Thar's Bears in Them Thar Woods

I did the 16 mile route yesterday that Liz and I did with Mark on Thursday. It's a great route-- much hillier than the 11 mile route that has been our basic route. Here is a map of the route:



It certainly looks like an innocent little rectangle, but it has 2 category 5 hills. MapMyRide uses the official cycling rating system for hills. Category 5 is the easiest of the rated hills, but the fact that the hills are rated speaks to their difficulty. One is .76 miles long and the other is .6 miles long. My speed going downhill was over 40 miles an hour on 3 different downhills.

I was pedaling up the .76 mile hill when a truck going the other way stopped alongside me. The driver told me that he had just passed a bear on the side of the road. I'm not afraid of bears--there's lots of them in Northampton and I know they aren't interested in messing with people, other than eating everything out of their bird feeders, so I said, "Cool--I'll get out my camera." That was clearly not the response he was looking for, so then I gave the more expected reassurance that I would watch out for the bear and thanks for warning me. But I did pull out my phone and put it in camera mode. Unfortunately, I was almost at the top of the hill and while I tried holding my phone while navigating the downhill, I realized that I would not be able to brake quickly if I needed to, so I put it away. I never did see the bear--bummer!

Liz and I are thinking about getting up a little earlier on week days and making the 16 mile route our daily route. That would be fun and would really increase our fitness. I was getting a little bored on our normal route.

Last night we went to Tanglewood to see Garrison Keilor. It was a great show. Before the radio program started, Garrison sang a number of songs while wandering through the audience. I got very close to him and shook his hand. Here he is:



We went with Bob and Diana, and because we all were doing things before we left, decided to pick up food for our picnic on the way. Mistake. The place we stopped at had pretty mediocre sandwiches and poor Liz got a little bit of chicken with some mustard and tomato stuffed into a small soup container. All in all very unsatisfying, so we got potato chips. And because I was in the exciting part of a new novel I made popcorn when we got home.

I had gotten to the point that I was no longer tracking everything I ate because I was in such a rhythm with my eating that I always stayed within my calories. Now, on days like yesterday, I'll think, well I had a long bike ride, so I can eat this, and this, and what the hell, this. I still don't have the weight off from last weekend--well, that's not quite accurate, I have taken off 2 pounds, put them back on, etc. etc. So I'm back to tracking everything I'm eating.


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