There's more than the bike...

Although you'd not know it from this blog. The Ponytail Express will hopefully contain my obsessive cycling ramblings, thereby freeing this blog up to be about things other than cycling.

Like maybe dogs.

Or hiking. Or.... other stuff.

I'm craving chocolate right now. How's that for exciting news about my life?

Team in Training's Tahoe Ride

Parting Shot
Originally uploaded by jenworth.

more soon, but here's the quick version:

It was a great ride! The scenery was, of course, beautiful. Around the lake is 72 miles, so to make it a full Century we did an out-and-back to Truckee (this was the least scenic part of the ride). Otherwise, the crystal clear Lake was on our right for the whole ride.

It was a chilly day and at some points it was quite windy. What was supposed to be a fun, fast descent from Spooner Summit was a shocker: the wind felt like it was blowing us back up the hill and sideways.

Throughout the ride, there were people on the sides of the road cheering for us, offering us peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and holding signs of encouragement.


There were TNT participants from across the country, so to distinguish individual groups from one another in a sea of identical TNT jerseys we mounted little items on our helmets. Wisconsin had cheese wedges, Florida had dolphins, North Carolina had Krispy Kreme logos, etc. Within the SF Bay Area group, each team chose different tokens. My team had small goats mounted on our helmets. Our group was made up of strong hill climbers, hence “billy goats” (and also for our Mentor named William Wang, nicknamed “Billy Goat”), but apparently this confused people from around the country. They couldn’t figure out the correlation between goats and San Francisco.

for those interested, my ride stats:

start time: 6:15am
finish: 1:45pm
total time on bike: 6:20
average speed: 15.0mph