Today I tried biking with the Western Wheelers, a cycling group in our area. They organize lots of rides -- sometimes you can find 3 or 4 in a single day. Normally, Mr. R-T and I cycle most Sundays, 25-40 miles in our area (well, not in the rain. We are both rain wimps.) with various subsets of two other couples. Even though we recently added another couple to our "bike club", none of the seven of them could make it today. I've been thinking that I need to find a group to do weekday rides, so I might as well start with this.
I have a huge amount of inertia around joining groups. It helped that I had already planned to ride, at about the same time, so getting ready wasn't a big roadblock. I found the group easily (which doesn't always happen with this sort of thing), and they were very friendly. Of the nine on the ride, seven were regular Western Wheelers riders, who seemed to know each other, and I and one other guy (a young guy from Google) were the two newbies. I was worried that the old-timers would stick together, but everyone was cordial and I talked to about half the people over the course of the ride. It was billed as an easy 'social' ride, so it was as much about chatting as it was about making it up the hills. The trip was about 25 miles, plus it took me 15 miles round trip to get to the starting location, making it a nice 40 mile ride.
Definitely much less stressful than I expected, and this will make it easier for me to do next time. I'd like, in the longer run, to find a small group of women to ride 1-2 times a week, but doing groups of unknowns for a while as I seek out congenial biking partners seems like it will work.
I suspect over the next year, I will end up joining 3-4 such groups: hiking, wine tasting, maybe German conversation, and a few other things I want to explore. This seems like the best way to build up a collection of retired friends who share interests, while my existing friends are still busy with their work lives.
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