Bringing people up to date after six months of silence

A few people pointed out that I've been silent on my personal blog recently. Part of this is that I've been active on an Adobe-internal blog; the rest is that life has been busy. But the thing that I'm proud of is that I am truly back on the bike again, both road and mountain. I started training in earnest in March and got myself back to a decent aerobic base before I went on holiday in July. Ann and I went to Interlochen, Michigan where we rented a cabin on a lake for three weeks. I put on over 500 miles during that time. It would have been more miles except that the final week was during great heatwave and it was too hot to do more than a 30 mile trip early in the morning.

I have kept the training pace up since I've been home, doing 100-120 miles/ week. Within that time and distance, I am doing more mountain biking and doing the tougher hills; I am also having a great time. I commute to work by bike at least twice weekly, and throw in an extra hill or two before I head out of town in the morning when I have the time.

One innovation of this year came as a birthday gift. I've been using an old Polar S910 bike computer and watch. Ride results were downloaded over an IR connection (remember those) and you had to have SW installed on the computer. It was so old school. The new bike computer is a Garmin Edge 500. I love it. [And it is great to have a son who works in a bike store.] The Edge synchs up with satellites much quicker than before and downloading results is a breeze. The software is all web-based, so I can access my bike data on any computer. Also, the GPS speed and elevation tracking is good enough for mountain biking, so I only have the wheel sensors (all wireless) hooked up on my road bike; every other bike is just instrumented by the GPS. You'll see more stats from this and the ride-sharing site Strava in future posts. And who ever would have though of a social fitness site.