Reached My Riding Goal But Not Done Yet, I Hope
With the year winding down I am running out of days to reach my mileage goal for the year. Today is the first day since December 12th that I could get out and ride. As I was getting ready my wife ask me if I thought I could stay upright since she saw some strong wind gusts in our backyard. With all of the holiday eating and lack of biking I told I her I had plenty of ballast to offset the wind.
I thought about some route options that would get the 18 miles I needed to reach the goal. Going north with all of the road construction is too much effort so I decided to ride my Atascocita – Walden – Huffman route. Usually this route is 30+ miles but today I cut off a couple of miles at the beginning and ended up riding 30.31 miles. This put me over my goal at 6513 miles. I might be able to add some more miles to that but right now the weather forecast does not look favorable. Saturday and Sunday look warm enough but the chance of rain is near 50% or more. The rest of the days may be too cool for me, below 60 is too cold for this older body.
If the sky had not been overcast I probably could’ skipped the leg warmers with 71 degrees but the stiff wind made it feel cooler than 71. I wore a long sleeve jersey and a windbreaker jacket in addition to shorts and leg warmers. At the start the wind was gusting to 23 mph but it settled down to 12 mph by the time I got home at 3:07. Riding east over Lake Houston on FM1960 the wind helped me but on the return going west I slowed down to below 14 mph going into the stiff wind. My average speed up to this point was 15.4 mph but I lost a .1 mph thanks to the wind. I was able to recover that lost mph and held it until I reached Kingwood Drive at 28 miles into the ride. Once I crossed over Kingwood Drive winding around the streets and parking lots I ended up averaging 15.3 mph which isn’t bad considering how little I have rode this month; 116.6 miles.
This year I rode this route 59 times out of 191 rides. Maybe in 2015 I can increase the northerly rides when the Grand Parkway construction moves west of US59.
I did see two other bikers. Both were on FM1960 over Lake Houston. They were not recreational bikers but more utilitarian bikers; a category I just made up.
Garmin Connect and RideWithGPS maps, metrics and charts. Click on an image to enlarge it.
