Creative Training - by Jamie

The closer we get to the ride, the tougher it seems to be to get in as much riding as I originally envisioned in our training plan. This is, unfortunately, somewhat opposite of what should be happening. As a result, we've had to get a little creative to keep ourselves in shape even when Amy and I can't get on the bike trail together and do a few hours of riding. Here are a few of the stop-gap training measures that we've employed:

Round and Round
In our original vision, our long rides were going to be on some of the great trails that we have nearby, such as the BWI Loop that does a 12-mile circuit around the Baltimore Washington International Airport, or the Baltimore-Annapolis trail that runs, as you might expect, from Baltimore to Annapolis (or nearly so). However, packing up the bikes and getting to those places eats up time, and time seems to be at a premium these days, what with our son playing baseball now and other warm-weather family activities coming into the picture.

So, the other day I did a 31-mile bike ride around the neighborhood. Literally "around." There's a good 5-mile circular loop with some nice ups and downs that I just kept doing, with an additional trip down and back on the one long, straight trail that runs 4 miles north-south through the neighborhood to break things up. Got a little repetitive at the end, which isn't great for morale, but you do what you gotta do.

Divide and Conquer
Part of our plan for Climate Ride has been to train and ride together--a fun shared adventure. But as time has gotten compressed, and the need for longer rides has come upon us, Amy and I have had to sacrifice a little of the togetherness on our training rides. We'll do part of a ride together, pulling Ray in the trailer, but then one of us will break off and head home with the little guy so that he doesn't throw a fit over spending hours strapped into his "bike choo-choo". Meanwhile, the other biker continues on to get some more miles in.

This past week all three children were with us and we did a divide-and-conquer ride as a family of five. Jarod started a game where we had to think of animals that had other animals in the name (sea horse! sheep dog! elephant seal!), and we had a blast. After six and a half miles, Natalie, Ray, and I dropped off at home so that Amy could do some additional training. Jarod opted to join her, so the two of them got some quality bonding time on their bikes, and Natalie spent time playing with her baby brother while I prepared dinner. It worked out nicely all around, and it even wore out Jarod!

At some point we may go even farther down this path, with one of us starting off alone while the other is home with our son. Then after an hour or two, we all join up for a nice together-portion of the ride. After that, the cyclist who started alone goes home with our son while the second cyclist finishes off another hour or two of training. Not ideal, and spreads things out over a good chunk of the day.

Also along the divide-and-conquer line, Amy has started doing some rides during the day while I'm at work. That's great for her, but leaves me needing a way to keep up with my conditioning.

Stairing into the Abyss
My most creative training technique has been to take a 20-30 minute break at work and go up and down the stairs in my office building. Without a gym membership (or time to use one even if I had it), and with flat feet and bad knees that make running a poor option, I don't have a lot of options for exercise during the workday. However, I do work in a four-story building that has a fairly large number of stairs between each floor. I've managed to create a circuit up and down those stairs, as well as across the floors of the building. There are stairwells at all four corners of the building, so I have several options for how to go from one 4-story climb to the next. Another good thing about the stair climbing is it is good for the leg muscles that are important to biking (or so I tell myself).

Since I started the stair routine, I've worked up to going up and down the 4-story height of the building 8 times, plus a warm-up in the beginning that slowly gets me from bottom to top and then back down. For those who keeping count, that's 36 floors of stair climbing. Though it's not all 36 in one straight shot, it's still quite an accomplishment for me. And I think I've only gotten one weird look from someone who saw me get to the bottom of the stairwell and then turn around to go back up.

Sometimes, though, you just gotta ride
Soon we'll be doing our first full-day ride. On April 28, we're going to do the Ride to End Hunger in Calvert County. The event has several loops of different lengths, but we'll be doing the big one: the metric century. That's 100 km (or 63 miles for those still on the English system of units). I'm told it's got a goodly number of hills, but that's ok. So do our neighborhood bike trails. Seriously--I mapped the neighborhood trails with Runkeeper, and then compared elevation changes to those posted online for the Calvert Country event loops. Our neighborhood actually has some bigger hills, just not as many of them. Well, maybe there would be if I did 63 miles on that 5-mile loop. Anyway, I think we'll be ready enough.

So that's where we're at now. Only four more weeks to go until the mighty Climate Ride. One way or another, we'll be ready for it.

Big Rides, with Children - by Amy

The bridge was nice. The ramp up, not so much.

Over the last few weeks, Jamie and I have been trying to do several short rides during the week and longer rides on weekends. The lesson learned was that our biggest challenges aren't our physical limitations -- they are the cute little people on the ride with us!

First, we did the BWI loop -- I believe Jamie may have mentioned that ride in his last post. It was a total of 14 miles, which we did in 2 hours. If you think that is slow, then you have never pulled a 40-lb toddler in a trailer up a ramp to an overpass bridge!

On our earlier, shorter rides, Ray had nothing but love for the bike choo-choo. Ray loves watching airplanes so the BWI ride had additional entertainment value for him. We were cautiously optimistic that he would behave for two hours.

Jamie and Ray and the runway

Somewhere around the point that we started to feel good about being in the home stretch, Ray decided that sitting in the choo-choo was stupid and began kicking the front cover off (yes, we buckle him in, but the cover is only attached with velcro, and as I may have mentioned, Ray is big). Next he started to complain. Then he started screaming.

Fortunately, we had brought Ray's LeapPad in case of emergency. We finished the trail with the sounds of Team Umizoomi blaring from the choo-choo. I was concerned that the other bikers, runners, and picknickers might not want to hear Team Umizoomi, but I convinced myself that it was better than a screaming two-year-old, and besides, anyone looking for a tranquil run wouldn't choose a path by an airplane runway, right?

Despite Ray's meltdown, it was a good ride experience. There were some serious hills, but Jamie and I both felt physically like we could have kept going. The path offers a lot to look at, crossing highways, circling the airport, and rolling through some pretty farms. We'll go back to that one.

For our second big ride, we had all five Britts in tow and decided to stick to the Baltimore-Washington trail so that no driving was required. Ray behaved this time as long as we kept him stocked with goldfish. Our challenge this time was managing a somewhat grouchy 12-year-old girl who did not understand why she should be forced to spend a 72-degree afternoon outside on a bike. Jarod was extraordinarily eager and excited about the ride, which made Natalie more surly, which made Jarod more eager, ad infinitum.

We did 11.3 miles together, then we were in a good place to drop off Natalie at the house. The remaining four Britts did an additional 6.84 miles, for a total of 18 miles in just under two hours.

At this point, we are estimating a day of child-free Climate Ride biking will take between six and eight hours. Not terrible! Every time we go out, we continue to be more encouraged about the possibility that we can really do this thing!

Couch to Climate Ride - by Jamie

Some of you may be wondering: how the heck do you plan to be in shape for a 300-mile bike ride? The short but uninformative answer is: do a bunch of cycling between now and the ride. The more detailed answer is the subject of this post.

So, is it possible to go from being a couch potato to cycling 300 miles in 5 days in a few short months? Initially I feared that the answer was "no." But as I read the training tips on climateride.org, I started to believe that the answer might actually be "yes." At this point, I sure hope it is.

Being the mildly obsessive person that I am, I put together a training chart for Amy and myself, based on the tips here: http://www.climateride.org/training/training-basics/ One thing to note about the tips is that the prose paragraphs are somewhat less ambitious than the "handy chart that you can use as a guideline to weekly mileage." Given that by the time Amy and I started training we were already behind the curve of the mileage chart, I opted to build our training chart based on the written tips. We'd obviously be in even better shape if we were able to push ourselves to meet the goals in the mileage chart, but given our schedules (work, the poor sleep-habits of a 2-year-old, two school-age children with homework, activities, birthdays, etc, and a house to keep in order) I didn't see those goals as a real option.

Without further ado, here is our training plan as originally written:



This started back in February, of course, and even though winter was mild this year, it was still too cold to be cycling. To start, we did some creative indoor cardio, including things like climbing the stairs of my office building and playing dancing games on Nintendo Wii with the kids. It also included some limited strength training in the house (when you've been a couch potato for so long, you don't necessarily need weights to stress your muscles). Some time around the beginning of March, we began to do actual cycling. Ray has been along for the ride in the trailer for all our bike rides thus far, and the other two kids have ridden with us on a few occasions. For our really long rides, obviously, we'll need different solutions. If you're reading this and you've babysat for us in the past, expect to get a call.

The last few weeks of the chart may be overly optimistic about fitting in both three hour-long rides and multiple days of 5-plus-hour rides, but we'll do the best we can.

We have been mostly successful at sticking to this chart, though on some weeks we've only hit two rides instead of three. Last weekend we did our first long ride, a 2-hour loop of the bike trail that goes around the Baltimore-Washington International Airport (aka the BWI Trail) with a spur to Saw Mill Creek Park. Though tiring, that was an encouraging ride. We rode at a reasonable speed and felt that we could have continued riding if we had needed to do so. Ray did surprisingly well in the bike trailer for two hours too. All of this and more will be detailed in a subsequent post titled "Oh my God, we've got to go up another steep ramp and across route 170 again?" Ok, that's just a working title.

This week will probably be another week where we won't get in the quantity of rides that are on the chart, but our first ride was closer to 70 minutes than 50 minutes, and we will be getting in that all-important 2.5-hour ride.

Amy was wise enough to sign us up for another cycling event: the Ride to End Hunger in Calvert County ride. This "metric century" ride (100 km or 62.1 miles) is well timed to fit in with our training schedule.

Just recently, we got a Climate Ride e-mail reminding us to be sure to train on hills, as there will "definitely be hills, especially on Day 4." Yikes! Hitting the worst hills of the ride after 3 long days of cycling is a daunting prospect. Fortunately, we've got some good hills in our neighborhood as well as some of the routes where we plan to train. Now we just have to start training on them instead of saying "let's do the more gradual incline today."

And there you have it. Our plan to be Climate-Ride-ready by May 19th. You can certainly comment and criticize, but we're too far into this thing to shake it up much now. With only 8 weeks left, this is the time when things get real. So wish us plenty of luck.

Oh, and donate money, because it sure would suck to do all this training and not get to go. ;)

(Don't take that "winky-face" to mean I'm just kidding. Take it to mean that I say this tongue in cheek, but with an underlying subtext of "really, please do it").

Zen and the Art of Bike Trailer Maintenance - by Jamie

During yesterday’s evening training ride, the bike choo-choo got a flat tire. This made me especially frustrated, because it is still a brand new bike choo-choo (still has that new choo-choo smell). There was no sign of puncture, just a tire with no air in it. As Ray says when reading one of his Thomas the Tank Engine books, it was a “sad choo-choo.”

We discovered this situation at pretty much the half-way point of our 40-minute ride, meaning we had a ways to go before getting back home, most of it up-hill. Fortunately, we were the beneficiaries of the kindness of a stranger. Another cyclist, pulling his own bike choo-choo and passenger, offered us the use of his portable bicycle pump. He said that his own choo-choo (I think he used the term "trailer") had a slow leak in one of its tires, so he felt our pain. I am very grateful for the help that man provided. In hindsight, I was not as polite to him as I should have been, due to the frustration I felt as a result of my uncooperative bike choo-choo. Wherever you are, neighbor, thank you very much for your help.

I only got the tire pumped partially up before starting up again—I had difficulty using the portable pump, and I didn’t want to take too much of the kind stranger’s time while his own tire was slowly deflating. The air in the tire lasted until we got home, but was low enough that for the whole ride back I was anxious and moody—worried that it was going to go flat again at any moment. Not to mention the fact that pulling a fully-laden bike choo-choo with a half-flat tire up a long, slow incline is tough going.

What is my point here? My point is that this was a learning experience. The first lesson was simple: always bring a bike pump. The second lesson was deeper: accept the challenges that come with the adventure we’ve chosen. I have an admiration for Buddhism, especially the Zen variety, and yesterday’s training ride was an opportunity for me to practice walking the Eightfold Path (look it up!). Sadly, I missed the opportunity completely. To paraphrase Joey Tribbiani: I was so far past the path, I couldn’t even see the path. The path was a dot to me.

But therein lies the lesson. It turns out that all this training isn’t just about working the body, building the muscles, and improving the lungs. It’s about getting my brain around what it means to ride for a long time, to “be in the saddle” as it were, and to face all the ups and downs, literal and figurative, that come with that.

Om–aranam–arada.

Driving the Bike Choo-Choo - by Amy

When we signed up for Climate Ride, Jamie and I owned one adult-size road bicycle between us. We quickly confirmed that we would be able to borrow a hybrid road/mountain bike from Jamie's parents -- but we wouldn't be able to get it until April. It seemed clear that we needed to train on actual bikes before April, so Jamie suggested that he use our road bike until then and we would get a new hybrid  for me. I wasn't going to say no to a new bike!

We went to the Family Bike Shop in Crofton and had a great experience. A friendly bike geek/employee let me ride several different types around the parking lot to figure out what I liked. We bought a relatively inexpensive Giant hybrid. It sits very upright, which I love and Jamie hates. The only thing I don't like about it is the mint green color, but I figure on a 300-mile bike ride, comfort will be more important than color.

Since I'm home during the day and the weather has been beautiful, I've had plenty of opportunity to take Ray out in what he calls the "bike choo-choo." Pulling a 40-lb toddler isn't easy, but it should be good training, right? Ray loves anything that moves, so he is always excited to climb in the bike choo-choo. If I ride long enough, I'm guaranteed to get him down for a nap, which is a nice perk. If you see me pedaling the choo-choo on the bike trail or the street, please be sure to say hello!