Wednesday, September 29, 2010

Spirited SF2G plus a little dirt

Managed to get out early today and do an SF2G ride. We rode pretty fast, unfortunately I couldn't qualify for the Philz to Waterstop Strava segment because after hammering up Bayshore I realized that my almost tardy arrival at Philz meant I forgot to turn on my Garmin. Nonetheless we rode pretty fast, leaving the Mission at 6:45 and getting to Google just a hair before 9 AM.

And we were the "slow" group - the regular "Hump Day Hammerfest" left at 7 AM.

As we approached Google, Darrin asked me if I "enjoyed the ride". I had. I felt good, we rode fast, the weather was perfect. Little did I know the best was yet to come.

Leaving Google, I checked out the new trail behind Moffett Field. This lets me get to Sunnyvale Baylands and then eventually the San Tomas Aquino trail straight to nVidia, basically off road from Google to work. And the first 3-4 miles are...

A scene from today's commute. 4 miles of this behind Mof... on Twitpic

DIRT.

The view out there is pretty nice, and unique, this land has been shut for a long time.

Mofett from the trail on Twitpic

I saw 4 other people on road bikes with 23mm tires out there, it's very rideable, a few spots with some gravel. I did almost biff it, but that had nothing to do with gravel - there was a wooden bridge just before a little singletrack section. I was watching the guy in front of me on the singletrack and failed to notice that there were metal gratings on the bridge. No harm no foul.

Someone has already created a Strava segment for this section - next time I won't stop to take a picture and I'll know about the tricky bridge.

Wednesday, September 1, 2010

Cut another 5% off Jefferson Time

I did a 10:36 on Jefferson via Highland this morning, shaving another 5% or so off my time.

Jefferson via Highland

My legs are generally feeling better on an upward trajectory but there are peaks and valleys. Last Thursday I felt really good on an SF2G ride, Monday not so much. Overall I have noticed that I have been able to hold my HR at 160 for a longer time than say 3-4 months ago, and I see numbers in the upper 160s and even a 170 occasionally, whereas that wasn't happening. I'm not really a guru but I don't think you can train your HR to go up - maybe I was just kind of crappily sick, or I couldn't get my HR to where it needed to be due to other physiological reasons, but in general I feel better.

The effort up Jefferson was actually somewhat restrained, so to see a 30 second cut was very encouraging. Enough so I decided to ride up the bottom part of Page Mill, during which I of course felt like crap :)