September 7th (Morning)

Well, fall is coming if it isn’t here already! Corrie actually got a fire going last night, and Taryn starts her first day in Grade 1 today. Yikes! It seems the summer has flown by! Although, I’m into my 7th month of riding already and I have more than 2100 kilometres logged, so it has been a great summer for riding to be sure. I hope to continue well into November and maybe longer if the weather cooperates, so we’ll see! I will be needing lights soon, as the ride is definitely getting dimmer…

It is getting harder to take a decent picture with my cell phone camera now. It takes horrible shots with dim lighting, so I may be getting to the end of pictures from the phone for a while! I took this shot to show the amount of street lights still on in the valley, and they don’t even come through into the picture…

The ride this morning was a good one. I felt great and had a pretty good time of under 60 minutes in the end. The bike ran pretty well, although I did have to stop and do some quick barrel adjustments on the rear derailleur to get the downshifting to happen quicker. The brakes were pretty loud again as the trail and brush were pretty wet from a rain last night. But, it wasn’t raining on me this morning so that was good! Coming up to the top of the east side of Peterson’s Creek I think I saw a vulture of some sort up on a tree. I did take a picture, but with the lighting mixed with my shaking hands, I can’t even see a dark spot on the picture where he was…

I didn’t make the climb out of the creek, but I did make the next steep hill that somehow foiled me on Friday. Coming up the rest of the ride on Tom Moore I met up with a guy that looked quite out of place on these trails. He had jeans on, a leather jacket, headphones and a seemingly permanent scowl on his face. Needless to say, he didn’t respond to my “Good Morning” greeting. But then again, he also didn’t pull out a switchblade to stab me, so I should look at the positive side of things, right?

In the end, I don’t think I reached more than 95% of my maximum heart rate, so it was a really good ride. On the road connecting Frolek’s lower and upper roads I only hit about 92% at the most, and then up Tom Moore is where I noticed 94% and then 95% at the end. Pretty good, considering that both of those hills I usually am sitting close to 99%! I’m sure that by Thursday this week I’ll be hitting the high percentiles again.