Living with MS: Bike MS: "I can't believe you did it on mountain bike!"

Okay, I get it, I need a road bike! One of the most common things I heard on the ride yesterday was... "I can't believe your doing this on a mountain bike! Your like working twice as hard as the rest of us!"

What can I say... I like doing things the hard way. *lol*

Anyway... The ride yesterday was awesome. When I first signed up I knew that it was just going to be me but I was okay with it because I tend to zone out and go into my own world when I ride, but I was a little bummed out when I realized that there wasn't going to be anyone there at all when I crossed the finish line. However, I discovered that once you get going you tend to stay near the same group of people who are all generally traveling at your speed and I ended up meeting some really cool people.... So I wasn't really alone after all.

I made the 40 miles in just over 3 hours of riding time not counting the two stops we made at designated rest areas but those only lasted 10 minutes at most. The one day group started up in Fort Collins and it was timed so that the group coming from Westminster on the 2 day ride would cross the line around the same time we would be finishing so when I got to the finish there were tons of people all cheering and shouting everyone in.

When I signed up to ride, I went for the one day because I felt that I wouldn't be ready for the two day in time, however I went into 40 mile ride so strong that I probably could have done the longer route. I wasn't the fastest bike out there, but I wasn't the slowest either and everyone in my group kept marveling at the fact that I was on a mountain bike.

You know, if riding a mountain bike on one of these things is really twice as hard as riding a road bike, then I've got next year's ride in the bag. I gotta figure, if we were doing 40 miles and I was working twice as hard as the others, then I was really doing 80 miles worth of effort, which is about the half of the 150 miles of the other ride.

SO there it is... Bike MS is over at least for this year.

I am SO going to do it again next year!