Hey everyone, I'm back with another cycling post to hopefully entertain you all with some pretty pictures I made on my last training, it's now been around 6 weeks I think I've bought my mountain bike and I have to admit I didn't think I would like it this much that fast, my first plan was to combine inline-skating with cycling, and when the weather allows it to skate on Thursday which is my regular day off of work, and make a nice ride on Sundays...

I'm making this post with Ecency's new text editor to test it out, I'm usually using Peakd's editor but so far, I like Ecency as well! The only thing I am missing so far is the auto save to draft function or maybe this is just not visible I don't know.

The reality is I haven't use my skates for the last three weeks because it's just easier to be on a bike and I'm training the same muscles with added benefits like I can just STOP when it's needed like really quick, an incident I had last year with a car not seeing me and just crossing the cycling path which was parallel to the main road so I needed to make a emergency turn to the gas station the car was heading for, I was going around 25 km/h on my skates at the time and I can brake using different techniques but stopping at high speeds when something unexpected suddenly happens mostly results in falling so it's better to make a turn and hope for the best - I was able to stay up right on my skates but it scared the crap out of me!

Planning my trip

So when planning my trip I usually look at the wind direction and let that decide which way I am going, 90% of the time the wind is coming from the South West in my country - well.. that's my impression but let's see if that's true just by experiencing.

So far, this was my second trip I could plan with the wind blowing from another direction which is nice for a change! Today the wind direction was North West, I'm using Google Maps to roughly plan where I'm going, the 'measure distance' tool is awesome!

Riding my mountain bike brings me a lot further from home than I would usually go on my regular city bike, so I'm exploring a lot of new paths and roads and get lost quite often 😅

This is the dyke just before crossing the highway, the weather was great and because it was still early in the morning the temperature was still nice as well, 16 degrees when I left my home.

On this trip, I knew where I was going until I crossed the highway on the top of the map, from there I made a small piece of paper to look at which way I needed to take, something like 'after crossing the highway, take the first right, at the end turn right and then cross the b-road N320... and that's where things went sideways because cyclist aren't allowed there 🤔

Exploring is fun though so I made a U-turn and got on a cycling path and I roughly knew which way I needed to go although I now was cycling on a road I had never been to before, I knew I had to stay somewhat close to the highway because I needed to cross it again after a couple of kilometers, it was now just a matter of finding the next crossing...

It didn't take long before I could see something familiar in the distance, the crossing underneath the highway I recognized from driving the car there, great - I'm back on track again!

Checking my small piece of paper again, 'after crossing the highway, go immediately to the left, follow the road called 'sonsbrug' and then head to the right to the road called 'acquoyse meer'...

Yeah, that was the plan but it didn't go like that because for some reason I have never seen the road I needed to go right at, I probably just ride straight past it so I ended up in the middle of the village called Beesd I planned to only cycle past but now I've ended up between some houses and a playground 😁

O well, as long as you roughly know the way you are going or at least the direction... I could see the highway again, now on the other side so I knew I had to be cycling away from it, with some stops to take pictures for my post and drink some water in between I got to the next village I wasn't supposed to go to today, Rhenoy but actually it was very pretty here, I like mistakes like this!

Because of my detour, my trip now was a couple of kilometers more, but I need to remember this so I can get back here again, I liked it!

I'm using Strava to track my route, distance and performance and I pause it when I stop to take pictures, Fitbit is also tracking my training but it doesn't pause when I stop so it's displaying a lower average speed, it was a nice training with an average heart rate of 142.

When I got home I had some more water and needed to cool down before showering, a good moment to clean my chain with a piece of cloth and re-apply the dry way again since the last time was 150 km ago, crazy how much distance I already did!

For the summer I'm using wax since I'm riding on clean roads in dry conditions mostly and even when I find some off-road parts, the chain remains cleaner with wax compared to oil, I still need to learn how often I need to re-apply the way but a 150 km interval was a nice start to begin with, the white wax looks funny when it is just applied, it needs to dry a while and also it takes some time to get to the inner parts of the chain where it's needed.

When I got back, clean and showered the white liquid was gone and I could clean off the excess wax with a clean cloth to make sure it's not flying everywhere and mess up my bike on my next ride.

That's it for today everyone, thanks for stopping by! I hope you like the pictures, every now and then I try to make a post like this, it's not very practical to make multiple stops on training rides every single time though 😆

As for as the new and improved ecency editor goes, it has improved a lot! no need to use any codes for markdown to space out pieces of text and it even allows to make your pictures smaller, I like it!