Turtles - Our first foray into the world of civilized cycling will be this Saturday, May 1, at the Wellington Warmup.  This is the ride where we finally get to flex these new muscles and lungs that are the result of  our winter training!  43 miles of relatively flat roads, supported with 3 aid stations, commemorative t-shirt is included as long as supplies last with the $25 registration fee.  Show up at 7am in Wellington at the Main Street Market to register.  The 43 mile ride begins at 7:30am.  29 and 15 mile routes are also available.

An interesting learning experience: I recently sold my old man road bike (upright position, flat bars, low gearing, etc) which meant I had to switch to the mountain bike for a couple of weeks.  Reproducing the HTT course (13.8 miles Masonville loop) and logging everything with a GPS, I found that my overall time of just over an hour wasn't significantly different between the old man bike and mountain bike with slicks on it.  I also tried a real road bike with Large and Larger front chainrings over the same route and it wasn't any fun at all.  I don't have the strength to keep an 80 rpm cadence on that bike up those hills.  The difference is being able to spin the pedals at a decent rate without blowing a gasket.  Using Sheldon Brown's online gear calculator, I found that 1st gear on the road bike is equivalent to 8th gear on the mountain bike!  I figure that with a more efficient and lightweight road bike, I could pull most hills using the equivalent of 4th or 5th mountain bike gearing but certainly not 8th.  Conclusion: my first real road bike is going to have triple 30/42/52 chainrings up front and a 12-27 wide range rear cassette.