Training on Plano Trails

The past couple of days I have been training in the city of Plano, Tx. This city unlike Carrollton (where I live) has better maintained and longer bicycling trails. There are three trails which I frequent The Blue Bonnet Trail, Preston Ridge Trail and Chisolm Trail. Since I wanted to seriously train I didn't carry my camera, so you all will have to be content with word pictures.
Moreover today was perhaps a bad day for cycling because the wind was heavy and one direction of my cycling was a tough cookie... the harder I cycled the more resistant the wind became... so I guess I would have expended twice the amount of energy to do the same distance.

The Blue Bonnet Trail is a 5-mile long trail which passes through various residential neighborhoods and parks. This East-West trail is lined by large expanses of blue bonnet plants. It is a treat to the eye to watch these blue blossoms swaying in the wind as we whiz past on the trail. I kinda don't like this trail very much because this has too many street crossings and there is very little tree cover... actually no tree cover at all.

Then there is the Preston Ridge Trail... this is also a long trail which runs in the North-South direction and like the Blue Bonnet trail much of it is through residential communities and hence quite boring too. The one better feature of this trail is that this is wee bit hilly and one can experience climbs and down hills. The last mile of the trail, close the highway 121, is through a protected forest and has quite a bit of tree cover and a large artificial lake.

The last trail Chisolm Trail is my favorite, for two reasons, this a lots of tree cover, runs along a winding creek and has very few street crossings. Whenever a road has to be crossed the trail passes under the road via a cool bridge. There are beautiful lake views, forest areas, conservation buffer zones etc, along the trial. And of course I caught glimpses of urban wildlife... geese, ducks, cranes, egrets, and of course the ubiquitous cormorants and crows. Chisolm trail also passes along a large lake in an area known as Big Lake Park and a war memorial, known as Memorial Park. These attractions give a unique character to this trail and thus my favourite.

I enjoyed cycling 30 miles (50 km) today, took me 2 hrs 45 mins and hopefully I will do more tomorrow and the days to come.

Needless to say I am still looking for donations for my cause - Eradication of Multiple Sclerosis. Do visit my page and contribute generously to this needy cause.