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Thursday, May 28, 2009

My New Love: The Valley Ride

If you are a long-time reader of this blog, a friend of mine on Facebook or you follow my Twitter account (@bobodig), you will know that I used to constantly rave about the Port of Oakland Ride (AKA: The POO Ride).

Well..........I have a new ride to rave about: The Valley Ride. I realized that I loved the POO Ride because it really played right into my strengths (flat crit racing). The Valley Ride is much more like a short road race. The ride meets up Wednesday evenings at Peet's Coffee in Los Altos around 6pm. It's pretty chill until we hit Arastradero Road. The ride consists of 3 sprints and one climb (sprint, climb, sprint, sprint). After the ride races up the Huddart climb, everyone waits up at the bottom of the hill for the group to reassemble...so if you are not a great climber, you won't be left out for dead. Also, some riders avoid the climb and ride straight to this meet up spot.

Great times and some great talent out at the Valley Ride. I highly recommend it. Go.



Monday, May 18, 2009

Great Climbing Profile

Try this ride...the first few uphills are pretty tough...the downhills are stomach dropping.


I'm pretty bummed about this Garmin 205 file. We did this ride on Saturday in the scorching heat...easily high 90's, low 100's. We started off at Cupertino Bike Shop, went up Highway 9, to Big Basin Redwood Park, Boulder Creek and then back up the back of Highway 9. Running out of water on the way back up 9 wasn't the most fun part of the ride. Even the downhills were like riding in an oven with a hot fan.

This file is also missing 10+ miles...likely due to the density of the redwoods in Big Basin (no fault of Garmin/MotionBased).

Last complaint...MotionBased took over 48 hours to upload this to my account after I downloaded it from my Garmin 205. :-(

The BEST part of the day (outside of the shady descent in Big Basin), was that Vance at Cupertino Bike Shop let us take showers in the shop before the drive home. Thanks Vance!