I can still remember that first 35km ride. With only two years of biking experience under my belt (I learned to ride a bike at the ripe old age of 28), I had decided to throw my wheels in the ring for the Friends for Life Bike Rally (benefit for PWA – People With AIDS Foundation) – a 630 km ride from Toronto to Montreal. Sounds intimidating, sounds like a lofty goal. Well, the ride itself is not the hard part.
The Bike Rally offered a combination of things three things I desire in my fitness: a goal to work towards, a community to share the goal and helping a great cause.
Every week, the Bike Rally sets up training rides to help you train towards your goal of riding 630 kilometres over six days. The first training ride was 35 km. A lot of friends saw that as an insurmountable distance. It seemed long to this novice.
Keep in mind I ride a hybrid bike. Tires are not super skinny, there’s a fork with suspension, all things that could potentially slow you down. In fact, I showed up to the first ride with a Canadian Tire Supercycle with shoddy brakes and two working gears: difficult and more difficult. Not recommended. I had a fancy new bike computer which registered me in at a mean 17kph. Eep – biking to Montreal was going to take a long time.
The first training ride starts from Finch subway, criss-crossed through backstreets, before heading down and up John Street. For anyone who’s climbed John Street heading east towards Bayview in a car, you’ll be familiar with how steep it is. Try that on a bike.
Most people arrived to the first training ride, which always starts off with a warm-up session, in their bike shorts and light windbreakers. There was still snow on the ground on April 5. This urban woman came in jeans and winter boots. Padded shorts? I don’t think so. As the kilometres increased my body caved in to the need for padded shorts and a better bike seat that provided, ahem, relief.
That first training ride nearly broke me. With exhausted, sweaty, agonizing quads, I slowly set my feet back down at Finch Station. I’ll never forget that sense of euphoria, of accomplishment, that I had become some kind of mountain woman, that something about the way I saw being active had changed forever, in a positive way.
I promptly put my bike on the subway, headed home, ordered a medium pizza, inhaled all eight slices and fell into the best coma-like-sleep of my life for several hours.
Over the course of five months my bike improved (I bought a hybrid), my speed increased (20 – 25kph) and biking 35 km was a light ride on the way to work. I started taking spinning classes at the gym to improve my ability to stand for hill climbs. I kept practicing yoga to keep my limbs flexible. Towards the end of that time, I biked to Guelph for a weekend (110 km each way) just for fun as well as some training.
The consistency and slow build-up of distance in those rides (each week increases by 10 km), made my goal attainable. The group rides were something I looked forward to every week. It almost felt like I wasn’t working out – well – until we started longer hill climbs up in York Region.
Get out there and enjoy training in the gorgeous outdoors of Ontario’s countryside. Feel good about your contribution to your body, and an amazing organization! Along the way you will meet an amazing community of participants who have similar goals to be bike-fit and raise money for PWA!
The ride took our group of 300 a total of six days to complete, riding and average of 100 km most days. Since that ride, I have piled thousands of kilometres on my bike every summer. My body stays fit, yet it almost doesn’t feel like a workout. Since that ride back in 2007, I have continued to find fantastic folks to ride with as well. Mixing the social elements of summer with fitness. How can you go wrong here? Get your bike tuned up, and head out on the road this weekend!
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