{"id":29376,"date":"2015-04-08T14:30:07","date_gmt":"2015-04-08T19:30:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.texbiker.net\/blog\/?p=29376"},"modified":"2015-04-08T14:30:07","modified_gmt":"2015-04-08T19:30:07","slug":"no-windbreak-on-this-bike-ride","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.texbiker.net\/blog\/2015\/04\/08\/no-windbreak-on-this-bike-ride\/","title":{"rendered":"No Windbreak on This Bike Ride"},"content":{"rendered":"

The wind was punishing on today’s ride on the “Oakhurst – Cumberland – Valley Ranch” route. It was from the SSW at 15 mph with gusts of 23 mph although I think the 23 mph was happening more frequently than an occasional gust. The temperature was 84 degrees with partly cloudy skies. Despite the warm temperature I wore a long sleeve jersey for sun protection. One of these rides I will switch to short sleeve jerseys and use the sun screen. As long as I was going north on this 32.53 mile<\/strong> long route the wind helped me go at 20+ mph but other directions I bogged down to 15 or 16 mph. The south bound service road from Valley Ranch to Northpark Drive was particularly tough. There was no windbreak making pedal turning slow. I looked at my Garmin a couple of times and saw 12 mph or so. Sometimes I think I was slower than that. I should’ve changed to a lower gear on the rear cassette but I kept pushing it. I was in the 34 x 13. I hated to change to the 34 x 14. As a result my average speed suffered. It maxed out at 14.9 mph and ended up at 14.5 mph for the whole ride.<\/p>\n

To give my legs a chance to recover I stopped at the Texaco station at the Valley Ranch entrance from the US59 service road. It felt good to sit and eat a couple of snack bars and drink the ice water. After about 15 minutes I rolled out into the stiff wind going south. A short stop at the traffic light at FM1314 in Porter gave my legs some rest but the rod from there is flat for about a mile when a gentle slope down comes in. This time the wind negated any downward help from the slope. The next relief came at Northpark Drive where I made a u-turn onto the north service road to get to Knox Street and turn towards Kingwood. At this point the trees provided a little refuge from the wind for the last 4 miles home.<\/p>\n

I had to make this ride with the end time in mind. I have an appointment to take our Jeep Grand Cherokee to the dealer to see why the engine malfunction light is on. I left home at 11:06 about an hour earlier than usual and got home at 1:41.<\/p>\n

I reached the 1209 mile point for the year. Last year I was at 1482 miles on this date. I am slowly getting back the miles I lost from the bad weather in January, February and March.<\/p>\n

\"Weather<\/a>

Weather at Valley Ranch in Porter<\/p><\/div>\n

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The wind was punishing on today’s ride on the “Oakhurst – Cumberland – Valley Ranch” route. It was from the SSW at 15 mph with gusts of 23 mph although I think the 23 mph was happening more frequently than …<\/span> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[22],"tags":[4697,1424,4699],"class_list":["post-29376","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bike-ride","tag-oakhurst-cumberland-valley-ranch","tag-road","tag-stradalli-rp-14-carbon"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4tok-7DO","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.texbiker.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29376","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.texbiker.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.texbiker.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.texbiker.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.texbiker.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29376"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.texbiker.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29376\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.texbiker.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29376"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.texbiker.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29376"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.texbiker.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29376"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}