Climbing Half a Cherry

We weren't sure how much to tackle today as we need to taper down our training before the big ride next weekend. And we also just did a substantial ride of three Larch Mountain repeats on Friday. But we both felt good so we went with a fairly solid ride, the last of such until the doozy on Sunday.

Quick Stats Ride Distance: 61.42 miles   Elevation Gain: 5,508 feet   Average Moving Speed: 13.6 mph

We really liked the Cherry of a Ride route, so we decided to ride a modified version of it, basically taking the first loop and doing all the climbs on it. This included going back up 7 Mile Hill from the other side this time, and that is a very solid climb.

By the way that is Mt. Adams in the photo taken at the summit of 7 Mile Hill. For most of the ride you have incredible views of either Mt. Hood or Mt. Adams.
Of course none of these climbs are all that considerable when compared to the long grades we'll be climbing on Shasta, but Larch is really the only comparable climb within reasonably close distance to our house, and we've had enough of that for a little while.

The other thing we wanted to accomplish today was riding in the heat. We haven't done too much of that around here this year, but we almost certainly will be on the big ride in Northern California. So we are trying to acclimate our bodies to the heat. They say it can be done, so we're giving it a go. So we intentionally got a late start so that we would be riding in the sun.

RIDE DATA:

You can see from the blue line stacked on top of the white speed line that we had a head wind for the last half of the ride. Amy doesn't like a head wind. Ever. I, on the other hand, actually appreciated it on the climbs, particularly that steep climb up the back side of 7 Mile Hill. It was a very hot day, and having that breeze helped keep me from boiling over.

In fact, I never really struggled with the heat at all today. I was pleasantly surprised by that. It helps confirm my suspicion that my struggles with heat in years past was at least partially due to exhaustion and not just heat. Of course today I had access to ice cold water all day and used plenty of it.

I tracked the ride in RunKeeper using my phone, producing the nice route map you see below. If you ever do such things please do not place any confidence in the climbing or elevation gain data produced by such apps. The exception is if your phone or device uses a barometric altimeter, like my iBike or some of the higher end Garmin bike computers, for determining your current elevation. The problem arises with the inherent minor amount of error in GPS units. A small amount of error on a map is no big deal. But in climbing data, which uses the difference in elevation between each and every point, the sum of all of those errors can be quite substantial indeed. Case in point: my iBike says we climbed 5,500 feet, but RunKeeper claims we did over 10,000 feet! Based on previous experience, including reproducible results, the iBike unit is correct, probably to within a couple hundred feet. Which means the GPS-based elevation gain data is basically double what it should be. In other words, pretty much garbage. The horizontal distance and map locations are very accurate though, so definitely worth it for that data.

RIDE MAP IN GOOGLE EARTH:

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