Category Archives: Tues/Thurs 7:45am ride

Endless ramblings regarding the every Tuesday & Thursday-morning bike ride, leaving Olive Hill & Canada Road at 7:45am, rain or shine

I *think* I’ve still got it, but this year has been tough for consistency

Last Thursday was a pretty easy ride with ex-pilot, who wasn’t feeling particularly fast. That’s OK; I can handle an easy ride, but it is nice once in a while to really feel challenged.

Sunday was going to be interesting; it was younger Kevin’s first ride on his regular bike (not ebike) in quite a while. His knee is still giving a bit of grief, but less, and keeping his power levels down allowed us to do an easy loop to the Los Altos/Cupertino Peet’s and return. Another not-very-challenging ride, and I was reminded a bit of the way-back days, when Kevin was severely overweight and slow and I basically gave up 2-3 years of challenging cycling while gradually getting him into shape. It was really nice to see him back on his lightweight “acoustic” bike.

Then Tuesday, neither Kevin, just me riding solo on the regular Tuesday/Thursday-morning ride, which was actually kinda nice because I could push myself as much as I wanted to and see how it played out. Could I maintain a relatively strong effort from start to finish? Turned out I could! I was a bit surprised how well I rode.

Tomorrow (Thursday, today by the time anyone reads this) ex-pilot says he’ll be out there and maybe it will be my turn to show up without any speed. Tough to say. After Tuesday’s tougher ride, I developed a lot of painful leg cranps, leaving my legs feeling pretty sore today, the type of soreness I used to get when doing a 111 mile ride to Santa Cruz and back. We’ll know the answers in about 10 hours. 🙂

We’re getting the band back together! Well, one blast from the past anyway…

Last Tuesday’s ride was not normal- it wasn’t just me & ex-pilot Kevin… we had another Kevin from the past, tattoo-guy Kevin Marr. Kevin used to ride with us frequently back in the day, during the period when youngest Kevin (my son) was rapidly improving.

We caught up with him near the top of Kings (ok, not “we” but Kevin ex-pilot did; I’d been dropped about halfway up the climb and was about 100 meters behind) and rode with him to the base of West Old LaHonda. He continued further to climb West Alpine that morning.

He’d taken some time off the bike and was recently getting back into it, sometimes showing up in the morning for the regular Tuesday/Thursday-morning ride but missing us because he thought we left at 7:30am, not 7:45. Hopefully we’ll be seeing more of him.