As I rolled into the Spendora Chevron at FM 2090 the first thing I noticed was the “love bugs” flying around and landed on various parts of the station. To my left was a large white Ford pickup with the driver busy cleaning the bugs from the windshield. I moved over to him and told him he was reducing the bug population for next year with all of the dead bugs. He laughed and agreed it was a big mess.
I rode the “Kingwood – Splendora – Kingwood” route for a total of 39.5 miles improving my monthly miles to 460.6, 312 miles from my goal.
The bike ride started later than I planned because I emailed Wahoo Fitness and Velocomp about a problem I started having recently with the max speed calculation for rides. Last Saturday’s ride had me at 77.4 mph which is way beyond my ability. My wife said if this was true she was going to get me on a pro team quick. At first I thought the problem was connected to using the PowerPod but after today’s ride I think the problem is with the Elemnt. At the end of today’s ride the Elemnt’s ride summary screen showed a 26.4 max speed. At first I thought that might be possible but I had stopped in New Caney at 12 miles into the ride and checked the max speed and it was 21.2 mph. There are a couple of hills after that point so I thought maybe I sped down one of those but when I looked at the ride summary on Strava 21.5 mph showed as the max speed. Not sure what the solution is but I will use the Strava data to upload to the Golden Cheetah program rather than the Elemnt data file. While I was working on this problem I connected the PowerPod to my desktop computer and opened the Isaac software to answer a question from Velocomp. While I had the PowerPod connected I used the calibration function and it updated the numbers. I probably didn’t do the initial calibration ride correctly. During the ride I noticed the power numbers were higher than before and when I exerted extra power going up inclines the power increased more than before. The ride numbers reflect this: average power 126 watts versus previous rides around 70 watts. Max power today was 463 watts versus significantly lower values. I like the calibration results.
Back to the late start (12:04 PM). That was a good thing because north of FM 1314 the service road edges were wet from a recent rain. I might have gotten wet if I left earlier. By Community Drive the wet road ended but later near New Caney it was wet again. The ride ended at 3:00 PM with me avoiding school traffic somehow.
The weather was good for bicycling: mid 80’s, mostly cloudy sky and a SE 14 mph wind.
Golden Cheetah Ride Summary
Link to RideWithGPS.com map and data.
Strava Extended Statistics view. Click on the image to got to the Strava data.
Home weather at the start, home weather at the finish and airport weather at the finish.
