With STP coming up and my intention to ride it two days with a friend and some of his coworkers, I felt that I really needed to do at least one two-day ride before the actual event. This weekend was cascade’s dedicated chance to do just that with Flying Wheels one day and a “lighter” CTS ride the next.

I did the 70 mile route on flying wheels and eventually caught up with some of the folks that I ride with on Per’s Tuesday and Thursday Night rides from Marymoor. The hills hit me hard that day, perhaps because of the Thursday night ride? Either way it was a pleasant day and I had a very tasty pastrami on a garlic bagel sandwich afterwards :). The next day I braved possible rain to do the CTS ride. While parts of it were at 16 mph because of a nasty headwind whenever we headed south, the overall ride was at the level or above of a normal CTS blue ride. Our group even added two bonus hills in Magnolia. The best part was flying north up airport road. I made up my mind late to try to join the fast group and ended up not catching them in spite of a 25-26 mph pace for a couple miles. I gained for a while but eventually just fell further behind. I caught up to two women, of whom I tried to keep on my tail but fell off, and the later who did stay with me, but my pace had fallen to 22-23 mph at that point. I found that for a good number of the hills I tried to keep up with the top of the group. I even had a shout up from lady behind me “oh Ari! Don’t use you grannie gear on this hill!” which quickly shamed me in to switching back up one in the front. I’m actually at the point now where for many hills I don’t need the grannie gear and also for the first time on Sunday it felt that muscle soreness was a bigger factor then cardio condition (of course this was on the second day of riding). If my heart monitor is at all accurate then I burned some 9000 calories in biking this weekend (meaning that I have some series cardio training left ahead of me).

That afternoon I attended a very pleasant housewarming at Tim’s place. Pamela and I got alot of playing time with Simeon there. Also after a month or two of holding the same movies from netflix, Pam and I finally watched them and we are returning it. If we do that again then netflix may not be the service for us. Oh, I did buy myself a father’s day gift, the HD-DVD version of BBC’s Planet Earth series. It is just plain awesome, too bad Simeon isn’t as fascinated as Pamela and I are.