Yesterday I complained about the weather being cooler than I expected. Today made up for that by going 5 degrees above the forecast of 78 degrees. I did wait to start today’s bike ride to give the streets time to dry off from the early morning .03″ rain. High humidity and dew point close to the temperature slowed that down some. I probably over dressed with shorts, long sleeve jersey and a short sleeve jersey over it. I used a new pair of Pearl Izumi Elite Gel gloves to go with those. You can see them in the video. While I waited I watched the Tour UAE on GCN+.

Rolling away at 11:36 AM on the Cervelo Caledonia I chose a route that I last rode on 7/21/2021, “Kingwood – FM1314 NW to McQueen Road”. With the warm weather I wanted to ride about 40 miles to make a dent in the remaining miles I need to reach my 300 mile goal for February. I actually rode 40.95 miles cutting the needed miles to 92. The warm weather should stay around until sometime Thursday giving me 3 more days to get those miles. Today’s ride performance was similar to the previous 6 times I rode it in 2021. Today was the longest ride so far on the Cervelo bike and the 2nd longest in 2022 on all my bikes.

With the SRAM Rival AXS eTap shifting I changed gears more than with mechanical gears. The tiny push of the brake paddle changes so quickly and I can see which gear I’m in on the Wahoo Bolt computer. Reminds me of the Shimano Inflight (I think that is the name) computer days.

With the warm weather there was a price to pay, wind gusts of 21 mph. The ride to McQueen Road put me in those gusts for short periods and my legs were up to the fight. The longest section came riding SW on Valley Ranch Parkway to FM 1314. On FM 1314 the wind wasn’t much of a problem and I got my average speed to 14.2 mph. I may have used more energy getting to McQueen Road than I should have because the ride back to the SE was into the wind. My legs held up until I reached Sorters Road. To recover some I stopped at the Circle K for about 8 minutes. I was running low on energy but I didn’t bring anything to eat. I thought the rest would give my legs ready to fight the wind more but around 7 miles to the finish I ran out of energy and slowed to 13 mph with some time below that when the wind was the highest like the southbound frontage road from Kellington to Kingwood Drive.

I talk about another dog chase in the video which may have used energy I needed for the ride back from McQueen Road. I’m ready for a ride without a dog chase.

Weather conditions: start 78 (humidity 76%, dew point 70), cloudy, wind S 9 mph; finish 83 (humidity 61%, dew point 68), mostly cloudy, wind SW 9 mph gusts 21 mph.

The probably helped me get this top result reported by Strava, 2nd fastest time on Stripes-to_OldHoustonRd (24:00). The dog chase was during this segment.