Reason #3 not to use the bike path

I ride bike paths as little as possible. Usually only to get me somewhere fast or if there isn't a safe road to get me where I want to go.

Every day that I ride from home there is a hill that I have to climb up to the subdivision where I live. I would say that 2 or 3 times a year somebody passes me that just can't fathom why I would be on the road with there is a nice, wide, paved path right next to the road. The usually yell some form of expletive out the window surrounded by the words, "get on the" and "bike path."

I have several reasons for not being on the bike path but last week I got a new one. Mudslides.

It seems that all the rain, coupled with the 6 inches of snow we had last week was too much for the retaining wall on Huntington. Bricks and mud were all over the the bike path. It's been almost a week since it happened and crews came out to clean it up but no repairs have been made yet. I'm curious how long that will take.

Mudslides aside, there are two other, more often occurring, reasons for not using the bike path.

1) Debris: This for me is the main reason. There is always tons of junk all over the path. From glass, to sticks, to gravel, to garbage. All the stuff that was on the road gets blown on to the bike path.

2) Kids use the path: There have been multiple times that i have actually used the path and while I'm going up the hill some kids come flying down on their bikes or skateboards and almost hit me. Bottom line it's too dangerous to use the path.

An issue related to this is the use of bike lanes. Algonquin has been cool enough to build some of the streets wide enough to include either painted bike lanes or non painted lanes. The problem with this is the same as reason 1 above. There is always crap in these lanes. What's worse is when the village comes around to clean the streets, they lanes are worse off then before they cleaned them.

The other week I finally saw it with my own eyes. The street cleaner goes by and it's tank is full so out of the top, pouring down the side of the vehicle is the overflow of the tank, depositing all the crap that it cleaned off the road right onto the bike lane.

Anyway I think I'm done typing now. This is the long way to say that hey, we had a mudslide by my house last week.

That's all for now. Maybe someday I'll actually have a race report.

Snow?#%*@&!?????

For the second week in a row a great week of training has been interrupted by bad weather. This time it's actually snow. Freak!

That's all

Wisconsin ride and First fitness test of the year

I was up in Eau Claire this weekend and I finally got a ride in on saturday morning during just about the only two hours that it didn't rain the whole time we were up there. I found a route on routeslip that was near our hotel. I detoured off the route to go up to Elk Mound. I almost didn't make it up to the top with my 21 cog cassette on. It was really tough.

After Elk Mound i returned to the route and all was fine until the road that was supposed to be the turnaround point was not just gravel but mud. I had to back track and find another way home. I made it back with about a half hour to spare before the downpour started again.

Back home today i did my first fitness test of the year. After warming up you do 5 miles on the trainer at what is for me 168-170 bpm. I did part of my warmup riding around the block with the kids, put the bike on the trainer in the garage and did the test while the kids washed their bikes. I have yet to compare the results but i'm interested to see where i'm at compared to this point in my training calander last year.