I rode my bike this morning before work.

Just to ride. No destination. No point a to point b. No group plans were involved either.

I just put on my cycling clothes and hit the Keystone for an hour. I did some sprints. It felt awesome. Well the first few did. The last few, not so much. I haven't really done a solo ride for quite some time. It was very refreshing.

I'm also going to try something different, or rather, retry something old. I've been using Shimano touring shoes for about a year or so now and I love that you can walk around semi-normally and not sound like a lady in high heels. They are not the stiffest shoes and I got them a size too big so I could wear them in the winter with a few wool socks for warmth.

I went old school this morning. I dug out my old 2002(3?) Sidi Genius shoes. These things fit like a glove and are stiff enough for racing. They are kinda snug on my feet since I bought them before I knew what I was doing in cycling, but snug is not such a bad thing when you're sprinting. The other noticeable difference between these and my Shimanos is the cleat is a bit more forward, even though it's as far back as it can go on the shoe. On my Shimano's I have the cleat pretty far back - like almost a centimeter behind my forefoot. I did this as a result of reading various places that doing so might alleviate toe numbness. I've always had toe numbness problems, so I gave it a try. It felt like a completely different, more powerful pedaling position, so I stuck with it.

Well, after this morning's jaunt with cleats more forward, I'm switching back to that position. I don't know if I was using very different muscles because of the change, but I felt snappier with my pedaling. It's hard to explain, but I'll give this a try for a while and if it doesn't work out, I'll switch shoes again.

So what the heck am I even blabbering about? Uh, I don't know. I guess sometimes you gotta go backwards to go forwards.

Edit: After watching the rides of these guys, I have new motivation to get out there. Watch all the short videos along the right hand side to get some amazing views of our country. And you may recognize from this vid a couple guys who ride/blog locally.