Great ride!

So yesterday was a perfect day for a ride into work again. Almost no wind, relatively dry air and cool temps. You can't ask for anything better than that.

I've been using a bike computer for a while now; normally it's set to the mileage screen so I can see how far I've gone. It's just where I like it. But for some reason yesterday I had it placed on the average mph screen and didn't realize it until about halfway to work. I didn't play with it much on the way there, but was excited to see I was holding steady near 15.0 mph average for most of the way, though there were several times on nice long straightaways I had a good 18-20mph pace going.

The morning part of the commute was a new record. Normally each leg of the commute averages about 13-13.5 mph, mainly because of traffic. Yesterday morning, I averaged 15.1! Whee!

My friend, Dianna, is regularly telling me I need to keep my foot positioned more flat, so that the downstroke is almost like scraping mud off my foot. All this time, I'd been lazy and made it more of a toe-down sort of stroke. I think keeping the foot flat really helped in using the entire leg to pedal rather than just the quads.

The same sort of technique was used on the way home, this time I was very concious of the average mph screen. I kept wanting to pump it up a bit more just to see if I could do 15.5 on the way home. Sure enough, I was able to average the 15.5 for the whole trip home. I knocked nearly 10 minutes off my normal commute each way! Whee!

Take that, bad traffic!!