First road bike ride in a long time

"Wealth consists not of having great possessions, but in having few wants." - Epictetus

For the first time in forever, I got out on a road bike.  It was a blast!  The ride was not all that long, taking about 1-1/2 hours, with a couple of short, but steep climbs.  Our house sits in a bit of a hollow, so every direction is uphill.  It makes you get winded right away, whether riding or running.  I guess that beats finishing a ride with a climb.

Above is a screen grab from the GoPro camera.  In spite of the snowbanks, it was actually pretty pleasant - 58 degrees.  I'll probably upload a couple of short video clips at some point.  I managed a 17 mile ride at about 13.5 MPH average speed.  Not bad, considering how long it's been since I've ridden routinely, and the climbing involved.

Below:  Still packing a bit of a gut.

I tried out the Novara.  It's a pretty nice ride - a lot less harsh than I remember the Masi being.  One thing that's a huge difference from the Masi is the gearing.  The Masi has very close gear ratios, so you can keep your pedal RPM right where you want it.  With the Novara, the gear ratios are further apart, so you might find yourself pedaling really fast, and change one gear - only to find that you are pedaling more slowly than you like.  You can see the difference on the rear sprockets between the two.  The Masi rear sprocket looks like a corn cob.   Compare the various sizes on each set of gears.

 Below: Masi rear sprocket

The vintage Cateye speedometer is working perfectly!  It helps that there is not too much to go wrong on it.  You set the units - metric or imperial, and input your wheel diameter, and away you go.  The input sensors are reed switches, and the computer merely counts the number of times the reed switches open and close per minute.  You can hear them click shut as the magnet sweeps by them if you put your ear up close with the bike on a stand.

Anyway, it was a fun late winter ride.  I got some exercise, some video, and a lengthy runner's high out of it.  I also developed a sore butt, even with padded shorts.  I'm going to have to investigate some alternative saddle arrangements.

Another thing I recently did was to take on a one hour challenge: Perform one cardio exercise for an entire hour and see how far you get. I typically go up and down these two flights of stairs until I've gone up and down 50 times.  It takes 27-28 minutes.  So I decided this would be my challenge.

In an hour I went 101 trips up and down.  The next day I could barely walk, my calf muscles hurt so bad.  Next challenge will be on the elliptical or bike.  Something that won't cripple me later.