Eureka!

Yesterday, on my ride home, I finally realized how I could link up most of the trails between home and work and turn it into a mighty fun mountain bike session.  Recently, as I have mentioned before, I’ve been hitting up the Schmid Preserve on almost every one of my commutes by bike.  It has several miles (actually if I did them all it would probably be around 6 or 7 miles total) of trails that I can take on my way in.  Once back onto the road I pass by another preserve (Zak) that has about 4 miles of sweet, tight single track that I had avoided on my commute because it is an out and back.  While riding home yesterday I remembered that the Zak preserve trail dumps out on the River Road (my office is right at the end of the River Road).  This is the only road that Marcy has forbade me to ride my road bike on because it is narrow, twisty, in bad shape and the drivers on it treat it like an F1 race course.  I wasn’t sure exactly where on RR that it came out so this morning I decided to drive the dreaded road on my way in to scope it out.  Turns out the trail ends only about a mile from my office (sweet!) so if I were to be riding my mountain bike it would be easy for me to stay on the crappy gravel shoulder and stay out of harms way.  I am now in heaven.  I am going to be able to turn a 12 mile ok road ride into a roughly 20 mile road/mountain bike ride with the option of adding another 5 or so miles of trails right near my house on days that I have the time.

This is very important because I’ve been looking at my riding time so far this year and on average, I am at least 25% lower and in many cases 50% lower on a weekly basis in comparison to last year and its gotten me worried.  Having B-Girl at home means that I can’t simply start riding more on nights and weekends because my time with her is scarce as it is, so I need to find ways to get more riding time in at the two ends of the day.  First thing in the morning and right before dark look to be my prime hours.  It’ll probably stink initially to be getting up at 4-4:30 in the morning to get a long ride in but I’d rather have that than no ride at all and come that first race, I’ll be glad that I made the sacrifice.  I typically already get up at 5-5:30 so how bad could another hour be???  Pretty bad is my guess but I’ve got to give it a shot.