Ride for Heart 50K Report

The year continues with the "firsts" and this one was my first ever Ride for Heart "group bike ride" benefiting the Heart and Stroke Foundation, where there were somewhere around 13,000 people in the "group", heh. I'm not going to call it a race because there was no competitive aspect to it, no chip, no rankings, aside from people like me who were pretty competitive with themselves for using this opportunity as a training tool or for going after personal bests. Of course, I had nothing to compare it with, other than my last week's 55km ride in my countryside, so I took it pretty chill for about 10 min, chatting with my friend Carol and enjoying the Toronto sightings outside the regular traffic jams. But then hubbs, who was participating as well with my old hybrid bike that he adopted after I got Neo, took off and I had the challenge of catching with him, if only I could. I tried to stay in the triathlon mindset and not go all out on the bike, but I also did not stop at all until 5-10km before the end when I finally decided to take some pictures. Thankfully the rain held off and by then a gorgeous blue sky was clearing before my eyes and I couldn't resist to capture the Gardiner Expressway filled with cyclists instead of cars.

The ride itself was only 45-46km instead of the advertised 50km, but because we parked our car along the Lakeshore, we managed to do 50km in total with the back and forth to Exhibition Place where the start/end was. I finished in 1h50 which was my fastest ride thus far outdoors, even though I took it easy for about 20min. Pretty happy with the time and with the fact that hubbs and I managed to raise a bit of money for the Heart and Stroke foundation, thanks to our generous supporter friends and colleagues.

I can't wait to do it again for the Toronto Triathlon Festival, 48 days from now! I was surprised at how much I enjoyed going downhill. For once I had no fear whatsoever even though I was doing over 50km/h. I think I am becoming an adrenaline junkie. On your leeeeeft!

Here's the Runkeeper activity, which I took from hubbs and modified to match my own times because mine vanished after resuming from a pause on the parking lot once I got back to my car. Only the last 20 seconds were found, which almost put me into a temper tantrum, but I was way too tired to even bother.