Winding up the Weekend.

All in all not a bad weekend. The weather on Saturday was just about perfect for a bike ride. I'm starting to try and increase my mileage on the bike now as I have a couple of rides coming up including the Denver Century at the beginning of June. I don't mind saying I'm frightened. It includes a climb up Lookout Mountain which looks like this.

Source

This is what they had to say about it at Colorado Bicycle Rides

The climb up Lookout Mountain road is difficult, but it is only 4.5 miles long and it flattens out in sections.

Only 4.5 miles...LOL! But before I get to that I have the a metric century the Community Classic Bike Tour up in Loveland which includes some decent climbs too. So needless to say I need to work on my climbing. Yesterday when I headed out I intended on riding a road that I had seen on my last ride.

You can see how the road kind of winds up.

It's a new road that connects Indiana to Hwy 72 and is almost 3 miles of climbing and is virtually unused. It almost killed me.

Going up!

On the way up there was one bike in front of me and I passed a guy, not a young guy either, walking up with his helmet on (complete with horns) and his skate board. I'm sure like me he thought it was a lot more fun going down then going up, and I said as much. When I got to the top I was spent. I was kind of shaky and quickly ate some of my snack, almonds, kashi and dates. It had been awhile since breakfast. I was extremely thankful to have brought it as I got a bit of a late start, just after 11 and then got stopped only minutes in to my ride by my son and his step-mom which lead to about a 20 minute conversation and delay.

From the top...getting closer to the wind turbines!

Now the good part...I get to go down that hill. Oh yea...much more fun... I admit to applying the breaks a few times. I saw a top speed of 42 which for me is fast...very fast...and of course causes thoughts of crashing, but the road was so smooth and with no traffic it was fantastic.. and then I turned on to another road and whoaa can you say headwinds? Which then turned into cross winds when I turned. But it wasn't long before the worst of that was behind me. All in all it was one fantastic ride I ended up with almost 25 miles and an average speed of 13.84 which I was thrilled with.

This is the elevation profile for the ride. I believe this will be a great training hill and plan to do it often....maybe I can even try to do it twice...although I might want to have 911 ready on my speed dial. Saturday night my oldest son headed off to Prom....wow they grow fast.

I'm so proud of him.

I wrapped up the weekend with a pretty good run. Even though I wasn't really feeling it I managed to do 5 miles at a pretty good pace of 11:23. Now if you were to look at my log for the last couple of weeks it would be glaringly obvious that I've not been to the pool...I will change that this week. I'm going to start setting a some weekly goals for myself and that shall be number one this week. This weeks goals 1. Swim! Get to the pool at least 2 times. 2. Track food better this week.