Cross training and "The Lost Ride"

Sorry, no pictures today. If you are dependent on pictures in the blogs you read, fall asleep now. You'll miss some good stories though.

Let's start with cross training. I grew up swimming competitively for 13 years. I was good, but never good enough to make it to state champs or anything that high up. I always kick myself looking back, wishing I would have cross trained to increase my strength and stamina. It would have improved my performance so much! Merely swimming was not enough to get to where I would have liked to be.

This brings me to biking. I am getting to the point to where I want to be able to do "suicide rides" without feeling like I'm going to suffocate. I was reading my cousin's wife's blog, and she mentioned cross training in one of her posts. I immediately thought "doh!!". Why didn't that occur to me sooner. That is really the key to improving my performance and getting to where I want to be conditioning and strength wise.

I just so happen to have a Gold's Gym membership. My relationship with Gold's has been an on again, off again affair. Recently if has been "off again" due to my extensive bike riding. I have a friend, though, who goes frequently to lift weights. Dan Talley, this friend of mine, has been my recent motivation to cross train, mainly because I don't have the cajones to go lift by myself. He is a good mentor and willing to teach me the ropes, seeing that it has been years since I've lifted free weights and that my experience prior to that is marginal at best. We had a good time lifting and I headed home with what I like to call "jell-o arms". This was tuesday.

Fast forward to thursday. I was definitely feeling the pain from lifting tuesday. Mostly my pecs and triceps hurt the most. I had previously decided to go for a ride with Chris, of previous blogging fame. We left my place at 9:00 and talked about the route we would take. We decided we were tired of the same old ride, and that we needed some variety in our riding diet. Time to explore some new pavement... and that we did. Chris knew the general route we would take, but we decided that we wanted to incorporate the Provo airport into our ride, as well as a route to West Springville. Not exactly routes that incorporate well into each other. No direct routes exist between these two points except I-15. Yeah, not even going there.

We started our ride on 3rd south in Provo, and rode up a hill into some residential neighborhoods. After that hill we decided that this ride would be a flat one if we could help it. We ended up riding through some industrial areas to get to West Springville. I was surprised that it was actually a nice ride. Once there we took SR-77 about 3/4's of the way to Lake Shore. We turned around and got back to the freeway and followed a frontage road. From there we got kind of lost trying to find our way back to Provo so we could make it to the airport. We ended up guessing how to get under the freeway to make it to the airport. We ended up stumbling upon an underpass and meandering through the East Bay area towards the airport. From there we knew where we were going, but it was interesting to follow random paths and take a break from the usual.

By the time we made it back to my place, we were only 1.8 miles from reaching 40 miles total, so we kept going and circled back so that our total miles ridden was 40 miles exactly. I am finding that I really like riding with Chris because he doesn't give up easily. We just keep going until we can't anymore, whether it's because of fatigue or our schedule.

In the end, Chris and I decided that there was no way to replicate our exact ride. We took so many weird turns and got lost a couple of times. We also had a good time just talking about life and it's complexities... from gay marriage, school, family life all the way to the Surf n' Slurp sno-cone shack. It was nice to have some conversation thrown in there.

Miles spent lost: 40.0