Category: Ride

A quick wee cruise around the streets here. According to Strava that was still 50 metres in elevation gain over 700 metres or so.

A quick lunchtime cruise down the hill. I am LOVING that there is so little vehicle traffic, I have not felt safer or more relaxed on the bike. It wasn’t a particularly fast ascent, but given how out of practice I was it was not too bad.

While it felt pretty good, today was my slowest climb up the hill. I stopped to check if my helmet had acquired a bug: it hadn’t; but I assume that counted toward the slow time. But overall, a decent couple of rides today.

After what feels like a loooog time I was back in the saddle today. I have been feeling under the weather for 3 weeks. I was not too keen on riding today, but everything felt pretty good once I was on the bike. It was one of the fastest rides down the hill, and strangely, despite feeling average, it was also one of the fastest rides up the hill.

The reason was simple: traffic lights. I had super favorable traffic lights up and down. This never usually happens, and it made all the difference.

Of 13 work days since I did my first commute, I have ridden to work on 9 of them. I’m happy about that and thought I’d missed way more days.

It was reasonably wet this morning. I left about 7am in an attempt to avoid traffic, but it seemed the folks who were driving to avoid the rain also left early. But it was OK overall.

I left work at 4pm, and the ride up was actually pretty nice. I had eaten at 3pm, and I found I had a lot of energy going up the hill – it was the easiest ride up so far. I could be wrong, but it felt quieter than usual, and it really was more pleasant. It was also much cooler than I when had previously ridden up the hill. It all added up to a mostly enjoyable ride, with a few hairy moments of too-close cars.

Down: good. Slow. Many stops.

Up: lovely. Strava didn’t record it. Even though it felt slow, Google seemed to think it was quick. I’ll never know. But who cares. I didn’t get hit by a vehicle, and I enjoyed it for the most part. Yay.

A peaceful ride down the hill, it was quiet and still. I rode up through the park, it was steep and not nearly as easy as the road. I was absolutely stuffed when I got onto the footpath. I nearly ran into Kim Hill on the footpath… she did not look very happy with me, and fair enough too. By the time I arrived on my street, my legs had recovered and I feel I could have ridden much further up the hill.

A nice commute in the morning. The ride down was easy and fast.

The ride up included a near miss, at the corner that freaks me the most. An instinct kicked in and for some reason I slowed before the corner, and a car cut in front. If I’d kept riding at the same speed, I’m not sure what would have happened.

That sucks about being a cyclist in this city.

Strava says…. personal best for the hill climb. By 16 seconds. I’ll take it!

After the experiment yesterday morning, I rode up the hill in peak hour traffic. It was a little cray cray to be honest, but OK. The hill was totally fine, although I think I was in top gear from some of it.

Overall: pretty stoked!

Mercifully I didn’t encounter any buses on the way up, I am a little anxious about manoeuvring around them in the narrow bits of road when they’re at a stop.

I did have a bit of a chuckle about the e-bikers zoooooming past me – good for them I say – but I had to remind myself not to try to keep up with them. At one point a chap on a snazzy looking roadbike zipped past me as well. I told myself it must have been an e-bike, but I think, in fact, he was an actual cyclist, unlike me.

I also used Strava for the first time today, starting with the ride down the hill from school. It will potentially be useful for plotting my progress and improvement (if any!).

I liked how someone has entered the “hill climb” as a thing, and I can see my time for that segment – just over 11 minutes, which, again, I am pretty stoked with. I do hope that improves over time as it’s surely a leading indicator of my fitness and preparedness for the big one later in the year.

I’m impressed and a little terrified at the way Strava pretty accurately shows my movements – down to walking around the living room and kitchen at the end of the ride.

My initial impressions are that Strava is trying too hard to get me to connect social stuff – and that ain’t gonna happen for a while. I would love to be able to tap on the map and see the speed I was going, or alternatively the speed chart and see where on the map I was when doing that speed. I apparently got up to nearly 50km/hr, which I can’t imagine is correct, so would love to know where I was when that happened.

A lesson from this morning from an intersection I had not encountered on a bike before, and that was to keep cool. I got a little flustered when I stopped, there were cars behind me that I assessed could make the same turn before me. I attempted to wave one through, but then a line of traffic appeared preventing the car from moving. I should have simply accepted that I had stopped and was going to start again, and not wasted more time missing a chance at going through the intersection, and holding everyone up.

On the 29th of January I set a goal of being able to ride up the hill from the city to my house. Today I did it and I’m quite pleased, I really thought it would take weeks to achieve it. Technically I did stop, but that was so I could cross the traffic to get to my street, I’m totally counting it.

I rode down before 9am, it’s Sunday so traffic was light, and had a pretty enjoyable ride up the hill. During peak traffic it will be quite unpleasant, but at least I know I can do the ride with little drama now.