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| A beautiful day for walking through Central Park. A sloppy and crowded day when you add cyclists. |
For all of you from the Northeast, you can sympathize. This was one crazy winter. Tons of snow and in large batches. If it wasn't snowing, it was raining. If it was sunny, there was still lots of snow on the roads. Nothing about this winter and early spring made training easy.
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| The melting snows in spring made for slick road surfaces and, occasionally, hidden patches of ice. |
I was now working out with my trainer Michelle and my physical therapist Todd to help rebuild muscle and continue to stretch and reestablish movement and range of motion in my right shoulder. But as the only real exercise I had done through much of last summer was just walking around or hiking, I wound up losing a lot of muscle mass, in both my arms and legs. Over the winter, that meant a lot of work on a stationary bike in addition to training sessions.
But even when spring came around, I wound up realizing that New York City was not going to be a fun or, as it turned out, a safe place to ride. My two usual routes in the City were up the West Side Highway along the bike paths that run from lower Manhattan, around the Battery, all the way up to the George Washington Bridge. That's about a 25 mile loop the way I plan it out. (The bike route goes even farther if you take the Bridge over to the New Jersey side and continue up Route 9W. That goes all the way up to Bear Mountain. I only rode that once this spring and not all that far once I crossed over the Hudson River.)
The other ride is up through and around Central Park. Up and around three loops of Central Park and back to my apartment is about 23 miles. Neither that ride or the Hudson path are all that difficult. The only real hill is at the top of the north end of the park.
The real challenge, however, wasn't the distance or the difficulty. It was the traffic. And not the car traffic. The people traffic. The runners traffic. The dog-walkers and carriage-pushing and kids on skateboards and scooters traffic. As well as obvious weekend bike riders who felt that riding three abreast on a two-way path that can barely accommodate two riders going in opposite directions was perfectly within their rights.
Having almost been hit by runners who veered off to the side of the road without even looking to see if anyone was coming up near them, or by cars abruptly turning into the bike lanes in Manhattan without looking for oncoming cyclists, and having witnessed two serious accidents, one only 30 feet in front of me, on both the Central Park loop as well as the Hudson bike path, it quickly convinced me that New York City was no longer a safe place to be training for this ride. So I reverted to a former training strategy: get as much basic riding in to regain my "sea legs" so to speak in New Jersey, then head back out to Long Island for long distance rides and up to Vermont for mountain rides.
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| Maybe not the smartest thing to do to stop and wolf down a fresh grilled tuna sandwich and sweet potato fries before continuing on for an 85-mile training day. But I couldn't pass up a stop at the Clam Bar in Napeague. |
Apart from the ugly weather conditions, everything went according to plan. Rides out into the Great Swamp south of Morristown were good for both middle distances as well as increasing my hill training. The weather was cooperating on my longer rides on both the North and South Forks of Long Island. And, while I wound up riding in and out of the rain up in Vermont, for the most part I got in the training I needed. I just wish I had done more hill training. But we'll see how it goes once I'm actually on the road in Utah and Colorado.
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| The morning rains up in Manchester, Vermont left clouds hanging on Equinox Mountain. Half an hour after this, I was on the road. Three hours later, it was raining again. Crappy conditions but good training. |
Now it's on to Salt Lake City and to pick up where I left off.
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