Biker Chick

So I picked up my new bike on Friday.  My friend Daryl's friend Colleen is letting me borrow her old bike since she just got a new bike.  So I will refer to her as Biker Colleen so as not to be confused with Running Buddy Colleen.  So Daryl acted as the middle man.  I met him for lunch on Friday and got my new bike! 

If I'm being honest, I'm a little scared of the bike.  Well, not really scared of the bike...just scared to ride it.  I don't like going downhill.  When I was 11 or so, my mom sent me to ride my bike to the convenience store down the road from our house to get some milk.  It was Thanksgiving.  I was going downhill with the milk resting comfortably on my lap secured by one hand.  The bike got going very fast and when I saw the rock, it was too late to avoid it.  The bike went down and so did I...and I cried over spilled milk.

I'm also scared of traffic.  Drivers are idiots to begin with, but they really get stupid when there is a cyclist.  So being so nervous, I gladly accepted my friend Abby's suggestion to go to the Gateway Business Park on a Sunday morning.  I knew there would be little to no traffic...which is good for a nervous biker chick like me.

So Sunday morning I got all my gear together, filled my water bottle, got in the car and headed out.  It wasn't until I got to Gateway that I realized that the water bottle that I filled was still sitting on the counter.  OK, one big rookie mistake...but not big enough to cancel the ride.  I did a loop around the parking lot just to check out my seat height and my gears. 

Another honest confession...I have no idea about gear selection.  So I just set it on a gear that gave me sufficient resistance and went with it.

The loop around Gateway is roughly 2 miles.  One side of the loop is uphill and the other side is downhill.  My first time the downhill, I was on the brakes the entire time.  By the second lap, I decided to see how fast I could go downhill without totally freaking out.  The computer on my bike said I was going 22 miles per hour.  It was scary but definitely necessary to get past my fear.  The uphills were hard and very humbling.

So I realized that I'm not as good of a biker as I had hoped, but it definitely gave me something to build on.  I can see that there's a real possibility of finishing a triathlon.