Did a Tuesday Ride that was meant as a start to work off my winter weight gain. I ended up doing 2,600 feet of climbing in 29 miles with most of it over 8% and long enough sections up to 12%. Can't say that my legs feel very good today. Thursday's ride will also be climbing but most of the 2000 feet will be relatively mild with the climb over the Dublin Grade being the worst at 6 or 7% and now that we aren't forced to wear masks I will take a brunch break about halfway.

Yesterday was pretty miserable with lines of cars as much as 20 deep passing in areas I was limited to 6 mph. On this route all of the cowboy bars are gone without even a trace of the old buildings. Normal people would never go into these places since it was like an outlaw motorcycle hangout. Only the cowboys were a hell of a lot fitter. What's more, even the old farms are gone. A few landowners still graze cattle but very few head. And up in the Altamont Pass they have windmills and all of that land is completely lost to farming or cattle. The sound off of those things directly or indirectly kill all of the animals.

Normally my first hard and long climbing rides are terribly hard and tiring and then it gets quite a bit easier. Hopefully yesterday will be the sign of better things to come. Long rides the same. My first metric century I lead by a nearly equal distance which nearly kills me, but then the actual organized metric is easy and mostly involves only time on the bike. Though some of the Metrics throw in an extremely hard section - on one of them they have a half mile of 23%. This year I will avoid that one. Most of the course is badly marked anyway and without people to follow I'm completely lost.

I rode the Trek Alpha yesterday and with every ride I'm growing more and more fond of it. It steers well at high and low speeds and it has pretty low weight the only place which it shows up is on the 12% grades. Hard downhills when I'm hitting 36 mph (with braking) I feel pretty confident and aren't afraid that some carbon fiber part is going to come apart. Though to be truthful, I never had a worry with the Colnago CLX3.0 and I doubt I will with the C50 since all of the weaknesses of the C40 were corrected on the C50. I think that the only gains with the C60's are lighter weights. Under hard riding the C40 would flex and steer itself. The C50 has corrected those problems with oversize main tubes and 1 1/8th inch steering tube. and massive stays.