You probably know about the call of the wild. Today I heard the call of the bike! Now I’m not talking about getting a phone call while out biking. Or that my bike can call me on my phone. With the gorgeous weather continuing to resist this call would be futile. The temperature ranged from 87 to 90 while I biked. I decided to repeat the route from Monday because I wanted to learn the streets better through Atascocita and Walden at Lake Houston. On Monday I stumbled through the streets and happened to end up where I wanted to go. So today I pulled up Google maps and wrote down a street list cribsheet like you see some of the pro racers checking. I put this in a plastic baggy so it would survive the sweat. As windy as it was I don’t think this was necessary though. Today’s route turned out to be identical with Monday at 32.16 miles.

Since this route generally goes south and east on the outbound portion I would be going into the south wind. At first the wind did not seem too bad but by the time I got to 9.5 miles at FM1960 it seemed to get stronger. When I left home the wind was 11.5 mph from the SSW but when I got home I saw why I battled it so much at times: South at 15 mph with 21.9 mph gusts. As I moved through Atascocita as long as I rode east the wind did not matter so much. Walden did not cause much a problem either since I still biked to the east but when I turned south on Fairlake Drive on the east side of Lake Houston the wind pounded me pretty good even amongst the trees.

Fortunately Fairlake Drive only takes about 8 minutes to ride before I turned east and north on FM2100 back to FM1960 in Huffman. While I biked north to Huffman another biker just crossed over the railroad tracks headed into the wind. We waved and I noticed he was moving slowly even being on his aero bars. When I got to the Chevron station in Huffman and took a short break he came to the station and stopped for a few minutes and headed west on FM1960. Going that direction felt like the wind came straight at you. So I finished my rest stop and started up after him. I did gain on him a little until we both got on the causeway over Lake Houston. Over the lake without any windbreak my speed dropped down to 13 mph or so. His speed must have been similar because the distance between us stayed about the same until we got off of the causeway. He pulled away from me then and soon our routes parted.

From there I biked northerly so the wind helped me. My average speed ended up at 15.1 mph with 20.7 mph as my max speed. Average cadence dropped from yesterday’s ride to 78.7 RPM. For awhile I did not think I would be able to get my average speed up to 15 or more. I would get ahead and then fall back when I hit the headwind. Elevation never comes into play around here with flat Houston. Some other numbers from today’s ride:

• 2:08:06 riding time
• 21:46 time stopped (mostly at the Huffman Chevron with a food break before heading into the wind)
• 6:37:50 riding time this week
• 100.54 miles this week
• 593.85 miles in April
• 1813.21 miles YTD
• RideWithGPS.com data and map link

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4-25-2012 Home Weather Station End