Touring Baltimore, Dreaming of Hawaii, Mapping Minnesota, and Making Progress With Those Goals

My Chariot Through Baltimore

We received some decent snow in Minneapolis this week, but I spent some good quality time seeing the sights of West and East Baltimore by bike. More accurately, I rode my bike on the trainer on the basement and watched episodes of the Wire - pedaling extra hard when I was anxious about Bubbles getting beat up on the West Side and relaxing a bit to hear what Proposition Joe was cooking up on the East Side.

Hawaiian Bike Shop T-Shirt - Perfect Fit!

Also this week, my friend Joan gave me a gift that she picked up in Hawaii, making me wonder when I'll get to go for a bike ride there. It's the best fitting t-shirt I've ever gotten as a gift. I love it. I also like how people think of me as a cyclist, although sometimes I am just a big talker. I apologize for not knowing how to take a picture of my back in a mirror without getting the corner of my face in there. (See my grey hair? How about my new haircut?)

I spent a bit of time today trying to remember some of last year's training ride adventures after inserting one of my favorite photos on Facebook as my profile picture. I thought there was absolutely no way I could have really gone for one bike ride last spring where: (1) I wiped out on my bike, (2) Two of the handful of us on the ride had flat tires, (3) A bridge was under repair and we had to carry our bikes, and (4) Two inches of rain the previous night had us turn a corner where we ended up riding our bikes in foot-deep water. Seriously, that all happened in one bike ride. I like adventures as much as the next person, but hope that this year's training rides will be a little more tame. 

Kim and Stacy, refusing to grumble

Part of me thinks I'll have good stories no matter what, though, once we start training. I'm starting to think that my presence is some sort of a jinx on the rides, since we had to carry our bikes over some train tracks and a plastic construction barrier on my second-to-last bike ride of 2012.

I spent a good portion of time this evening putting together another training route with the (less snappy) descriptive name of Southern Circuit. This is a ride that I made up on the go last year, while checking the Google Maps bike layer on my phone while out for what I thought would be a shorter ride. It's a 40-miler with a wide range of scenery, and involves more street riding than usual. I don't know that we'll do this as a big group ride - it can be hard to stay together as a group on the road since people on my team have pretty different abilities, different loves of speed, and a wide range of bike types.

As part of my route captain duties (pretty much self-assigned), though, I put a bunch of maps and a training calendar in the shared Google folder to help us as we plan our group training rides, but also added some maps my team members can use on their own as they train. I also put together an Alice-in-Wonderland-like document ("Read me!") in the folder that gives people brief descriptions of the routes and ideas of how to combine routes into longer rides.

This week I received another donation for the MS150 ride, bringing me to just over 25% of my overall fundraising goal of $4,000, with just over three months left. Thank you so much for all of your support - financial and otherwise - it means so much to me that people far and wide want to help me meet my goal of making a difference in the fight against MS! 

If you would like to donate, here's the link to my fundraising page: http://main.nationalmssociety.org/goto/MaggieMahoneyMS150.