Training Day #44

A Few Detours!!

Well, today’s bike ride was an interesting one. The training plan call for a long bike ride. This would be my longest bike ride so far in my training plan! I have been choosing my routes through Strava to see where most people are riding in my local area. I chose a course that is relatively low-traffic, except for one portion at the very beginning. Unfortunately, it is a stretch of about 1/8th of a mile, and I would have to make a left-hand turn into traffic. This turned out to be as hard as I thought it would be.

I started my ride with my freshly tuned bike from the shop. I dropped it off on Monday afternoon and didn’t expect to pick it up for at least a week. However, on Wednesday, I got a call from the shop saying it was ready. This was great because I didn’t have to miss a bike workout.

Anyway, I started my ride with basically a brand new bike. Once I got to the high traffic portion, I got on the road, but the traffic was too heavy for me to turn left without stopping traffic. So I chose to continue my ride and took the next right-hand turn. This allowed me to turn around and go with the traffic flow to take the road on a right-hand turn. This slight detour allowed me a safer option. Overall this ride provides great hills and scenery. I did get turned around once where I missed a turn, but I caught it pretty quickly.

This ride was a great learning experience of riding in heavy traffic and how to make it safer for myself and other drivers.

This will be the last update until Monday. I’ll be taking off the next two days of training. See you Monday!

Key Takeaways:

1. Stay away from heavy traffic roads during commuting times!
2. If you have to take a route with heavy traffic, try to make turns with traffic and not against it!

Training Statistics: