Trek 520 (Day Three)
Goodness gracious. Yesterday, I tried the auto stop-and-start feature of my cyclometer for the first time. I had found myself piddling along for the first couple of miles in the mornings, trying to find enough light to get the tenth flip to calibrate it with the trip meter. It goes like this: I start out, I watch the odometer like a hawk and wait for the decimal digit to flip (like from 8000.0 to 8000.1, for instance), then switch modes to trip meter and grab the last digit of that (0.07, for instance). Subtracting this from the odo tenth gives me an odo reading to the hundredth of a mile (8000.03, in that example). This is fairly difficult to do in the dark at 5:45 in the morning. So, I figured I’d better try the auto mode. I should have tried that two years ago. The auto mode did not lose a hundredth of a mile all day. Learning this is extremely helpful in not plodding along at 10 mph trying to watch the cyclometer. So, this morning, I stomped out a 17.3 mph average speed on the route on which my personal best for work commuting was 16.3 before I got this beautiful Trek.
This afternoon, I got out of the office pretty late and was further stalled by forgetting my cycling shoes in my cubicle. But, once I got stomping, I got stomping. Realizing I had about half an hour to sunset and probably another 20 minutes or so until nearly complete darkness, I got into my tuck and decided to see what kind of kick I could muster.
Remember my half hour distance record on Monday? It was 9.36 miles, now my personal best is 9.93. Remember my ten mile personal best I set on Monday? I smashed that one by almost a minute and a half (now: 30:15). My new fastest ever single ride is 19.7 mph average. Holy cow! That’s blisteringly fast.
In fact, it was so fast that it dragged my day up to 18.8 mph. That makes today the fastest single day ever. The stats:
Commute home: 19.39 mi in 58:55 (19.7 mph avg / 29.5 mph max)
November 24: 29.92 mi in 1:35:28 (18.8 mph avg / 29.5 mph max)
Okay. Let’s see how long it takes me to break that 20 mph average. Woo!
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