This was my second time out on my bike, and I took it pretty easy. I spent an hour or so running all the wiring for my new Cateye bike computer (cadence, etc) so that I was happy with it. That meant starting pretty late in the morning, so it was nice and toasty by the time I got out to the Veloway.

I did three laps to start with, or a bit under 10 miles total, just continuing to get used to the bike. I never did get comfortable going in to some of the turns quickly; I’ve done many a veloway lap before but always on my MTB and adding another 5mph can really make a pretty big difference in comfort. Still, it was good practice. My front chainring shifting was beginning to suffer, telling me that it was definately time for that first tune up.

After getting a little tired of the veloway I headed out down LaCrosse and took a left onto the MoPac frontage road. My plan was to do the whole South loop but I cut back a bit too soon and did a shortened version. I was playing around with the cadence monitor while I did it and found that if I was pedaling at closer to 90rpm than 75 (which I had been doing) I could go faster, easier. It was quite a surprising difference, actually. I’m sure there’s much that I have to learn about biking, and look forward to figuring more of this stuff out every time I get on the bike.

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