Anything But The Road Bike...

My name is Amy, and I am a cyclist. It's been six days since my last road ride.

After a weekend of hiking and beating myself up on foot, I decided to continue the alterna-training with a mountain bike ride on Monday. I didn't stop there, and headed up to the New England Velodrome for opening day at the track yesterday after work. Unfortunately, the nasty weather forecast kept a lot of people away and the turnout was low... they missed out on a great sunny (and windy) evening though! The low turnout meant only one other girl, so the twelve total people got lumped together into one big race group instead of Cat A and Cat B's. Too bad for me since I have untrained sprinting legs under me at this point, but it was fun all the same, and I got to ride a yellow bike. Three Cambridge Bicycle teammates were also in attendance - Jeremy Dunn, Craig Roth, and Michael McKittrick were dominant in most all of the races run last night, and we'll likely have more in coming weeks. Oh yeah, so I was dropped out off all the races save for the points race in the end, which I actually finished. good stuff!

Today was the fun training day:

yup, it was unicycle day.

Being so close to Andover High School, I walked the uni up the hill and took to the parking lots. Today's goal was to master the unassisted mount... easier said than done. After several frustrated attempts, I decided to start with just plain riding instead. About 30 minutes later, this was getting exhausting, and I found a quiet driveway area behind the school to practice the mounts. The goal was to do 10 unassisted mounts.

Twenty minutes later mount #10 still seemed very far away after a sketchy dismount and leg injury from the right pedal. But, I kept plugging away. After mount #17, I decided to take a break, because once things got going I changed my goal to 30 mounts. Well, it was a good call, because I GOT IT at mount #25. I just got it and it felt right. From then on, things just started falling in place... on mount #31, I did my first hop in place and kept riding. On mount #46, I hopped in place several times and kept riding between hops too. On mount #50, I decided I needed to learn how to mount on uphills and downhills too, so I did ten of those too. Over the course of the uphill mounts, I also realized that I didn't need to sit on the saddle to pedal. amazing!

As it started to get dark, I decided it had been a good training day, and I rode the uni home.