Good morning everyone, at least it's a morning at the time of writing but probably not when you are reading this, I know for a fact certain people are active on here mostly at night... 😉

Another week so it's time for another Cycling Chit Chat post, and indeed we might just skip the 'Sunday' part in it since it's launched on Monday my time and people might get confused it's only for Sundays, you're welcome to post the entire week everyone!

Riding two routes

Because my daughter now also started cycling for a sport, but she first needs to get fit before she can reach the MTB trails in our area so we're doing road rides for now together plus the weather hasn't been great so the trails are really wet now. This means I'm planning two routes, she decides the distance for our ride together and I'm building a route on Garmin plus a solo ride after I dropped her off at home to get to my ~50km daily goal, this means I can't go as far from home for now, but that's OK. Usually she rides once a week in the weekend so I can do my own thing on Thursdays but this week she had a school holiday so we were able to ride two times this week 😊.

There's only one drawback with two routes... I have to fight the wind all over again on my second ride... but Thursday at the halfway point on my solo ride, the moment I would turn away from the wind I had a happy moment not only because the wind resistance was gone but this part of the road has been renewed with perfectly smooth asphalt 😍 and it's quite a long road, about 4 kilometers.

Stats Update and Challenges

I've completed the first major Garmin Challenge for this year well within it's time limit which ended on March 31st, to ride 675 kilometers which sounds like a lot but it's pretty easy to complete when you're living in a country without mountains.

Strava had a similar challenge, to ride 200 kilometers in February which was an easy one.

Total distance for this year is just over 700 kilometers, I did not try and get this to exactly 700 that's just coincidence 😄. I do wonder how I get to such the elevation gain when all I climb are bridges and dykes.

Winter is defeated?

Yesterday I read in an online weather report it could be the winter won't return for this year which would be awesome, I do like winter when I'm not on the bike but it's pretty tough to ride in temperatures around freezing every week and I have to admit I wasn't feeling to happy to get on the bike sometimes, I went anyway and it's OK when I'm riding but I had to drag myself on my bike which doesn't happen with better weather

Looking at the weather forecast for March, with mostly temperatures around 10 degrees that's great, hopefully they are right. We have a saying in my country basically meaning that in March you can pretty much expect everything between snow and heavy rain so we will see.

I watched the latest short from my favorite cycling YouTuber Phil in which he was telling about his ride and he was now gutted and he needed that. 😆 I guess only cyclists understand that, so I felt less weird about my own ride yesterday fighting the wind and it was also raining but it wasn't cold and I couldn't be happier, when I got home my wife asked how my ride's been - it was bad, it started to rain, right? Hmmm no actually I had a great time and I was in a really good mood! 😁

This Sunday ChitChat invites you to share the little victories of your week—whether on the pedals, at home, or in your thoughts. What made you feel stronger than the gossip in your neighbourhood?

This ride was that victory, subconsciously enjoying the speed with wind and rain in my face, it was awesome! This is probably something only cyclist or other enduro sporters can understand.

An expensive little present

On one of my jobs last week I was waiting for my contact to arrive and I was casually talking to the head of the postal department on a university, he told me they had a big gym on the campus and they also had more of these around the country, they would send sport bars of different kinds to the locations but sometimes the local managers would just return the packages because they didn't order anything and they end up on a shelve there, so many they had to dispose of them sometimes, so I asked what kind of bars and that I use them while biking and he gave me a box to try for free, thank you!

I got this box of 12 protein bars which is now on sale but still €1.80 per par!? Cycling is an expensive sport as it is but this is just ridiculous...
I have to admit, they are very tasty so I will enjoy all twelve of them but when I run out, I will just have a good meal with two eggs for the same amount of proteins. 😆

Well... That's the cycling talk for this week, I'll wait for the post to launch tomorrow and I'll share one last pretty picture taken on my ride yesterday on one of the many dykes.

Thanks for stopping by and if you're a cyclist yourself, please share your adventures as well!