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In the effort to be healthy and active, and counteract the multiple boxes of frosted fudge Pop-tarts that we keep in stock, Tony and I went on bike ride this weekend. We try to do this every weekend (meaning, this was our second trip).
Tony likes the leisurely pace, and I like that red-faced oh-my-goodness-I-am-dying feeling that goes with trying to pedal up a hill. (I can pedal for hours on nice flat terrain, but hills continue to kick my butt. I really dislike them). Even so, I am nothing if not optimistic, so I planned a ride.
My bike is a pretty light blue bike, which took me forever to find because apparently bike makers are still under the assumption that a girl's bike, even if it's an adult size, has to be Barbie pink or Bratz purple. I probably wouldn't have minded a pink or purple bike if they had offered any other colors, but since that's all they think I want, I had to object on principle. It took a while, but we found a nice blue one instead. Plus, it coordinates well with my helmet, which is also blue and has Hawaiian flowers on it. Tony went with a red bike, but his helmet is black. (He had trouble finding a coordinating color. Actually, he had trouble finding a helmet period). Tony's head is apparently very small (which is fine with me, since one day I'll be forcing his offspring through the birth canal), so we had to drop down to Junior sized helmets for ages 8 and up. Just as I balked at a pink bike, Tony balked at a helmet with Sponge Bob or Transformers on it. (Expand your target audience, bike makers! There's no reason to belittle a grown man with the head size of an 8 year old by making him wear cartoons on his helmet!) We finally found one in the very back that was black with graffiti-like arrows/slashes on it, and Tony decided that he could live with it.
If you've never been, I highly recommend visiting Victor Ashe park. It has playgrounds and a dog park and soccer fields and pavilions and Frisbee golf and a pond and walking/biking trails all through it. All this is important because it gives you something else to focus on while you're having a heart attack as you fight your way up the first big hill. We normally bike over to the playground and take a break on the swings (Tony likes to swing...I like to gasp and wheeze like the out of shape person that I obviously am) before making the loop and heading back home. As an added bonus, this weekend's ride was accompanied by several middle and high-school cross country runners doing a local tournament at the park. Their trail ran right alongside our trail, which meant that 100 middle-school girls got to run by and smirk at me when I ran out of juice halfway up the monster hill and had to walk the bike the rest of the way to the top. Yeah well, smirk away, annoying in shape middle-schoolers. At least I have boobs!
I'm hoping that the weather will stay nice enough that we'll be able to ride each weekend for the next 2 months at least. And despite the killer hills, I am seeing a teensy bit of improvement with my endurance. Last weekend, I got chewed up and spit out by 6 hills. This weekend, only 4 hills kicked my butt. And sure, my leg muscles still turned to jelly, and my face got alarmingly red, but I recovered from this week's bike-induced heart attack much sooner than last week's. And in my book, that's a huge improvement...which should be duly rewarded with a frosted pop-tart!
