Thank you Sweetie!

I will take any compliment she can get. Even if it comes from an old, hairy fat man in a sleeveless shirt leaning out of the driver's side window of his contractor's truck. I bet if I wasn't concentrating on not becoming roadkill and could have gotten a good look at what he was wearing it would been a Big Johnson t-shirt with the sleeves cut off (if you are too young to remember these, check them out here: http://www.bigjohnson.com/). This actually happened twice today, men leaning out of their windows to thank me for signaling and moving to the left in a merge area. Most women would be insulted, and while I am a feminist in spirit and often times action; it is still an ego-boost to hear nice words from strangers.

They made me feel good for two reasons:

1.) I am obviously learning proper bike etiquette because people are being courteous to me and NOT giving me the finger and yelling profanity combinations even my grandmother wouldn't use (or maybe she would-she has a sailor's mouth and has been known to flip the DOUBLE bird at family events).

2.) They obviously noticed the 6 pounds I have lost since I have really buckled down and focused on my tri-training. :)

In another post I will share my tri-training plan with you and go into detail about how I got started, who I train with, why I do it, etc. etc. Each of those deserve a post of their own and I don't want to digress from my training ride today. Hopefully I will figure out a way to load Google bike maps into the Blog and then will be able to show you the route I did.

Today the Child was at Nanny's house eating marshmallows for breakfast and being played with on demand and the server was down for work. Down-time (this happens rarely) seemed the perfect opportunity for a bike ride and to take advantage of the BEAUTIFUL weather we are having here in central PA. I wanted to keep it easy because we are doing a group swim tonight with my Tri team and I didn't want to wear myself out. It was about 15 miles and had some AWESOME hills. I had actually never done this route before; usually we stick to the main road but I wanted something a little different so I took a left around mile 7. The road (Potato Valley Road for those of you from the Harrisburg area) loops around and hooks back up to Fishing Creek Valley road. This is the thing about valleys-you need hills to have them. Holy mama did Potato Valley have some hills!!! I didn't see any potatoes though ;). The hills were great for training and my new bike made them much easier to tackle than the blue monster would have last year.

Well I am off to pick up the Child from Nanny's and listen to her scream the whole way home about not wanting to go back to "mommy's house". Have a great evening!