Bike Riding for AIDS Life Cycle

A new thing in my life that’s going on? I signed up to ride the AIDS Life Cycle ride from San Francisco to Los Angeles this June! Long story short, I am thinking I’ll be good to go by June to ride 525 miles.

Long story long: I was finally talked into doing this ride after multiple years of coercion by PwC colleagues. I was happy to donate to others, but the idea of all that cycling, PLUS I didn’t even have a bike? Please. But in a year full of changes like moving to DTLA and also realizing I needed to be better at getting out there and meeting people, this seemed like not a bad idea. Plus, PwC does a pretty good job of supporting those who are on the team.

This past October, I signed up officially. I bought a bike from Just Ride LA (a bike shop a few blocks away from me). I slowly but surely learned how to be comfortable riding a bike with gears and how to ride in city streets with traffic. A huge plus for me was that I’ve been riding my Peloton for 3 years now, and that is a huge benefit in being able to handle riding hills as I’ve got a lot of leg strength. Recently, I’ve started doing formal training rides with FUBAR, which has been a fun and very challenging addition to my life. I had been just riding with Carlos, a PwC colleague and also an ALC newbie this year and also a DTLA resident, and we’d been making pretty great progress on our own to get to longer rides. But this group situation has been a good way to get comfortable with riding with a group and just challenging our skills in real-life hills.

Yesterday was the second FUBAR ride I did, after a ride two weeks ago that took us to Griffith Observatory. The ride yesterday wound through the Hollywood Hills, Mulholland Drive, and the Hollywood Reservoir, before returning to the Frogtown start. It was EXHAUSTING. For Carlos and I, we had started at the wrong point and had to bike 8 or so miles to meet up at the correct spot, so we ended up riding about 38.5 miles in total. ME! Riding that far! Inconceivable.

I’ve been getting very close to my $3500 fundraising goal – if you’re reading this and would like to donate, you can at the following link:

https://giving.aidslifecycle.org/participant/41097

Here are pics from yesterday’s ride – I’ve got more on my IG and I’ll probably get some of those over here eventually, now that I’m on board with working in the site again.