Riding Paradise

After much hemming and hawing, Lana and I decided to stay local to her home and hang out and ride like crazy women this weekend (we needed to make up for all of the long rides we didn't do together this past winter since she moved). You heard that right, I decided not to race. There are so many chances to race in Cali, but why race when you can have fabulous rides, at race pace, and leave from home?

Boulder riding is nice, but I do believe the riding here is better. Of course, the traffic to get to the riding is a little more insane than it is in Colorado, but at least there's a bike lane on every road from what I can tell.

These pics are from the Friday ride--totally twisty-turny road all the way up, much of it just like you see here...and very steep. It varies from 8% to 20% grades. Excellent place to do some hard intervals!

We pedaled for 3 1/2 hrs, and stopped by the Stanford campus for a riding tour of the campus. It's a pretty campus, and big. We were interested in knowing what was going on in the background of this picture. College (probably frat) boys...

Yesterday (Saturday), I went on a very fast group ride with ~100 local racers--Lana's boyfriend, Aaron, took me there (Lana didn't want to go since we thought we'd be racing on Sunday). A few women on the ride are pro, there were quite a few women there. They weren't intimidated. No one talked much on the ride, people took it pretty seriously. There was a group of 4 deaf guys on the ride--they were "talking" more than anyone out there (they were signing to each other). Everyone is nice, I haven't seen this many friendly cyclists in a long time. Almost everyone waves "hi." The guys were good to give pushes to the women who were dangling on the back. After the ride, then, everyone was chatty and I went with Aaron and a few of his friends for some climbing. Total ride time was almost 4 hours and my legs were toast.

Lana and I caught the train to San Francisco--it was a double-decker. Doesn't take too much to impress us.
We made some new friends.

The North Beach area is very Italian and after wandering through China Town, we had some yummy Italian food, served by Italians. It passed the test of my critical taste-buds.

Today we did another long ride (over 4 hrs) that involved tons more climbing, with grades over 20% in places. It took us past massive, beautiful homes, vineyards, just absolutely lush, gorgeous places. We did some more intervals and when I found a guy flying up a climb, chased him until it was time to turn around (won't admit that I was tired and my legs were quite unhappy). Now we're relaxing and enjoying not doing anything (except blogging).