Toughest Ride in a While

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Now that I’m done with my exercise stress test I’ve decided to focus more on riding. I went out for four hours today, and covered just over 50 miles. The first two hours were standing pedaling, and in the last hour I threw in a bunch of intervals.

My old low-end watch recently died so I treated myself to a Garmin Forerunner. It has the nice feature of providing wrist-based heart rate normally, but if it notices I have my heart rate strap on it pairs with it instead. This was my first serious ride tracking with the new watch. I’m pretty happy with it so far, I like how the display is customizable, so I have time, date, and heart rate on the watch face. You can also customize what appear on the main screen during various activities, so I have speed, elapsed time, distance, and heart rate for bike ride. I don’t like to be distracted by tech when exercising, I prefer to peruse the results later. But it is nice to be able to glance at it once in a while, like “that was a tough interval, I wonder what my heart rate got to”.

Toughest Ride in a While 1
Over to Coyote Creek Trail then out and back to the end at Tully Road. I had originally intended to loop over to the west side of the valley to climb the IBM hill on the way back but was short on time so just did out and back.
Toughest Ride in a While 2
I felt like I was pushing pretty hard the whole way especially the first two hours while standing, so I was surprised my average HR was only 110.

I want to work on my climbing because I’m not strong enough on steep climbs. I was going to do some tough climbing on the “IBM hill” on Bernal road. But I ended up taking the Coyote creek path all the way to its end at Tully road in San Jose, and was behind schedule so I left the hill out. That’ll be for next time.

Toughest Ride in a While 3
Going Through Hellyer Park I saw a bunch of Canadian ex-pats at Cottonwood lake. These geese have figured out there’s plenty to eat around here and have gotten too lazy to do their Canada to Mexico lifestyle, and just hang out in this area.

It was a great day for a ride, not too hot.

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