The last two Saturdays Jodi and I have been joining group rides with the Charles River Wheelmen. The CRW is a cycling club in the Boston area, and they have a lot of rides west of Boston in the area of Concord and Lexington. There are still a lot of semi-rural, quiet back roads out that way, and on weekends many roads actually have more cyclists on them than motorists.

We have been doing more cycling and less running this year than we have in recent years. For our bike tour this year we have decided to go to Israel. Since it is way too hot to cycle there during the summer months, we will be going in October. That pretty much rules out running a fall marathon. It’s just as well, as the last couple of bike tours we did with way too little training and we — or at least I — suffered for it. If we’re running 4 or 5 days per week as part of training for a marathon, there isn’t much time or energy left for cycling. So this year once I finished the Mount Washington Road Race last month, I put running on the back burner and am concentrating on cycling. If we’re in decent cycling shape when we start our tour it will be much more enjoyable.

So, we’ve quite enjoyed our rides with the CRW, and I expect we will be riding with them more through the summer. The rides we’ve been on have been small enough that the group soon breaks up and we don’t end up in a big scrum of cyclists, but we see other of the cyclists often enough to be able to chat now and then. It doesn’t hurt that the roads and scenery are nice, either!

Allen

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