Confessions of an Amateur Biker

My husband and I are recent converts to road biking. We had been enjoying mountain biking at various locations throughout south Florida for a number of years. The mountain bike trails closest to us were destroyed in one of the multitude of hurricanes to hit south Florida in recent years. We decided to purchase road bikes as a way to continue riding while waiting for the off road trails to be rebuilt.

A few months after purchasing our road bikes I received information in the mail from the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society regarding their Team in Training (TNT)program. TNT is the Leukemia Societies main fund raising program. This program trains amateur athletes for local and national events such as triathlons, marathons, and century rides while at the same time raising funds for their organization. I went to their website to find out more about the century rides and discovered there was a ride scheduled in 5 months time in Cocoa, Florida. I was 42 years old at the time and my husband would be turning the big 50 a week before the century ride. I thought joining a team would be a good way for us to increase our road biking skills while at the same time increasing our level of fitness. The longest road ride I had done up to that point was around 22 miles so 100 miles seemed nearly impossible. But I like challenges so I signed us both up for the century ride.

My husband has a bit of an addiction to bike shops and is always reading about and researching the latest and greatest gizmo's and gadgets in magazines such as Bicycling. We were riding fairly new aluminum frame Cannondale road bikes and thought they were great. But he began to read more about bikes meant to make your ride more comfortable for longer, leisurely rides such as the rides we were beginning to do while training for the century ride.

We are a family that owns enough bikes to open our own shop, or at least that's what our neighbors tease us about. My husband owns a mountain bike, road bike, urban bike, and a chopper bike. I only have three bikes, a mountain bike, a beach cruiser and my road bike. Our daughter and son both have a beach cruiser to ride around the neighborhood. We also purchased a mountain bike for our son and a spare mountain bike for his friends to use both of which were hardly ever being used. My husband decided he needed to buy himself a carbon frame road bike and worked out a deal where he traded his current road bike and the two unused mountain bikes for his new Cannondale carbon frame bike.

After his very first ride on his new carbon frame bike my husband started talking about getting me a new carbon frame bike. Apparently he noticed such a difference in the comfort of his ride by switching from an aluminum frame to a carbon frame bike that he felt guilty that I still had to ride on an aluminum frame bike. I had just switched from my clip less mountain bike pedals to clip less road pedals so I was doing just fine and didn't even ask for a new bike. But a few days later he went to our local bike shop and ordered me a new Cannondale Synapse 2 Feminine specific carbon frame road bike.

No one will ever mistake me for a hammerhead. My preferred speed is in the 18-20 MPH range, with occasional bursts up to 26 MPH. Initially I didn't seem to notice much of a difference but my first ride on the new bike was by myself without anyone to draft behind. I think I hit a nasty headwind on the second half of that ride and I struggled to make it home, barely getting above 15 MPH. But on our group rides with our fellow TNT members I noticed a huge difference in my riding. I was able to keep up with the fast group almost the entire way. Overall my ride seems much smoother and I'm finally starting to climb out of the saddle when we have to go over any hills, okay, just going up and over draw bridges, this is south Florida so there really aren't any hills down here. Our last TNT ride was 65 miles. I didn't really want to stop at the first rest stop. We had only gone 17 miles and I felt like I could ride a bit longer before having to stop to refuel.

One day I was enjoying a short road ride on my new bike. As I was heading back to my point of origin I was nearly run off the road by a really RUDE cement truck driver. Initially he beeped his horn a couple of times which at first I thought was a polite way to let me know he was behind me. But then he kept beeping, louder, and more frequently and started riding right on my heels. There was no place for me to go, this was just before the beach parking starts along A1A along Delray Beach. There wasn't a bike lane or shoulder for me to pull over to. He apparently thought I was going to sprout wings out of my butt and fly away.
I finally gave him the one finger salute as we were heading towards a red light. While stopped at the light he practically ran over my toe - what an idiot. I proceeded to give him the Italian Kiss of Death and shot a multitude of mental evil-eye darts at him to no avail. It seemed that my Mojo just wasn't working that morning. When the light turned green he decided to start driving REALLY slow. I must have observed six or more patrol cars during my ride but of course none of them were around while this was happening. I just wanted to get in a couple of miles before having to pick the kids up from school. GEEEEZZZZZZ!!!!!!

We have recently purchased land in Waynesville, North Carolina and are looking forwarded to retiring there in a few years. We will have to learn an entire new way of biking though. Being flat landers for the past 15+ years it will be a real shock getting used to riding our bikes in the mountains. We brought our mountain bikes with us while on vacation to look for our land. We nearly died on the trails at Tsali near Bryson City. We are used to trails that are a lot more technical - filled with tree roots, or rocks, or sugar sand, or multiple log-overs, but our lungs sure weren't used to riding at altitude. At 3500+ feet it felt like we were trying to climb Mt. Everest! I had a bit of a hissy fit and mental break down at the top of the Mouse Branch Overlook trail because I couldn't freaking' breath. But when I looked down onto the houseboats in Lake Fontana with the Blue Ridge mountains in the background it put a smile back on my face. It's good to be a biker!