This post is a couple of weeks late, my fault, I know, been a busy time getting caught up from my trip, taking another trip, and planning a trip later this month. While I was in the Denver area I managed to rent a bike thanks to a friend (via twitter), and decided I wanted to go for a couple of long bike rides.

Throughout the week I spent time looking at Google Maps and Strava to try to figure out what route I was going to ride. I had already planned to meet up with Joel from www.reasons2ride.com, so I wanted to find a route that worked out well with a place to meet him.

I settled on a ride from Parker Colorado, north up the Cherry Creek trail, connecting west to the C-470 trail, out to the Mary Carter Greenway Trail north, connecting to the South Platte River trail (going north). From there the plan was to hear into Denver to the SAME Café, run by friends of mine.

This route was going to be around 40 miles each way, longer in one direction than I’ve ever ridden, so I was half worried that making it back to Parker might be an issue, so I had an out, a shorter way back leaving SAME Café and heading to the Cherry Creek trail, which would have cut about 16 miles off the return route.

Friday after work, I was in Denver for the week providing custom DotNetNuke Training to a client, I stopped by the Littleton Bicycle Village store to pick up my rental bike that @Im_a_cyclepath hook

Here we are, day 3 into 30 days of biking (the month known as April). I came home from the office early today, left at 5pm, missing the Bay Area DotNetNuke User’s Group meeting (www.baydug.org). I stopped by the lbs (www.bikeworkshmb.com)  to see what they might have in terms of a road bike for my wife, she’s 5’10” tall so that pretty much rules out most “women’s” bikes, so I figured I would see what they had in a 56cm or so in men’s. They had a couple of lower end Specialized Allez, similar to mine, but with lower end components.

Unfortunately they don’t appear to have much else right now, but I did figure out that they offer fitting services, so we will likely be scheduling that here in the next couple of weeks. I think she needs a 56cm, but I think we would be better off knowing for sure before buying.

Pro Tip: If you visit Bike Works go upstairs, they have stuff up there too!

After getting home I decided to just rest and take it easy, watch some TV before the wife and baby got home. I thought about riding, but decided that my sick body wasn’t yet up to a long ride. I’ve been fighting off a cold for two weeks, and this past weekend it struck me down, lots of coughing the past few days, I think I still have both lungs, but am not sure.

After dinner I gave the baby a bath, side note: some how I have been tricked into this duty each night, for 1.6 years I managed to avoid it! (to be honest, I enjoy bath time playing around with Jacqueline, so I can’t complain).

Once the baby was down I decided I should at least get out and ride a little bit around the neighborhood to have some actual riding for Day 3 of 30 Days of Biking.

This is when karma struck, in the form of rain. None

I can’t believe I forgot about this, but fortunately I was able to get ride in for Day 1 of 30 Days of Biking 2012. http://30daysofbiking.com/ What? 30 days of biking? Isn’t Toddler366 enough for you Chris? No, it isn’t.

So what is 30 Days of Biking? Well, plain and simple, bicycling at least once, every day, in April 2012. Why? Why not. Biking is good for you, the more you do it, the better you feel, the better shape you are in.

How much will you be riding? That depends on my schedule. Some days it will just be a quick ride around the neighborhood, some days I’ll get in multiple rides. Hopefully every day I will get at least one ride in though, even if it is short.

The difficult part for me is that I am likely going to be travelling to the east coast at the end of the month, and getting a ride in with that may prove hard, though I may try to ride a couple of times, even if short, with my good buddy Stephen Jones from www.velonation.com, but we’ll see how that comes along.

With each ride, assuming I ride with my Garmin, I will post up my Strava report from the ride. So here is Day 1’s ride.

Yesterday morning we headed off to REI to see what we might find at the Garage Sale. We didn’t plan on buying anything, but we had never been, so we went with open minds. Well, we scored. We ended up getting the Read More...