beside the Canadian Embassy
Friday, March 30, 2007
The weather this week in Washington has been beautiful as Spring arrives triumphant. In the four years I have been here I have never tired of this season, so unlike the muddy, rainy grey Spring we have in Ontario. The air is clean and fresh and the wind blows the promise of a new beginning. I often go for a bicycle ride at lunchtime and today I brought my camera to record cherry blossom time, when the tourists come out of hibernation and invade the District of Columbia in full force.
Leaving affairs and diplomacy behind, I rode out of the Embassy at 12:30 and headed along Constitution Avenue, turning left on 15th Street and passing the Washington Monument. The flags at the Monument are a good indicator of the wind strength I could expect and it looked much better than when I had ridden the same stretch on Tuesday and Wednesday.
Putting away the camera and turning away from the Tidal Basin, I rode into East Potomac Park to begin my workout. I passed a sign encouraging people to park there for the Cherry Blossom Festival since there were 1300 more trees to look at. There were no blossoms to be seen there on my Wednesday ride and today, two days later, the trees were simply glorious.
I felt pretty good, and was able to reach 53 km/h (33 mph) on one of my pulls on my old but honourable steel Bianchi, which limits me to a maximum gearing of 52x13. I went slower than I usually do on the east side of the course to recover so my average speed was a bit lower than usual but the workouts were excellent, bringing my heart rate pretty high up. Of course, my average would have been better if it were not for all the cars and buses that kept getting in the way. The Cherry Blossom Festival will run for two weekends, the first being tomorrow, and the crowds will be immense so I am not sure if I can get many more rides in at Hains Point in the coming days. But this week was great!