Wednesday, March 28, 2012

First Ride

We had a beautiful day on the bike. Brown Betty is taking in the scenery while she takes a sip of water (I'll revisit this later). Riding was the easiest part of our day, planning the ride, on the other hand, takes an act of Congress, especially for full-time working Bettys who have kids!

It's not like on a whim we say let's go ride and walk out of the door, jump on our bike and ride until our heart's content. First and foremost, we start by negotiating schedules. I can ride when the boys are at lacrosse practice between the hours of 4-5:45 p.m., Black Betty has a window of 3:30-5:15 p.m. between drop-offs of dance and baseball pick-up and Brown Betty has pick-up of her youngest at 5:45 p.m. which she cannot be one second late for or she will be charged! Then there are our work obligations. Let's just say Brown and I have jobs that can easily be put to the back burner while Black Betty has more pressing obligations, which in this case kept Black Betty from riding with us.

Family. check. Work. check. Bike. Oh yeah, that little detail! Is the bike even rideable since it hasn't been touched in months? Tires need to be pumped, cobwebs dusted off, chain lubed, brakes tested. Here's where the helpful husbands come into play. All the Bettys are lucky in that we have enablers as spouses. My husband put the bike rack on the car and gave my bike the once over and pumped my tires (I can pump my tires just fine but have a nasty habit of blowing the tire, more on that later). Brown's husband all but rode with us as he is the most attentive in the bike department. He gave it an A #1 tune-up and put it in the mini-van so all Brown had to do was hop in the car in the morning. So lucky!

Bike. check. We rode from a small town outside of Winston-Salem, NC called Lewisville. It's really a bike rider’s dream. The scenery is beautiful and the rolling hills make for a challenging outing. We got our 25 miles in and made it back for everyone's pick-up. Negotiating all the moving parts are totally worth it. As Brown texted me later in the evening, "I am so glad we did that!" Me too.

Blonde Betty

Sunday, March 25, 2012

The Season Begins

We are planning our first ride of the season tomorrow after work. Yippee! There will be 3 Bettys in attendance; Black, Brown and Blonde. We're not very fast but we're hoping to change all of that with more riding and better training. All of our rides in the past few years have had side-busting stories so we thought we might record them here for others to enjoy. Sometimes we ride with a husband, ours or someone else's, a co-worker, who'll we'll call Bob, and other random Bettys who want to stay in shape and burn some calories. We have lofty goals for this season by doing at least two 100 mile rides. Hope you will follow us on our journey.
Blonde Betty