5 Mile Mistake – July 25th Bike Ride
Keeping with the ride theme this week I set out on a route last rode on June 13, 2012.I modified the route a little at the beginning with a different exit route from Kingwood from the June ride. I figured this would add about 3 miles to the 37.13 miles in June. What I did not calculate though was the extra 5 miles I rode because I looked up the streets for the Commons of Lake Houston and it showed Hargraves Street connecting with Kingwood Drive (east of the river version) via Commons Park Drive which I missed. Once I realized the mistake I backtracked to the streets that I knew went where I wanted to go. So the route today ended up at 47.28 miles.
The reason I wanted to ride through the Commons of Lake Houston revolves around the no shoulders on FM2100. While the traffic on FM2100 is not too heavy the road surface gets bumpy so dodging those can be troublesome.The streets in the Commons are relatively new and smooth in most cases. There are even stretches of concrete roads.
With this longer than planned ride I still managed to average 15.4 mph with a 22.0 mph max speed. My legs got tired around the 30 mile point so I slowed down some. I think this could have impacted my cadence which averaged 78.2 RPM. This is the same as Monday’s ride. Riding time came in at 3:03:56 plus 44:46 time stopped. This is about an hour longer than my typical ride lately. Mileage marks as of now: 124.45 this week, 449.23 for July and 3762.65 YTD.
The weather tried to get me. For most of the ride scatter clouds ruled the sky but in Huffman just as I got ready to leave for the ride home it started to rain. It didn’t last very long but the pavement got wet with puddles of water. I waited a little over 5 minutes after it quit and then started riding. Within 2/10 of mile the pavement dried with no signs of any rain from that point all the way home. Temperature ranged 85 to 95, humidity 74% to 47% and the wind was not a factor at 8.1 mph from the SW. After I got home I could hear thunder in the distance but no rain.
My right brake lever continues to not return to the fully open position even though I worked on it a couple of times. So after calling two local bike shops and not finding the cables I wanted I order them from Amazon.com. One shop did not have just the cables but cables with housing which I don’t need. The other one only had some low priced cables which I don’t think will last very long. I wanted coated cables which I think will operate smoothly and not rust for awhile. Aztec cables should fit the bill. Now that Amazon.com collects sales tax I wanted to shop around but their pricing still looked good plus the 2 day shipping cost looked reasonable.
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