It was the best of times........

Well, not really, but I did have a pretty decent weekend in light of the fantastic march heat wave, as I hope all of you did. Other than some personal issue not related to anything on this blog, here's my weekend:

Saturday I got kitted up to go for a long ride with The One And Only Duane Skofield. I've gotten into the habit for the past few months of depositing my paycheck on saturday morning at my local bank branch. It's never busy and I can get in and out right away. I ridden my bike a few times over the past week and left it in the vestibule. Today, for some reason, the manager was in. She saw me with the bike and said rather incredulously, almost condescendingly "you can't leave your bike there".
I said, just as incredulously "you're kidding"
Indignantly, she replied "No why would i kid about that"
I asked, "why not"
she said "someone could get hurt on it".
I said, "yeah right" rolling my eyes, and walked out.
fucking douchebag.
There is another branch on the other side of haverhill, so I went there.

Now, I've been riding my bike to work in north andover in spring, summer, and fall since I started there in '96. For a while I was depositing my check at one of those two branches, and I would ride my bike to either one, leave it in the vestibule, and do my banking. So saturday I go to the other haverhill bank, leave it in the vestibule, walk in, and who's there but the manager from one of the north andover branches that I used to go to all the time. She works there now. I told her what happened at the other haverhill branch, and she rolled her eyes, and said to me, 'well, you're welcome here _anytime_'.

Anyways, I get out on the road, and ride over the the meeting place. I've been getting a sharp tendinitis pain the past few times I've ridden, so I was ready to bail if it happened again.

Well, it didn't. I got 3 1/2 hours in and would have gone longer had I remembered to bring more than a kashi bar and a gu. I felt a few interesting 'bruise-like' pains, but nothing that became a problem. I felt no problems at all the last hour.

I had ridden to work the day before, and was pain free for the whole trip.

Here's why: I dropped my cadence. I figured out that the reason I had been able to do 2 hour mountain bike rides with no issues but only an hour on the road bike was the spin. You don't spin a cadence of 100 on an MTB for very long. On the bike I was doing it for tens of minutes straight. On the friday, when I felt some pain, I would drop a gear of stand on the pedals. I quickly found that the pain went away. So on saturday, I targeted my cadence at 90 instead of 100.

I'll need to get back to a steady 100, but I figure I'll work on that during my morning commutes, since they're usually around 30 minutes.

Yesterday, I did the last irish pub series race, and felt good, more on that later.