Good ride in Rock Creek Park

This is a fuzzy picture that I took a few days ago, but I wanted to get one of Bono sleeping while I was on the trainer. It's pretty noisy with the trainer, the fan, and the TV (louder than normal because of the trainer and fan), but he manages to nap away.

I rode my Rock Creek Park loop ride for the first time in a while last night. Sunset keeps getting later which is nice. I'm "on duty" this week (Wednesday to Wednesday), which consists of monitoring message traffic and calls on the "duty" blackberry and checking in with our Chief of Staff in the morning and before I leave the building for the day. We only have it once a year, so that aspect of it is nice. The downside is that I have to bring the blackberry with me on my rides.

I've never used a blackberry, but I have to say that my initial reaction is that I like the user interface of the iPhone much better (might just be because I'm used to it) and the typing on the iPhone is leaps and bounds better than the blackberry.

The fact that I left work later than I wanted to, started the ride later than I wanted to and had to stop in the middle of the ride for about 5-10 minutes to forward some "duty" messages on the blackberry, equated to a shorter ride, but not too bad. I would have liked to do 6-7 laps, but got in 5, 2 warm-up, 2 hard, and a cool-down.

I forgot to put on my heart-rate monitor and realized this about 4 minutes from home, but didn't want to waste time turning around. I starting storing it in a different (warmer) closet than my cycling stuff (in a cold closet) because I'm a wimp and don't like putting on a freezing heart-rate monitor. I would have liked to compare the HR data to some of my other park rides, but oh well.

Overall a good ride and feels really good to get off the trainer. My previous fastest lap on the loop was 10:54. This time out I did the first "hard" loop in 10:52, then the next one in 10:29. 23 seconds faster isn't bad. Real improvement? I guess I would know if I had a power meter...

Splits are here: http://connect.garmin.com/splits/3119923

Lap 1 is getting there, Lap 7 is because I crossed the lap point and turned around to go home and it created another lap when I crossed back over the lap point (based on GPS position where I initially pressed lap the first time). Lap 8 is getting home.

Ride overview is here: http://connect.garmin.com/activity/3119923

I signed up for the Tour de Ephrata, April 25-26. Saturday is a 26-mile road race. Sunday morning is an 8-mile, 1st half rolling, 2nd half climbing TT followed by a criterium around 11am.

It's kind of far to travel for a race (over 130 miles), but Cezanne will be in Philadelphia that weekend , which is about 65 miles away, and it will be good to get some more racing miles in my legs.