Today was the day I decided to ramp up my mileage for my weekly rides. I’ve felt good the past couple of weeks, and ready to increase my mileage. Both my legs and my lungs felt ready for it. In addition, it was a nice day, and I decided to ride from home to the trails. To get a longer ride in without being out later, I had to start earlier. Since it was nice out, I could do that easily enough. I set out from home and picked up the Lanana Creek Trail at its Main St. trailhead. I headed north and saw a number of other folks enjoying the trail on their bikes or on foot. Unfortunately, I flatted my rear tire after not long on the dirt. I had just inflated my tire, so I thought I may have burped some air. I reinflated it and checked for trouble. Sure enough, I heard a loud hissing sound. I looked around for the source of the escaping air and found a puncture. That’s odd…I’ve got sealant in there, it should have sealed this little hole. It looked about the size you’d expect from a piece of broken glass, but the hole was clear. Well, that’s why I carry a spare tube. So I had to pull the tire off and insert a tube. While I had the tire off, I double-checked that a piece of glass wasn’t poking through the tire. Fixing that would have killed the evening. When I got the tire off, I saw why I got a puncture…my sealant was dried up. There were no boogers of any sort, so it appears as though I just didn’t put enough sealant in to start with. I’ll have to remedy that. The tire was clear, however, so I tossed in a tube, inflated to a comfortable pressure, and continued on my ride.
Once I got to the Raider’s Trails (old-school name, I think the University is trying to part with…but they don’t have a good name for the place to replace it), my riding buddy had already gone on his ride. I guess installing a tube took me too long, and he decided not to wait much longer. I decided to try to catch him on the trails. I hammered my heart out today, and I never caught up with him. By the time I finished my first lap, he was gone from the parking lot, so I guess he had enough of a head start on me. Oh well. I waited around for a few more minutes in case there were any late arrivals, and when it looked like nobody else was going to arrive, I headed out for my second lap with lights. I crashed more than usual, probably because I was a little bit tired. It was still fun, though.
I heard some barred owls while I was out, and I also saw a bat. The cool breezes of the night were a welcome change from rides in previous weeks where the air was still and sticky. Nice night to be out riding.
My mileage for the ride was actually closer to 13 miles. I cut the GPS track off so it would not show the location of my house.
I’m trying out an additional data display option. GPS Visualizer can generate maps and graphs based on GPS data. I really liked the fact that the old plugin I used on my website would display graphs of different statistics from my GPS data. GPS Visualizer operates a little differently, but I can still display much of the information that I used to be able to display with the old plugin that crapped out on larger .gpx files.
So far, I like this elevation profile. You can see I don’t have a lot of elevation change locally (only about 100ft from lowest to highest point), but it’s a nice-looking graph.
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