I spent a huge amount of time tonight setting up my cross bike for the upcoming cross season. I swapped out pedals and a front wheel from the fixie, grabbed a rear wheel out of the bin, put on some leftover Ritchey Speedmax tires, adjusted the brakes (mental note to self: there's no pad left whatsoever. The screaming tomorrow will either be The Lambs, or your bare calipers carving a gigantic presidential endorsement into the rims. Better not use brakes just to be on the safe side). And I cleaned up the drivetrain. Total time: 29 minutes.
Yep, nobody prepares more carefully for cross season than I do. Nobody.
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I commuted downtown to work today, from near Crofton. It was a pretty sweet ride that my friend Sean showed me. An approximation of the route is here. A couple miles of it were pretty sketchy, particularly riding on no-shoulder Paint Branch Parkway. The map also has a weird detour down Kenilworth that doesn't accurately reflect our route - we took a bit of multi-use path from Paint Branch down to Hyattsville, cruising along the Anacostia River on mostly deserted path, right up to where we linked up with Route 1. But otherwise, the map is pretty accurate. The ride was about 21 miles to my office. It's not a terrible ride, particularly if you ride with somebody else; that makes it a bit less sketchy and the cars give you a bit more room. Doesn't hurt if you're moving along at good speed, either. We averaged about 17 MPH though if you take out the stoplights it was probably closer to 19, over a very roll-y course. I wouldn't do this route on a beech cruiser though...
This route may have to go into regular rotation next spring. Do this one a couple times a week and the legs will pick up some serious conditioning.
3 comments:
A "beech cruiser" is presumably a wooden bicycle?
Jim,
You can take that multi-use path all the way down to Cotton City park (get up on the levee to your right) and take Bunker Hill Rd. to 38th Avenue to Perry St. into the Mt. Rainier Circle.
That may be the route you took and the map just doesn't reflect it.
Uncle Bob - that typo just goes to show you what happens when I blog after not drinking.
Scott - I'm pretty sure that's about the route we took, except we got on Rt. 1 for about a mile prior to the circle. The GMaps Pedometer app doesn't do multi-use paths, in my experience.
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