{"id":15408,"date":"2012-08-16T17:02:28","date_gmt":"2012-08-16T22:02:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.texbiker.net\/blog\/?p=15408"},"modified":"2012-08-16T17:02:28","modified_gmt":"2012-08-16T22:02:28","slug":"preferences-made-to-break-august-16th-bicycle-ride","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.texbiker.net\/blog\/2012\/08\/16\/preferences-made-to-break-august-16th-bicycle-ride\/","title":{"rendered":"Preferences Made to Break – August 16th Bicycle Ride"},"content":{"rendered":"

Monday I wrote about my preference to not use the same road and streets to go out and back for rides. Well today that is exactly what I did. I haven’t done this route in awhile so I thought the distance would right for the time I wanted to spend. The heat was moving higher even though when I first started it felt comfortable for a short time. My ride got off to a turn around when I tried to use my usual greenbelt trail to get to started. The trail was blocked by tree workers cutting and removing some big trees that fell victim to last year’s drought and the pine bark beetle. So in the first 1\/4 mile I already was back tracking. There was a work around so I took that to get back on track.<\/p>\n

With the delay my first 5 mile split shot up to 23:01, not where I wanted it to be to reach my 15.0 mph or higher goal. The next two 5 mile splits’ average speed improved to 17.0 and 18.3 mph, respectively, to make up the time lost. With my average speed above 15.0 mph I worked to keep it there. The overall ride average speed ended up at 15.4 mph, max speed of 22.8 mph and average cadence of 78.1 RPM. The route distance of 33.19 miles<\/strong> came in where I wanted thanks to adding a little jog near the end to get above 32.9 miles.<\/p>\n

I did pretty good until the turnaround at SR242 when I started riding into the 4.9 mph south wind. While this doesn’t seem that big of a deal the temperature seemed to have increased so that when I got back to New Caney and FM1485 I felt very hot. So I took a short break at the Chevron station standing in the shade drinking cold water from my CamelBak. This helped a lot so I got back on the road to reach my planned pit stop in Porter at the Star Stop Exxon station. Once I got there I found a spot in the shade, got a 44 oz. Diet Pepsi and enjoyed the nice breeze. My sweat soaked gloves got wrung out and laid out on a bunch of paper towels to dry. By the time I left the gloves dried out nicely. I did too. The total stopped time for the ride: 50:55. I guess the extra time means I did not hurry to leave the shade in Porter. When I got home my weather station showed 99.1 degrees; no wonder I felt hot. There is a chance of rain over the weekend so the heat may let up some. While I was riding I checked the weather in Wichita Falls and it said light rain and 74 degrees. Will this repeat on August 25th?<\/p>\n

Other statistics:<\/p>\n