I'm still here; I merely sent this blog on vacation for the past month or so while I get mentally ready for the upcoming season of AIDS/LifeCycle 10 training rides. I've still been riding; in fact, I recently passed 6,000 miles for the year so far and am likely headed toward my second-highest annual mileage ever.
In the meantime, however, I've just signed up to ride the Death Valley Century on February 26. This will be my second time on this ride, but the first was way, way, WAY back in 2004 ... long before I was part of the ALC family, and about 35,000 miles ago in my training. While most of this route of the Death Valley Century is relatively easy (there's another route in the fall that is significantly more challenging), I found the ride quite difficult six years ago, and I'm curious to see if my perception of the route will change -- especially the strenuous climb to Jubilee Pass (pictured, 2004), since the climb actually starts well below sea level.
Stay tuned to this blog; as of this Saturday, I will be certified as a training ride leader for ALC10, which means that I'll soon be offering rides out of Mountain View, including the fourth year of the ever-so-popular Cat-3 Distance Training rides, culminating in the Fourth Annual Altamont Pass Double Metric in mid-May. (The Death Valley ride means that I might have to miss one of my own training rides this season, but I'll have a highly qualified team of ride leaders to back me up and fill in.)
If you're an intermediate or advanced cyclist who's part of ALC for the first year or the 10th, I invite you to join us in Mountain View every other Saturday starting in early January. We'll start with a 40-mile ride and gradually work our way up to the double metric with rides that are exquisitely planned and mapped and usually with outstanding support by our volunteer crew of SAG drivers and friends. You'll get an excellent preview of what days on the ride in June will be like, and you'll get to see parts of the Bay Area that you might have never seen before.
Before that, I'll probably run a couple of warm-up rides in December; details on those are coming soon as well.
