Freelance Biking – May 14th Bike Ride
Today the route went freelance. I thought I felt good so I wanted a route over 40 miles. Combining some of the route with streets from the Humble Lions Club ride took me through Huffman, Crosby and Summerwood. I biked on these roads before but not for a long time. When I got to Crosby road construction on FM2100 moved me to some back streets to get around the affected area. My previous experience in Crosby helped to skirt around the work zone. At the start I did not know what the distance would come out to. It ended up at 48.12 miles. This put May total miles at 407.29 and year to date miles at 2342.96. Road surface on this route generally was good with some roughness on Sheldon Road and Aqueduct Road.
Of the ten 5 mile laps all but two of them averaged 15.0 mph or more. The weather conditions (78-86 degrees, mostly cloudy, 8.1 mph NNE breeze) helped me speed along even though I thought it might be a touring type of a ride: long and slow. Overall I averaged 16.1 mph with a max speed of 25.9 mph. Average cadence held at 83.5 RPM, a nice increase over my typical cadence. In the slides below the Speed-Distance one shows the distance and time for 4 different speed zones. Zone 3 shows 39.29 miles (2:13:38 time) biking in the 17.6 mph to 21.2 mph range. Total riding time came in at 2:59:02 with 32:19 stopped. I only took one major break in Summerwood at the 35 mile point. The rest of the time stopped was for traffic lights, traffic and a porta-potty break in Deussen Park just before getting to Summerwood.
One statistic I don’t really pay attention to is the climbing and descending since Houston is practically flat as a pancake. Today’s ride shows 2238 upward change in elevation and 2179 down in elevation. This is not quite going over a mountain but it is interesting. This ranged from a max of 115 ft and a low of 0 feet.
There were some other bikers out today as well. Three were turning north off of FM1960 just west of the causeway and another on Aqueduct Road beside the water canal before I got to Deussen Park. Not sure I will be able to ride tomorrow with a 40% chance of rain.
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