Saturday's ride to the Cape was the hardest, fastest, longest ride I've done. It was also 94 degrees and humid. We biked more than 140 miles that day, with very few rest stops. I'm incredibly proud of myself for completing it, but it was really hard, and much of the riding was not particularly pretty or fun. It was also just on the edge of what I'm actually capable of doing. Part of my motive in training for a tri is to start pushing myself to that edge, to learn where it is and what it feels like to reach it. It turns out that the reality of reaching that point is pretty unpleasant.

On the other hand, it felt really good to push that hard, and to succeed. Even if I couldn't eat dinner because I was so overheated and exhausted, and even if I did break down in tears on the way home (and nearly cried once or twice in the middle of the ride, too). I also improved my riding again. I was pushing like hell to keep up with our riding companions Dena and Susan, and that meant that I had to push on the downhill stretches since no matter how hard I pushed on the ups, I wasn't going to keep up with them there. Usually I tend to ride my brakes and coast far more than I should. I get nervous when I get up any decent speed on a downhill. No matter how many times someone has told me to trust my bike, I can't do it unless I'm really familiar with the hill. But on Saturday, I just let myself do it, without holding back. It felt fantastic when I got it right - when I kept up my pedaling until I couldn't pedal any more, and then let gravity do its work, trusting that KP was gripping the road and wasn't going to fall over.

What really felt great, though, was riding to work this morning and doing the same thing. My commute is really hilly. The uphills slow me down a lot, and I usually can't make up for it on the flats and downhills, because I don't push enough. Today I did. Instead of slowing down before the steepest part of the downhills, I kept pedaling. I felt great, and I cut five minutes off my commute time!

I also managed to put into practice something Dusty recently told me about cornering. He said that if I can't get myself to keep pedaling, I should at least make sure that the inside pedal is up, so it doesn't scrape against the ground (not that that is going to happen at my typical slow cornering speed). Today every time I cornered I'd correct my pedals, and more often than not, realize that continuing to pedal truly did feel more stable than braking.

I've been riding now for three or four years, and most of my progress has been slow and steady. But every once in awhile I make a leap forward. Last year when I stopped riding for the winter I still mostly hated hill climbing, and avoided it when possible. When I started riding again this spring, something had changed and I started to enjoy the hills. After the ALC, I figured out how to use my gears more efficiently (that would have been so useful to have figured out before the ALC, sadly). After the Cape in a Day ride, I put together the things people have been saying to me about how to let myself go downhill faster, how to trust my bike and use its strengths. I need to get a new battery for my bike computer, because I bet that I just got noticeably faster once again.