A person can ride a bicycle throughout the year in North Texas. I used to do so. For about the past decade, however, I’ve put the bike away in mid-November (after the Denton Turkey Roll) and stayed off it until late March or early April. During the winter, I focus on running. It staves off burnout. By the time March rolls around, I’m ready to ride again.

The problem with this schedule is that the first few bike rallies are difficult. Aerobically, I’m in great shape (from running), but I have no cycling legs. This makes every hill a struggle. You would not want to experience the burning that I felt yesterday in Aledo (during my 397th rally). But burning is a sign that new muscle is being created. This muscle will help me do longer, faster rallies in late summer and autumn. I view the early rallies the way I view marathon training: as preparation for what’s to come.

The average high temperature at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport during March was 73.4° Fahrenheit. That’s the highest I’ve seen since moving to DFW in August 1989. What’s funny is that January was the coldest month I’ve seen (50.3°). So much for global warming. The warm weather the past month, combined with lots of rain, has made everything green. We usually don’t get this much verdure until May. I even saw a field of bluebonnets the other day. It’s rare to see these before mid-April.

It rained hard in North Texas Thursday and Friday. Luckily for me and for the other cyclists, the rain stopped Friday evening. When I awoke yesterday morning at 6:05, the ground was dry and the sky clear. It turned out to be a gorgeous day. Okay, it was chilly at the start by Texas standards, but within 30 minutes of the start I felt fine. About the only thing I would have changed is the wind. It made about half the rally difficult. The other half was easy. Parts of the course were treacherous as a result of the previous day’s storms. We had to ride through water a few times, and there were branches on the road in various places.

I had three new pieces of technology to test. The first is my car, a 2007 Honda Accord. It ran well. It was nice to have good air conditioning on the way home, and what can I say about the CD player? Swing Out Sister never sounded so good. The second is my Microsoft Zune portable music player. It’s loaded with 7,134 songs from my CD collection. I listened to several dozen of them during the rally. The sound quality of the Zune is excellent. The best song of the day was “Take a Look Around,” by The James Gang. There were, of course, many other good songs. They wouldn’t be in my collection if they weren’t good. The third is my Polar bike computer, which has both a heart-rate monitor and a calorie counter. It worked perfectly, despite my fear that I would accidentally erase data. My maximum heart rate for the day (over 51.3 miles) was 151 beats per minute. My average heart rate (for nearly three and a half hours of riding) was 118. I burned 1,888 calories during the rally. That’s an average of 545.6 per hour and 36.8 per mile. For purposes of comparison, I burn 90 calories per mile while running. That shows you how much more difficult running is than bicycling. I love both sports, but running is harder. You see a lot of people go from running to bicycling. You don’t see many go from bicycling to running, as I did in 1996.

All in all, it was a great day. I saw friends, got a workout, built muscle, listened to music, tried out my new technology, enjoyed the beautiful Texas countryside, and, most importantly, had fun. If you’re not already a bicyclist, you might want to give it a try. What do you have to lose, except a few pounds?