Cycling

Yup. You read that correctly. I am starting a "cycling" section on explor8ion. We'll see where this goes over the next few years but since I turned 50 last year I have gotten into cycling, big time. After climbing over 1000 peaks I always knew that the day would come when my focus would shift to something else. We're only given one life and there's so much to enjoy when you're lucky like us Canadians. There's hiking, backpacking, skiing, snowshoeing, golfing, canoeing, photography, traveling, SUPing and now I have cycling. Work is seriously getting in the way of fun. 😁

I've been doing bike approaches for many years to access hard-to-reach areas of my beloved Rockies west of Calgary. Over the years as we started doing rougher and rougher routes on the two-wheel steeds I realized that there was another sport growing very quickly - bike packing. After researching it some more, I bought my first official bike packing bike last spring. It was a 2nd hand Salsa Cutthroat and I immediately fell in love with it. I've taken it on several long mountain approaches already and am looking forward to my first true bike packing adventure, hopefully sometime this year. 

I wasn't done spending money just yet. 💰 For my 50th birthday I bought a 2nd bike - a beautiful, brand new 2023 Cervélo Soloist that was on deep discount from The Bike Shop in Calgary. If I thought the Cutthroat was fun to ride, the Soloist is like a racehorse! "Cervélo" is an interesting combination of words. "Cervéllo" is the word for "brain" in Italian and "velo" is the French word for "bike". So it's a "Brain Bike", designed in Montreal no less. I call it my Italian Stallion and every time I mount this thing I want to go FASTER. Dang this thing is nimble and quick. I love it. Needless to say I am delighted to have found a hobby that I love this much, this late in life. I'm as excited to ride now as I used to be to go scrambling. 🚴

Needless to say I am unabashedly hooked on cycling. My UL backpacking techniques are suited perfectly for bike packing and I will get there - it's not a cheap sport to get into and I'm still working on building up my kit. In the meantime the gravel bike is perfect for early and late season rides on dirty pathways and highways. I put over 5,000 kms of distance and 65,000 vertical meters on the Cervélo on Rouvy (paired with a Wahoo Kickr Core 2) in my basement last winter so I'm ready for whatever this season brings.

Like I wrote earlier, I am not 100% sure where all this is going, but I do know that it will mean less focus on mountain activities as I continue to explore this awesome sport over the coming years. I used to be into running but my knees no longer allowed me to both run and hike / scramble / climb / ski so I had to stop. Cycling is my new running. It's highly aerobic, it hurts in all the good ways and it's just plain FUN. Since I am discovering bike routes the same way I discovered mountain routes, and since I am having fun recording them, I might as well share them with you. 

I will group them as follows for now and will likely evolve things as I accumulate new rides. Many of these rides are derived from excellent cycling resources including RideWithGPS and others and will be referenced accordingly. Many of these are approaches to larger mountain adventures of the past decade or so.

• YYC Rides - City of Calgary rides, mostly paved within and immediately around the city.

• Gravel - AB Rockies - Rides in the Rockies west of Calgary (including BC and AB).

• Roads West of YYC - Road rides west and south of Calgary.

• Roads East of YYC - Road rides east and north of Calgary.

• Gravel West of YYC - Gravel rides (mostly unpaved) west and south of Calgary.

• Gravel East of YYC - Gravel rides (mostly unpaved) east and north of Calgary.

• Okanagan Road Rides - Road rides in the Okanagan (BC).

• Okanagan Gravel Rides - Gravel rides in the Okanagan (BC).