Late Fall Ramble

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There has been enough wind lately that the trees have dropped a lot of leaves. It is surprising how much color is left. I went for a ramble that included Coyote Creek trail and some detours.

The trail was flooded at this ford. The creek is surprisingly high, because we haven’t had that much rain yet. Perhaps they are draining Lake Anderson which spills to Coyote creek. I had to turn around here and take a detour.

I found a side trail I haven’t used before which took me to Basking Ridge Ave. This is a neighborhood that was developed there about 12 years ago. My wife and I had looked there and had liked one of the model houses. We signed up for one of the lots with the style house we liked, and were number 400 in line! Fortunately we didn’t get it, it would have been about $300,000 more than we ended up paying for our current house, which we like better. When we signed up on the waiting list it was right before the 2008 housing bust, and we were lucky to buy our current house after the bust when prices were low. This is the neighborhood we had looked at:

I didn’t realize that off Basking Ridge Ave. there is another Coyote Creek trail (called “Tree life cycles trail of Coyote Creek”) that is only just under a mile long, on the opposite side of the creek from the main trail. It is still pleasant:

This smaller trail took me to Bernal road, where I got back to the main trail. I rode it to Hellyer park. Here is some of the fall color on Cottonwood lake in Hellyer park. The cottonwoods were bright yellow, the picture didn’t capture the color too well:

And some more color further along in the park:

I’ve mentioned previously that on parts of the Coyote Creek trail it feels like you’re going through a green tunnel. This time of year it’s more like a golden tunnel. This is a stretch I passed on the way home, the picture from my phone doesn’t do it justice:

This is my route on mapmyride:

It was 42.5 miles and took about 4 hours. My average speed was slow because I stood up to pedal, which I enjoy but slows me down, for the first 28 miles. I also walked up some steep hills to give my hindquarters a break. I did some walking with hand weights and my kayak trainer for a while afterwards. My total workout was 5 hours, which is the most I’ve ever done without eating breakfast first. So I’m pleased with my amount of fat adaptation, which I think is pretty good for someone not on a low carb diet.

That’s the good news. The bad news is my new fitness tracker, that I’ll talk about more in my next post, showed my heart rate was too high during a good portion of the ride. For an easy exercise session, my heart rate shouldn’t exceed about 120. In this ride I averaged 127 and hit a max of 166, and was over 140 a lot of the time. These would be good stats for a hard day, not an easy day. My approach is supposed to be a couple of hard, but relatively short days per week, and the rest of them easy. It appears I need to tweak my intensity levels a bit.

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