I’m back from Anguilla and the wedding. Anguilla was great, but the bikes the hotel promised us would arrive by 9:00 am never showed up despite repeated requests. Taken together with the 10 days I didn’t ride before the vacation because of my knee, I’ve now been off the bike for almost 18 days. That’s the longest I’ve gone without riding since at least 2008!

It’s all good, though. My knee feels perfect again, and now I’m on the English 650B with a much lower low end–34/36 vs 34/25 on the 700C English. Hopefully spinning up mountains, as opposed to grinding up in the 34/25, will prevent the knee pain from coming back. I also made a deal with the devil, and I have some Speedplays coming. These pedals always struck me as a little dumb because the mechanical bits are part of the cleats rather than the pedal, but if they reduce the risk for knee pain, so be it.

After a quick trip to California next week, I’ll be back for the rest of the summer, so expect lots of new routes in July. They will be of the shorter variety, say 50 to 80 miles, for a while. I don’t want to push out a 200-mile ride until I’m sure about my knee. I need to get back into fightin’ shape, because I have a 400-mile ride planned for August, starting in Albany and circumnavigating the Adirondacks. Note that this isn’t a bicycle tour, we’ll be doing it rando-style, meaning that I have a hotel reserved at about 250 miles so we can pass out for 3-4 hours before completing the ride.

And of course, don’t forget to enter the Win a Garmin contest!

John

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