The last time I posted I talked about being grateful for the pain because I was able to ride my bike again.  Well, I’m still grateful, but now it’s not just pain, it’s suffering on the bike.  And I have Strava to prove it.

Two weekends ago I decided it was time to do some serious climbing again.  I headed up Mt. Baldy road, hoping to make it to the Mt. Baldy Village – 2930 feet of climbing in about 9 miles.  And, to make things interesting, Jonathan and I decided to do it in the heat of the day to train for the heat we’d face in France.  Yes, mom, I am an idiot.

The road to Mt. Baldy Village is an unforgiving slog, with sustained grades between 8 and 11%.  And it was between 85 and 90 degrees out.  But I made it.  And celebrated with a beer while waiting for Jonathan who climbed to the summit.

Last weekend the weather was horrible and I stuck close to home, but still managed to climb about 2200 feet in about 45 miles.  It was cool out and other than my stomach muscles crying out (still not recovered from surgery) it wasn’t bad.  I was mostly tired, as it was the longest ride I’d done yet – right around 3 hours.

So yesterday I decided I had to go farther and higher, which took me back to Mt. Baldy road, but first I had to get there by way of Glendora Mountain Road and Glendora Ridge Road – 21.8 miles of climbing.  I wasn’t sure how my body would feel, as I had a colonoscopy on Friday, but I figured there was only one way to find out.   My goal was to make it to Mt. Baldy Village where I would wait for Jonathan, but I was feeling good and decided to go further up the mountain, about 3 miles.

After meeting back up with Jonathan, who summited Baldy, we decided to go back down Glendora Mountain Road and Glendora Ridge Road rather than just descend straight down.  This involved more miles, and more climbing.  And it was hot again.  But we did it, and when I uploaded my data to Strava I had a suffer score of 359 – something Jonathan did not know was possible!  It turns out my heart rate was between 159 and 176 for 3 hours.  Total time on the bike was 4 hours, 50 minutes, and we covered 53 miles.

This morning we decided to do a little more climbing close to home as we are having record breaking heat here in Southern California.  So we did a “usual” loop for us, down the coast and up a few local hills.  We climbed about 1600 feet over 44 miles and my suffer score was a mere 136.

I still have a ways to go to get back to where I was before surgery, but now I can at least ride long enough and hard enough to suffer!  And considering I couldn’t walk up the stairs without crying 6 and a half weeks ago, I can’t complain about my progress.