I finally got the road bike out this weekend! The weather played nice, the streets were clear enough of debris and it was time to get out and spin. I headed up to Elk Park for an easy ride. For those not familiar with Elk Park, it sits at about 6,300 ft and there is flat meadow for about 9 miles where I-15 runs through it. The beauty is that it has an access road that hardly gets much traffic and can make for some great early season rides as the itch to get out needs to be scratched.
In the grand scheme of things it is a long, straight, flat ride that can get boring pretty quickly but it beats the heck out of sitting on a trainer for any period of time. The other bennie at this time of year is that the rest of the roads that are thawing out usually have a ton of dirt on them or are in really poor shape with serious potholes from the winter freezing and thawing cycles.
The ride is always a funny ride because you feel like you are just crushing it heading north for 9 miles and you start to tell yourself you are riding strong...It was relatively easy to maintain a 22-24mph speed heading north without having to put a lot of effort in. The reality check is when you turn around and head back south on the access road and realize you had the benefit of a nice tail wind...the 22-24 avg quickly drops to the 14-17 range and you are battling the wind the whole way back. It is a funny thing about this particular geography...the wind is always blowing, and always blowing in the same direction from the south to the north.
It was still a little chilly but good to test the legs and see how they did after putting in a good day on Saturday too. The back to back pushes are usually a decent barometer of just how in shape or out of shape the legs are in the early season. I ended up doing a couple of laps on the Elk Park access road circuit and it ended up being around 38 miles in a little under 2 hours. I would have liked to have ridden longer but ran out of motivation to turn around again for a 3rd lap up there. The wind beat me down enough to discourage such thoughts...guess the upcoming True Grit will have to not only be a physical smack down but also a gut check to dig deep and push through some mental pain too - "Gee Wiz" (as my old stats prof used to say. We all hated that SOB as he was just a horrible teacher: more accurately, he was incredibly smart but did not have the ability to dumb it down enough for us! I remember the long long formulas and how he would start to erase the formulas as he ran out of space and we would just be left with un-legible scribbles from trying to copy the board at mach speed - and at the end of these rambling formula erasing sessions he would say 'Gee wiz, it is that simple'...mold all of this frantic writing and speaking with the fact that he had a really strong Belgian accent which made his Anglais difficult to understand and we were all just at a total loss). Whoa, off on a tangent there...back to the ride:
I was not able to get the powertap working on the ride but at least came away with some data points via the Garmin Forerunner. I will have to spend a little time fine tuning the power-tap and computer to make sure it reads for the next ride.
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