Improving

I've gotten a little frustrated lately because I've been comparing my riding stats for this year to 2007. That was my best year riding and my conditioning is not nearly as good now. I'm trying to concentrate on improving my current conditioning rather than comparing myself to two years ago.

There was a brevet today that I decided not to do. There was a 200K and a 300K option. It is very inconvenient to get to Edwardsville at 5:00 am. Since we have only one car, and since Helen needed the car today, I would either have had to find a ride or have Helen and the kids get up at 4:00 am and take me to the ride. I don't think that the 200K was worth that much driving. The 300K was pretty much out of the question because I don't know if I could do it. I certainly didn't to attempt 186 miles for my first long ride of the year.

Instead I decided to ease into the longer rides. I went on the ride this morning at Maplewood Bicycle. Only two other people showed up (Bill and Brian) but we had a good ride. We rode 35 miles which is not a long ride but it is my longest ride so far this year. I thought about riding some extra miles on my own but I decided to call that ride a win. This also makes my highest mileage week for the year (122 miles) since I commuted every day. Again this is not very impressive compared to 2007 but it's great compared to last year.

As I mentioned I rode every day this week. Last week I took 4 days off or work for the kids' spring break so I only rode one day. But that means that all of my commutes were by bicycle that week (one for one). That gives me a streak of 16 consecutive commutes.

My weight is not going down as quickly as I would like but it is going down (I think). In my last post I mentioned that my Wednesday weight was 197 but I thought it might be a low reading. This week I forgot to weigh in on Wednesday but my weight on Tuesday was 197 and on Thursday was 196. My my totally self imposed rules that makes my "official" weight for the week 197 but it gives me hope that I'm losing weight. We'll have to see what it is next week.