Routes

There were periods of time -- sometimes months, sometimes years, sometimes only weeks -- over the past 15 to 20 years during which I went to the gym.

 I largely enjoyed it, but it never seemed to stick. Typically, what started as pretty developed workouts would end up reduced to simply half an hour on the elliptical, maybe some pointless situps, and that was it.

Chalk that failure up to many things, but I always suspected boredom played a major role in my vanishing act. Having music or television to watch always helped, but it all just became dreadfully repetitive after a while. With that in mind, I decided that riding a bike might go a long way toward addressing the boredom issue as I was putting together a sort of path out of this malaise about a year-and-a-half ago.

Turns out I was spot on. The scenery, the concentration required not to get killed or injured, and the ability to stop and snap a picture of something cool have allowed me to create a routine for doing something that's good for me and enjoyable. One of the biggest advantages over watching a half-hour of closed-captioned Food Network is that I am not captive to any particular route.

There are shorter routes I take and longer ones, but among those, I tend to keep returning to a few favorites. Living in a pretty centrally-located section of the city, I enjoy ready access to a lot of different routes on my bike. One of them is the Blackstone River Bikeway.

Completed several years ago, the bikeway runs about four or five miles. It starts in Worcester and ends in Millbury. There is  a grand plan to run it from Union Station all the way to Rhode Island, but that's eons away. For now, it's a nice little spot, that's super kid-friendly.

There are two parking lots--one right by the mall entrance in Millbury, and one in Worcester, near Route 20. We usually park or ride to the Worcester entrance. The Worcester half is the less aesthetically pleasing section, although there are some cool river views, and the elevation changes are minimal. The Millbury side is where it really undulates and opens up; there is a spot we always go to get right up close with the Blackstone. There are fish in there, and beavers, and turtles, and all kinds of birds. For having a toxic industrial legacy hanging around its neck (Worcester's water treatment discharge still goes with the flow), I have never seen the river and its banks anything less than teeming with wildlife. It's really cool, and the bike path itself is a decent mix of not-too-tough hills, long straights, and picturesque esses.

The other spot I've discovered more recently is the area around the city's drinking water reservoirs in Holden.



Some of the hills that help feed the reservoirs also make it tough to figure out an easy loop, but boy is the scenery amazing as ever. The reservoir roads were a favorite of my dad growing up in a "let's take a Sunday drive" family, and they haven't gotten any less gorgeous.

The restrictions on trespassing in the drinking water resource area means that everything is just grown in. Just covered with vegetation. It's primitive-looking. If you catch the right view, it's as if you're getting a glimpse of centuries ago. It's a beautiful, smooth, satisfying ride around there.