Cycling legs are under me again

As many of you know I have been training for STP again after having too much time off over the winter, I had some work to do to get back up to speed again. This weekend was the first time I have felt really comfortable and strong on the bike since mid July 2006.
Weaver and I went for a 52 mile ride and it was windy, which is always harder on me, maybe it is just mental, but it is always harder. Even with the wind, I was able to push hard the entire ride and I was able to keep respectable speeds for the ride. It feels so good to feel strong on the bike again. I know I have a long ways to go and a lot of room for improvement, but it is nice none the less.

The little things

I have been cycling for over year now and I am starting to do a lot of similar training rides to what I did last year. Part of this is just trying to work off the winter fat and some lost fitness.
While doing lots of these repeat rides, I come up on hills, sections of road, etc. that I rode all the time last year and I remember them being miserable sections of road. Some hills I at first couldn't climb without at least stopping once, or I was dying at the top of the hill.
Fast forward a year and a winter of virtually no riding, and getting back on the saddle, but still some fitness left. These places that used to be miserable are no longer much of anything to mention. The hills I used to barely be able to make it to the top, I now like to use them to stand up and push hard to the top to get my HR up and to get some good muscle built up while pushing hard up them.

So, where am I going with this? Well, I get too much time to think while on a bike sometimes, and sometimes I realize very crisply something about life. So, here are one of my on the bike thoughts.

People do not magically achieve their goals, by setting them and just getting there. So many people love to say, look how successful you are, or look how much you have lost, or congratulations on graduating, etc. Although these achievements, that once were goals, are just the combination of several to thousands of small goals accumulating to one large goal. If you can achieve your smaller goals, you will eventually meet your ultimate goal. Without meeting the smallest goals, you will never meet your ultimate goals.

An example; for me, it was to do STP last year, which was 206 miles. All last year, I thought I had one goal in mind, which was to do STP in one day, it really took me achieving several small goals, to make it to my achievement. These goals were things like riding 150 miles in a week, then 170... Ending up at around 400 miles a week! Without achieving my smaller goals, I could have never have made it to my final goal. Yes, this is a very simple theory, and no it does not take a rocket scientist to figure it out. However, it made me realize that nothing in life comes without a bunch of small goals, that eventually end up to meeting an achievement or goal. For me, I hope to no longer get intimidated by large problems, if there is a way to achieve the goal with smaller steps, I need to set these smaller goals, even the smallest goals to meet the smaller goals need to be thought of.

Urban ridings affect on average speed

I usually do not like doing hard effort training rides around the city if I can avoid it. I have always hated all the stop and go's of the traffic lights, and it never really lets me judge my previous performances against that day because the stop lights and slowing down, etc. throw off your stats.
I did a training ride yesterday and since it was late and I wanted a fairly flat route and it was dark out so the street lights can be nice at times. It seemed I couldn't get a break with all the stop lights. I decided to run some calculations of my ride because I have a device that records all of my riding data and this is possible (and yes, I can be this anal at times).
During yesterday's ride I had to come to a stop 7 times (which doesn't include all the times I had to slow down) and my average speed was 15.8. I knew while riding my average would be lower than it should be because of all the stopping and slowing down. The number of stops and slow downs was much more than I usually have on this ride.
Although my numbers are not scientific, they are thought out. Each time I come to a stop it takes a minimum of 60 seconds (usually closer to 70 seconds, but I am using 60 to keep from making myself look too good. :) )from the time I start slowing down to the time I am back up to speed. I then took the amount of time it would normally take me to cover the same amount of distance at normal speed as I took from slowing down to speeding up and it takes me 19 seconds to cover that distance at speed. This means I lose 41 seconds every time I come to a stop.
After making some corrections to the numbers in my route to figure out how well I actually did I was able to determine that had I not had those 7 stops (again, not factoring in any times I had to slow down, it is too hard to calculate) I would have averaged a speed of 17.5 mph vs. the 15.8 that was recorded.
As you can see, there is a big difference between riding in the suburbs and riding on farm roads and the effect on your average speeds.
I know many of you don't really care about this, but several of us cyclists do. So there! ;)

How many miles do I hope to ride this year?

I have been working on my training schedule for the year, and I know some of you are curious about what I am up to with my training.
According to my training schedule, I should ride over 4,000 miles by July 15th, which is Seattle to Portland. After Seattle to Portland, I will drop my training miles to start working on speed, and getting my longer distances at 100 miles or so, instead of 200. I would guess that by the end of the year, I will have ridden around 6,000 miles.

Unleashed

Kristin and I watched a Jet Li and Morgan Freem movie this weekend and we weren't sure what to expect. The movie, Unleashed, was a suprisingly good movie. If any of you get the chance to rent, or watch it on HBO, Unleashed is a movie worth watching.