Charmaine must be a little crazy. She signed up for Little Red Riding Hood this year. That means riding 100 miles on a Saturday in June, which doesn’t give her much time to prepare. I’m sure she’ll do fine, but it’s going to be tough for me to keep up with her as she trains.

On Friday she rode up Provo Canyon in the morning with her good friend Kristen. She invited me to come along, but I wasn’t feeling up to riding through the snow. They had done the same ride not long ago and had to turn back when the snow got too deep (it’s been a crazy spring here in Utah). This time they didn’t run into any snow and had a great ride. I was starting to wish I had gone with them until Charmaine suggested a second ride that day… up American Fork Canyon. I agreed to go, and it turned out to be a lot tougher for me than I had anticipated. I was pretty burned out by the time we got to the Timpanogos Cave parking lot, so I had us turn around. We rode down the canyon and out past the Timpanogos Temple, then back home. I think we figured it was about 13 miles, which was in addition to the 20 miles Charmaine had done earlier in the day. Did I mention she might be a little crazy? :-)

Then Saturday came. My legs were not as bad I had expected, so we rode our trainers for about 45 minutes while watching an episode of Bones. I’m paying for that decision today. My hamstrings are pretty sore… and I know there’s going to be more riding to do tomorrow. I hope the snow stops falling so we can ride outside again. I think I do better outside than on the trainer.

I just got off the trainer again. We seem to have a pretty good system going. Ride the trainer Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Swim Tuesday and Thursday. So today is Monday and I’m either getting stronger from all the riding, or I’m just well rested from a couple days off over the weekend. Either way, I had a good ride tonight. I stayed on the small half of my rear cassette most the ride. I even hit the bottom several times. I’m not going to jump to my big ring on the front until I’m hitting the bottom regularly, and I think that’s a real possibility over the next few weeks.

Tonight we watched an episode of Star Trek Enterprise. It’s not as exciting to ride to as some of the other show we have. It’s sort of slow. I guess I never realised that while watching it from the bean bag, but it’s painfully (no pun intended) obvious while riding the bike.

We rode our bikes Saturday as part of the Icebreaker Triathlon. Sunday we rested. Monday we rode our trainers for about 40 minutes while watching an episode of Battlestar Galactica. Tuesday was swimming, so we didn’t ride, but we got back on to ride again tonight. That means we’re riding every other day now. This may be the recipe for success.

Tonight’s ride was while watching an episode of Bones. I started warming up before the episode actually started, and continued through the whole thing. I didn’t stop until the credits were done rolling. But the best part was how great it felt afterwards. I think I may really start liking this sport. I just hope more riding translates into better bike times eventually.

One thing I did tonight that I don’t usually do is switch resistance an cadence for a specified amount of time. Tonight I decided I’d switch up to my big crank from the opening credits until the first commercial break. That turned out to be really hard, but it made riding on my smaller crank not so bad after that. I also switched up to a high gear near the end of the show so I could “finish strong”. It made it a lot of fun, and I think I got a lot out of it.

Charmaine talked me into riding our bikes and watching a couple episodes of The West Wing Friday night. I’m hoping that I’ll start getting used to being in the saddle, but so far I don’t last more than about 40 minutes before I’m pretty uncomfortable. We ended up finishing the first episode and got about 5 minutes into the next episode before I couldn’t take it any more. I think that means we rode about 50 minutes, which is pretty good for me. Other than the 25 mile ride in last year’s Spudman Triathlon, I don’t think I’ve been on my bike this long.

Saturday Charmaine jumped back on the trainer again. I was in no condition to hurt myself again, so I felt a bit bad about letting her ride on her own. She didn’t want me to feel bad about it, so she said she would be pretty quick. More than 2 hours later she was still riding. I think it’s pretty obvious that I’m holding her back on this training thing. Hopefully I’ll start to catch up one of these weeks.

We haven’t ridden our trainers too much, but I’ve decided that I should be blogging about the times when we do, just so there’s a record of it… and why we weren’t swimming or running (yeah right) or doing something else.

Last night I spent some time messing around with the iPhone SDK while Charmaine was reading a book. After a while I heard a peculiar noise. It sounded a bit like the clothes dryer at first, but then I realized it was coming from the TV room. Charmaine had started to ride her bike while watching TV. I’ve found too many excuses to skip riding in the past, so I decided I would get on and ride. We ended up riding about 45 minutes… the entire length of a West Wing episode on Boxee.

I spent more than half the time in a higher gear than the last time we rode, so I was pretty happy about that. I really enjoy riding the bike. Now if I could just stop getting sore from all that time in the saddle!

I got Charmaine CycleOps Fluid2 bike trainers for her birthday this year. Of course, she hasn’t had her birthday yet, but Contender Bicycles had a big sale that didn’t coincide exactly with her birthday. At any rate, she seems happy to have them. We tried them out the first or second night after we brought them home, but I didn’t last very long. It’s hard to stay cool without the wind from actual riding.

Charmaine bought a good-sized fan that we set up in front of the bikes. There went my I’m-too-hot-without-the-wind excuse. Tonight we decided to spin for about 30 minutes while watching some TV. It worked rather well. I was a bit scared to spin for longer than that, knowing how my swim coach enjoys long and difficult sets of kicking… and swim practice is only 24 hours away.

My right foot started to feel really loose while riding, but I pushed on through. At the end of the ride, I couldn’t unclip my right shoe from the pedal, so I took my shoe off. Some of the screws that held the clip onto my shoe had come loose and popped out. And because I pushed through, I did quite a bit of damage to the bottom of my shoe. Hopefully we’ll be able to put it all back together and ride some more later this week.