This was one of those perfect days. 75 degree weather and blue skies set the tone.
I started off with a brick workout (65 km on the bike, followed by a hard threshold run).
Trek was at his grandparents’ house all day, so after lunch, Xan and I took Navy downtown to play around in the fountain at Jamison Square Park.
After that, we went to the Diesel store, where Xan wanted to check on repair of sun glasses she bought there last year. They couldn’t do anything about that but gave her a brand new pair, free of charge. Talk about customer service!
For dinner, I prepared a good piece of salmon, served on a bed of whole grain pasta and topped with white and black trumpeter mushrooms. A great finish to a great Saturday!
I’ve played around with different websites to find one that works best for mapping out bike rides. Google Maps itself is woeful for this purpose. You can’t hit a point on a road and have it move from A to B without going in a straight line. Fortunately, there are some sites that have this function built in (using Google Maps as the backbone).
The best one I’ve found so far is www.bikemap.net. Below is an example of my last ride. Compare this to the Google Map version a couple of posts down. One cool feature is the km/mile markers and the elevation chart.
Yesterday’s bike ride with Sven and his neighbor, Jamie, was another good one. I had mapped out some new roads which none of us had biked before. The terrain west of Beaverton is very hilly, so it’s impossible to find anything that’s completely flat, but the goal here was to avoid the worst elevation gains of the Bald Peak Ridge.
I had a 42-mile ride scheduled with Sven this morning and met him on the corner on Scholls-Ferry and Murray. The weather forecast was not promising, with a good chance of rain, but I decided to chance it and left the rain gear at home. Sure enough it started to come down early on; enough that I was damp throughout.
I had mapped out a new course and didn’t know that a considerable portion of Firdale Rd was actually gravel. We decided to take our chances instead of turning around and, amazingly, made it through without any flats (instead, my front tire went “psssssh” later on, as we were heading south on OR-219 from Hillsboro).
The pace was a little slower than I would have liked, my flat tire cost a few minutes, and Sven bonking at the end forced us to stop for some Snickers bar and Gatorade. But all-in-all a decent ride.
I was playing around with Google Earth while setting up a bike ride for Sven. After exporting the kmz-file and uploading it to Google Maps, the results are easy to share. Check this out:
Surfing in Bali.
