Kelly and I met at 8 this morning at Bent Creek to ride. We have a new winter rule - anything above 20 degrees is fair game. It's fortuitous that we revised our previous rule (which was flexible but definitely did not include temperatures below freezing), for two reasons: (1) it's been a crazy cold winter so far, so we'd NEVER make it out on the bike if we waited for it to warm up, and (2) it's also been a very wet winter, and it's sooo much nicer to ride frozen trails than boggy trails. Or to not ride at all because it's too much of a mess. So off we went this morning, but with a twist - in keeping with the MAF training, my heart rate was not to exceed 134. Kelly is not normally the type that wants to ride slowly, but she seems somewhat interested/somewhat bemused by my low heart rate idea, so she came along for the ride.
We weren't expecting a ton of snow - it's all melted outside of the woods. But not so much in the woods.
Which meant that not only were we CRAWLING up the hills to stay in my MAF zone, we were also creeping on the downhills because there were a lot of icy patches. Which meant this was not exactly our fastest ride ever.
In fact, when we finished we simultaneously remarked that it was the slowest we'd ever ridden a bike in our life. I'm kind of really banking on the MAF theory that you can get faster at the lower heart rate if you improve your aerobic conditioning. Because honest to God, we couldn't get much slower.
But in the category of "there's always a silver lining", we did take a lot more time to stop and smell the roses - hence the pictures. And we had a great time chatting, and now I'm back home and not sacked out for the rest of the day, which is convenient since I have a fair bit of work to do.
And, in our smelling the roses, we also found some cool ice climbing possibilities. Not that I engage in such activities, but if one did (and Kelly does), this was apparently a pretty interesting find.
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