On Wednesday morning we got a sitter for Tan and Bren and Angie and I took Dallin on a bike ride on the Rec Path from Keystone to Frisco and back.

Dallin has been watching the Tour de France for a couple years now, and got a Radio Shack jersey for a gift last year. He’s been wearing it and riding his 24″ 18-speed mountain bike about 5 – 10 miles a day pretty consistently. We got him a helmet and gloves to match his jersey, and he’s been wearing Angie’s old Shimano bike shoes w/o the SPD cleats on. We get him little incentives like that to help motivate and reward his progress.

I had messed with the map and determined that a full lap of the lake via the Rec Path was between 20 and 26 miles, a perfect marathon training run. I figured that going to Frisco and back would be a good 20-ish mile ride for us, and that if we paced ourselves we could get Dallin around and back. The elevation profile looks a lot worse than it really was simply because a lot of miles with little vertical are being compressed into a small image.

We took off a little after 8 AM, and stopped a few times here and there to make sure Dallin was properly hydrated and sugared up. We had a couple bananas, some of the squeeze fruit purees and some Clif Bloks. We set a decently slow pace of averaging a little over 6 mph, including all the stops, and pulled into Frisco at the stop light after about 1:49 for about 12.2 miles. We stopped at Abbey’s to share a breakfast croissant and ice cream cones for a good half hour rest.

We then took off back the way we came, and managed to average almost 8 mph, finishing our trip back in 1:30. At the condo the sitter had Tan and Bren in the pool and we all piled into the hot tub together. It was awesome to get Dallin out for his first big bike ride of 24.2 miles in a little over 3 hours of travel time. Felt really good to be passing on the torch so to speak. Angie was also stoked and wants to do it again.

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