What an exciting weekend!! Benjamin learned how to ride his bike without training wheels!!! He was so proud of himself. He looked great and is now ready for a "big guy" bike. We are going to have to do that this weekend.

In other news, I picked up my new bike from the shop on Friday and Saturday morning, I headed out. I had a great time, but it was truly scary - as you will see! I decided to head up Mt. Lemmon, our local mountain that is only 2.8 miles from our house. It has about a 6% grade, and is all switchbacks. It is considered a challenging ride. Off I went -- thinking positively. Things went very well going up, except when a bunch of guys said hello as they went by and I got distracted and crashed into the guard rail. I didn't realize until Sunday that I could have really gotten hurt, so at the time, I just kept on going. Thank God for the guard rail - it is an amazing drop-off. Then, as I was passing the 2.5 mile mark, I hear from behind me, "hey, I thought we agreed you were going to take an easy ride this morning, to check the fit of the bike and get used to it." It was the woman from the cycle shop. We stopped at the first scenic overlook and she decided to go back down. I asked her if I could ride with her and she was very gracious and said sure.

Thank God she stayed with me. This portion of the ride was, without a doubt, the most horrifying, scary, death-defying, blood-curdling, perilous, steep, fast, and intimidating ride I have ever had. I don't think I will recover from this section of the ride for awhile. She was wonderful -- she stayed with me, in spite of probably thinking that I was a total dork most of the time, and made sure I didn't die on the way down. The thing is, I never even considered how I was going to GET DOWN the mountain. It just hadn't crossed my mind. The hard part was going up, right?

So, I turned my bike around to begin the descent and, within about one second, I was convinced that I was going to die by either crashing into the cliff on my right, or losing my balance and shooting across the road and going right off the road and into space. The third option was being creamed by the crazy people coming down going about 55 miles per hour. On a bicycle. I had a deathgrip on my brakes the entire way down and even then was going too fast for my comfort most of the time. I even had to stop several times to just regain my nerve. I don't know how fast I was going since I was unable to focus on anything but the road -- there was NO chance I was going to look at my odometer. I am still scared when I think about it. The brakes just didn't do enough to make me feel comfortable. However, I finally made it down. My arms and legs were shaking with the strain of holding the brakes as hard as I could and gripping the bike so I didn't fall off. It is now Monday, and I am still hurting -- my arms, neck and shoulders are really sore.

I don't think I will EVER ride down Mt. Lemmon again. From now on, I will drive up, leave the car, and have Ron drive me down. Or, I could just ride up and wait for Ron to come and pick me up. Never again!

On Sunday, I missed my 5K race because I was sick to my stomach. Ron and I went out to dinner on Saturday night for our anniversary and I guess it didn't agree with me. I was bummed to miss the race. In the afternoon, we showed Brigid how to ride a bike with her feet clipped to the pedals. It went very well and she didn't have any problem with the clips.

Tomorrow is Andy and Benjamin's last day of school for the summer.