Whoa, 53 degrees outside when I got up. I read the forecast which promised warming up to about 80 after noon. I didn’t wait that long for the temperature to get in the 70’s and began my bike ride at 11:01 AM. Riding my Canyon Endurace I set out on what I call the “Atascocita – Walden – Huffman” route planning on biking at least 31 miles. I actually rode 33.53 miles boosting my week’s total to 59.97 miles. I reached my 700 mile goal for September on Sunday but today’s miles added enough to make up for my short fall on my August goal. One more biking day in September to add more miles, maybe get to 800 for September. September goal recap.
I altered today’s route by not actually biking through Huffman. Because of the strong wind I didn’t go north on FM 2100 to FM 1960 but instead returned west on Old Atascocita Road and Fairlake Lane. The trees lining Old Atascocita Road provided some wind break going west. My legs needed that.
Last night I watched a YouTube video on the Loam Ranger channel about the best settings for a GoPro camera. I made some changes to my Hero 7 Black and added some homemade wind muffs. Today’s ride tested the muffs and they failed. I don’t know if the muffs are too small or if the mic I left uncovered picked up all the wind noise. I moved one muff to the uncovered mic and will test that on tomorrow’s bike ride. The foam windscreen worked better. Some pictures of the muffs.
While yesterday’s front moved on the wind stayed behind making the bike ride challenging whenever I hit the headwind. At the start the northerly wind was a not too bad 8 mph but by the time I finished at 1:39 PM the wind increased 15 mph gusting to 24 mph from the north. That made for tough pedaling once I turned north on the return to Kingwood from FM 1960. Weather conditions at the start and finish: start 77 (42% humidity, 51.8 dew point), fair, wind N 8 mph. Finish 78 (29% humidity, 43.4 dew point), fair, wind N 15 mph gusts 24 mph. Notice the low humidity and dew point at the end of the ride. Those levels have not been around here in quite a while.
I decided to wear a long sleeve jersey under a short sleeve jersey because of the temperature but didn’t think about the wind picking up so much. Glad I made that choice; at times in the shade and the wind kicking up it was cool.
Stopping for a few minutes on Old Atascocita Road east of FM 2100 I took these photos. I liked the design and massive size of the gates. Lots of blue sky too.
While I was out biking UPS delivered my warranty replacement Wahoo Elemnt Bolt computer. I will get it set up to use on tomorrow’s bike ride.
Link to my Strava activity page.
One of the Chrome browser extensions I installed adds various details based on the ride data. One of those compares year to date mileage progressions for a number of years. Below is a chart comparing YTD miles from 2011 to 2020.
