Ditchbanks FTW.

The cycling trick in our linear north-south Rio Grande Valley is to match the Rail Runner with the wind.

The best rides (where by “best” I mean “my favorite”) are in the valley, along the river and the ditchbanks that make up our ribbons of green.

A modest tailwind, graph courtesy the excellent David at intervals.icu

A wind out of the north calls for a train ride north, and a ride back down the valley. A wind out of the south, as was forecast today, calls for a southbound train, in this case to Belen, and a ride back up the valley into town with the wind at one’s back.

The southbound train is early, so it’s mostly a warm season thing – early out the door to beat the heat – but the northbound train is a great bike riding tool year round.

This morning we caught the 6:30 southbound to Belen, arguably the southernmost peri-urban outpost of the greater Albuquerque metro area. Our route included a stretch on the east side of the river we’d never ridden because the key road, NM47, is an unnerving mix of kinda busy with no shoulder. But the ultimate goal is to ride everywhere, so for completeness sake today we gave it a go, using parallel ditchbanks whenever possible.

I switched from miles to kilometers this year for my annual ride-my-age birthday outing. The last few years I’d used an electric bike for the big rides, but this year I’m almost entirely riding a new acoustic bike (a guitar-playing friend coined this for me, though others have perhaps stumbled to the same locution?), so 66 km on the acoustic it was.

The weather was perfect. A cloud deck kept it cool, the rain mostly left us alone, and the tailwind, while not as strong as forecast, spent more time at our backs than anywhere else.

The ride was full of delights. There were:

• a small farm field with turkeys and a very curious llama (I couldn’t get ‘em both in the same picture.)
• lots of ditchbanks, with enough rain last night to firm up the dirt without leaving it muddy
• egrets, lots of ‘em, cattle egrets and those other ones I can’t remember the names of
• happy cows dining al fresco
• a sacred place, and a plea to protect sacred places, and an ensuing conversation about atheists and Mormons and John Lennon’s Irish heritage that’s too convoluted for a blog post – but not too convoluted for a bike ride!
• an unfortunate incident at the day’s second Lotaburger. I don’t think you could say that, technically, we got kicked out. No, we definitely did not get kicked out of Lotaburger.
• A reminder that New Mexico State Highway 314, up from Los Lunas through Isleta Pueblo, is one of the great local bike rides – flanked by a cottonwood forest in the full green of early spring, slicing through desert wetlands, with a wide well-paved shoulder.

To top it off, the final few miles required dodging a thunderstorm, triangulating between my weather radar app and a group text among family members spread out around town. I hit my 66th kilometer just before reaching the shelter of the bus stop for the ride home, just before the first hailstones hit.