My Favorite Training Ride

Hi, recently I got a Garmin Edge 205 bike GPS. Its a thingy that tracks your ride and then you can download where you went and map it out, including the elevation changes. Also you can use it to compete against your prior rides etc. You can google it and figure out the details if you want. But the point of this is that we do a ride for training and its a tough one. Its located at Crystal Cove state park and we do some loops around this course (pics below). According to the fitness GPS we burn about 1400 calories, which does not sound like much until you try to burn off that many on an excercise gear in your favorite fitness center. On this particular ride we did it in about an hour and 50 mins. (excluding about the 10 minutes in between a few hills I rested to wait for my training partner). My record for this is 1:47, but I think anything under 2 hours is a great workout result.

If you ever want to try this, meet us at the parking lot most Tuesday and Thursday mornings at 7:30 AM. Bring lots of water, spare tubes, and a pump. And if you are really slow, you might be on your own, because for the most part we need to get on with our day. Don't worry about getting ahead of us, if you are that good, have at it. As we are old farts (53 and 59) you young-uns can kick our butts - but unless you are used to this kind of riding you will be surprised at the difficulty in keeping up.

The route is looping - clockwise from the left, at the survey point we double back through the crossroads and do that little inner loop, back up to the crossroads, then back down the center, up to I think I can, back to the survey point again, then double back the starting route to total out almost 20 miles. We end up passing the crossroads 4 times, so there are lots of shorter (and longer) variations.

(click to see better detail: - sorry html programming bores me)


Here is the hill profile, (click to see better detail)