Little Girl on a Fast Bike in a Big City

"People always want to know what I'm on. What am I on? I'm on my bike busting my ass six hours a day" -Lance Armstrong


Milwaukee is not, sad to say, the best place in the world to learn how to bike. It may actually, be the worst. The roads aren't well kept, and the drivers are rude. Only select portions of the bike trails are paved, and oftentimes when you wake up in the morning you never know if it's going to rain or snow or be sunny and 80.

Over the past week, however, I've made it my mission to find the best way possible to tour this city on a bike. The first couple of times I ended up just doing multiple loops around places that I had run. I felt like some sort of ghost haunting the parkways where I used to do tempo runs and long runs and the roads behind our track where I used to  do intervals.

After that I started getting more adventurous. One day I road down to Miller Park and did some fast laps around the Brewer's parking lot before finding  a bike trail to head back down. Another day I followed a parkway that I thought was only 4 miles long (I used to do speed workouts on it) and I ended up making it almost 20 miles north.

I've also accidentally ended up biking on crazy busy streets or in really bad neighborhoods by accident. Because Milwaukee goes for miles and doesn't dead-end into country roads like my hometown does it's hard to know where a street will take you. The other problem about biking in Milwaukee is that the streets are often both bumpy and littered. There have been times where I'm so scared that I'm going to pop one of my tires because of the glass in the road or the huge potholes.

Oh, and one last thing about Milwaukee: The driver's do not care about you. It's not like they switch lanes to give me an extra couple of feet or drive slowly when passing me. Usually they blow by me, flipping me off as they go. Last year, when I started biking, I did a whole post about how afraid I was to fall off a bike. Now, I'm more afraid of falling off due to getting run off the road.

By Thursday I was finally getting the picture: I had to get out of the city. I took some back roads all the way to a different town and finally was able to get some speed. I ended up in the city of Waukesha and toured around there a bit.

Saturday, I went on my first group ride ever. The two guys that I went with have been biking for longer than I've been alive. One of them, 70 years old, completely destroyed me the entire ride. He said that with his team (yeah, he has a sponsorship at 70) averages 22-26mph  for their entire rides. Safe to say I got my biking-short butt kicked my someone 50 years older than I am.

But that said, what they taught me about biking was invaluable. It's also becoming clear to me, that the adventurous side of me actually likes biking better than running. In running I can't get 25 miles away at the drop of a hat. I can't go exploring in other towns or country roads. And seriously "I ran 7 miles" doesn't sound half as cool as "I biked 50 miles"