I tried riding out to Pinglin (坪林) this morning. I abandoned before I got there because I found a roadside map en route and decided it wasn't going to happen this morning. The map showed an alternate route to cut it short and it turned out to be perfect.

I'm guessing Pinglin is about 18 miles away, shorter than last weekend's ride up to Danshui, but I found that after 2 and a half miles getting out of incorporated Hsindian onto the road to Pinglin, it was all a steady uphill.

I'm not complaining. I complain a lot. And normally complaining would entail griping about how the uphills keep coming and coming, relentless and merciless. And it was all uphill, seriously, but I was able to maintain a 9-10 mph clip without going down to the granny gear, which to me means not a rigorous uphill. Just . . . maybe a little annoying, but I like climbing so the annoyance was only in not knowing when it would end.

But after 10 miles of that, at which point I thought it might be all downhill to Pinglin, I decided I didn't want to risk the downhill, only to have to redo the uphills coming back. So I took the cutoff which turned out to be all mad downhill to make my brake hands sweat, finally placing me in familiar territory.

I shouldn't get down on myself about downhilling poorly. I do remember when I started doing "rides" in the Bay Area, I was pretty bad at downhills, and I remember practicing "getting horizontal" in Golden Gate Park. So after several years of getting rusty at it, I need to develop that skill again.