The Think Tank

As I’ve written about before, Joel and Tim and I are planning on participating in the Seattle to Portland bike ride this year, and as such we’ve been trying to train for it.  I say “trying” because we keep falling short.  We were doing very well in the early stages, but when the weather took a turn for the worse several weeks ago, our training regimen followed suit.

To that end I bought a new bike a couple weeks ago using my REI member dividend (accumulated over two years) and their annual Spring 20% coupon, plus some birthday contributions, to bring the price down to a very reasonable level.  Since I got such a good out-of-pocket deal on the bike, and since I am a certified fat ass and the wheels that came with the bike had questionable reviews, I splurged on a new wheel set.  As it turned out, that delayed delivery of my bike for quite a while due to several screw-ups, but I finally was able to pick up my new toy Thursday night.

Today seemed like the perfect day to take it out for a spin.  All in all I really liked how it performed, the lighter weight was a real boon on the hills, although my general level of unfitness did dictate that I had to stop a few times on some of the longer hills.  However, usually those stops were paired with navigational fixes, as I got lost several times due to the rabbit warren nature of the streets in west hills.  They are crazy.

My route took me up to Pittock Mansion, where I stopped for a few minutes and took some pictures, then through Washington Park and by the Zoo, up to Council Crest (where I took another photo break), and then down past OHSU into Downtown on my way home.  All in all it was about 23 miles and, according to MapMyRide, about 1,100 feet of climbing.  I swear to God it felt like more than that.

It was a nice ride and a perfect day for it.  I think I even got a couple of nice shots to boot.