Simi Valley to Santa Barbara

Today we rode from Simi Valley to Santa Barbara. I showed everybody the effects of knee-induced inactivity coupled with poor eating habits. The ride was beautiful though, and I can't wait to do it again when I'm actually in shape. Here's the route:


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T + 5

Its been five days since the century. I'd been concerned about knee pain while riding, but starting sunday it hurt when I was walking. Not exactly pleasant. The pain has slowly subsided over the past few days. At first most movement hurt; now I can do everything except jog pain-free.

I hope that I don't continue to do damage to my knees - I'd really like to be able to walk AND ride without pain again soon.

Photo from Stagecoach Century

2009 Stagecoach Centrury

Yesterday was my first century!

It was a great ride, with loads and loads of support and great weather to boot. It was nice at 7:30 when we rolled out, and was warm (but not overly hot) when we finished in the early afternoon. we started off at a nice and easy pace, and treating each rest stop along the way like a buffet line. We decided to pick up the pace a little after we hit the halfway point and looked at our watches and saw that we had taken 4 hours to do the first half. On the way back, we pulled harder, turned in a 7 hour total time, of which 5:45 was spent in the saddle time. Here is the route we took:


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Montrose Tempo + GMR

As next weekend is the Stagecoach Century, we tried for a 90 mile ride to get me mentally ready. The plan was to add GMR (Glendora Mountain Road) onto our usual 60-ish mile saturday route. That was supposed to give us about 80, to which we were going to add a 5 mile detour for lunch at the end.

Unfortunately, around mile 75, my knee decided to give me shooting pain, and I simultaneously discovered that I had a flat. We stopped to fix the flat and rest the knee, only to discover that my tubes didn't have a long enough valve to poke through my new rims. Since gloria couldn't find the whole in the tube, and i was open to the possibility that I didn't screw down the plug enough after filling the tire that morning, we put the original tube back in and tried to continue. That was a mistake. My knee continued to hurt more and more, and the tire went flat again after about 6 miles. At that point we gave up and turned around for home.

Here's our route:


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Exploring Valencia and Rt. 126

We had planned on doing a 90 mile ride today, but we abbreviated the ride as seen below because of extremely strong winds. On route 126 headed west at the beginning of the ride, we were able to coast along faster than 30 mph because the wind was so strong. We decided that it would be unwise to coast for the first half of the ride and then have to ride strait into the wind the whole way home.

Here's the ride that we did:

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Here is the ride that we intended to do:

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Big Tujunga to Clear Creek

It was foggy and cold at the start, but once we got into the mountains it turned into a beautiful day.


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Today: Casual ride to Big Tujunga

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