More tiring than expected...

Teaching my daughter to ride has gotten me back into biking a bit (or at least got me interested; it is a bit early to say that I am or am not "into it", I guess).

My front derailleur cable was recently almost pulled out of the shifter when it fell off of most of the hangar it was on, and was caught completely by that cable.  Luckily, that was the extent of the damage.  And thank goodness it was caught, because it was hanging above my car, so the car would have been damaged as well.

Anyway, after getting a bicycle repair book, which was actually an impulse purchase when getting my daughter a new helmet, I managed to mostly fix it.  It's a three-crank device, and now goes from inner to middle to outer, but only back down from outer to inner.  One of these days I'll get the two adjustment screws right for that, but it's workable, so I'm leaving it for now.  It's easy to work around.

Having that fixed, I decided to take my first (semi)serious ride today, and figured I'd just loop around several of the local roads.  I must admit that I hadn't appreciated just how hilly the roads are; I got an app which tracks, among other things, altitude, and the altitude graph is a lot rougher than I'd've guessed.

I ended up going 3.57 miles over 15:36, which is roughly half what I'd planned, although at a higher average speed (that's 13.7mph; I'd've guessed I'd be closer to half that).  I didn't expect to be pretty near wiped out at that point, but I was.  And I'd've definitely guessed that that was more than 150 calories.

Be that as it may, I'm glad I finally got out, and I'm looking forward to getting a heart-rate monitor and speed/pedaling monitor for more accurate data (I looked into getting something like a Garmin bike computer, but I think these, along with Cyclemeter (or maybe Wahoo's own app) will do a better job, cheaper.  And hopefully give me fewer batteries to keep track of.

Most importantly, hopefully I can keep with this.  The Quick4 is a pretty decent exercise (and short enough that I've been able to keep up with it almost six days a week over the last several months), but does about nothing for aerobic fitness.