More biking with new bike

I went for a great bike ride last night. Instead of going my "usual" route (can it be a "usual" if I've only done it twice a week for like three weeks?) I sucked it up and went over a bridge to ride 2 loops around Hains Point, aka East Potomac Park.  This is a great loop to practice pedaling consistently instead of frequent braking and coasting to share my usual trail with runners and other bikers.

(And, new this year with the road bike, occasionally accelerating to pass other bikers!)

There's a three mile loop or it's possible to do a five mile loop, but two of the three-milers trying to pedal pedal (1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 ... counting to myself at some reasonable rate, trying not to say it out loud while riding) was enough for me last night.  I look forward to feeling like the ride over is a nice warmup instead of feeling like it could be an actual part of a workout.

No, I'm not going to share the elevation profile of this route. It's so flat that it's almost downhill both ways. Seriously.

The absolute best part last night was letting two bikers who were around my skill level pass me and then pushing it for a while to catch up with them, and reaching 19mph in the process, which is quite fast for me if there is no coasting down-hill involved.  Actually, that's a little fast for me going downhill too, since I'm sort of a chicken.  One of them was a super athletic looking girl on a hybrid-ish upright bike. I wish I could've gone as fast as she was going when I was on my other bike last year.

I practiced getting my water bottle out without swerving violently as well. It's getting better, but certainly doesn't feel comfortable. Yay summer and exercise!

The vocab word from today at work is Mahalanobis. I should get back to Mahalanobising (not actually a valid way to use this word in a sentence)