Keefer Madness

Importance of Switching Up Your Route

// June 7th, 2009 // Cycling, Personal Crap

Everything fell into place for me to get a ride out on the road this morning — weather was dry and pretty cool. We didn’t have any appointments or things that had to be done first thing and I was really motivated to just jump out onto the roads here in the Raleigh-Durham area. Only thing is, I didn’t want to do my usual solo effort “courses.”

Instead, with Sunday having less traffic on a lot of the roads, I biked over to the Research Triangle Park (RTP) area, which is a complete ghost town on the weekends, seeing as it is made up of 95% businesses/companies of the Monday-Friday 9-5 type schedule. So I had plenty of open roads to tear up the miles. Then, I headed to mile old stomping grounds — the area in Southwest Durham where I basically lived for the last part of high school and after college. Things have changed and grown quite a bit!

While I wasn’t out there doing a century, or just blowing myself up, my 40.5 trek around roads I hadn’t visited in quite awhile was a nice change — both to revisit old memories, but to also feel good about riding. A lot of those roads, I hadn’t been on in over three years, never on my Tarmac Expert (obviously) and at quite a bit slower speeds.

So while this may come as a big “duh” remember to switch up those old routes. Besides breaking up the monotony of riding the same routes often, it also can be a great motivator and a reminder of how far you’ve come. For me, it was nice to fly up some of the hills that in past years really kicked my butt.

RTP/Southern Durham Solo