented for three years, then zipped through the mean streets of Los Altos over to the Palo Alto bike path and back out to Foothill. Facing the wind now, I pushed up into Menlo Park, got onto Alameda to Woodside to Canada and back to Edgewood.

One nice thing about road riding is that there are usually lots of people to pass and be passed by. And Canada is like a cycling mecca, so there were lots of other riders to pace myself against. As I was bombing south at about 25 MPH on Canada, heading into Woodside early in the ride, I spied a rider far up ahead and decided to try to catch him. Slowly I gained on him and after a while I was about 200 yards back. At that point, he noticed me and I could tell he was making an effort to hold me off. When I got within 25 yards, he started fidgeting and fussing with the bike, cycling for a few strokes then picking at the cables, the seat, the seatstay, and on and on. Maybe it was just me, but it seemed like he realized I was going to catch him so saved some face by feigning some kind of mechanical situation. To annoy him more, I caught all the way up to him and then sat on his wheel for about half a mile until he waved me back. I dropped back about 10 yards and then marked him all the way into Woodside. Ah, good times.

The wind was pretty stiff, and I wobbled through the few downhills there were, but I am very pleased with all the numbers for this ride!