While most of the country feels the effects of winter, it is more like fall in California.  Ann took the above picture of a tree in our backyard, which is just now starting to change colors.

We went cycling today for about 60 miles.  It was cold when we started but by the time we reached the top of the climb up to Henry Coe State Park, the temperature was 70 degrees.  It was delightful.

A couple days later I took a similar picture with my Nikon D300, which I kind of over enhanced in Adobe Lightroom.

Fall usually means cooler temperatures and changing colors of the leaves.  But this is California and fall here is often like summer elsewhere.  It was a lazy day today and I did not want to do to much because I am racing tomorrow up Henry Coe.  A nice bike ride around the reservoir seemed about right.  We decided to take single bikes instead of the tandem.  That allowed me to take a few pictures, and video along the way.

The weather was wonderful, sunny in the mid 80’s.  It makes us wonder why we would want to live anywhere else.  We started up Mantelli, which is a short, but steep climbing.

Then it was around the reservoir.  The water level is way down, so we are headed for a drought if we don’t get more rain this winter.

As we often do, we stopped for lunch at a Deli on the way.

Here is how our time compared with previous best times.  We took more than 3 minutes off our previous best time on the tandem.

But looking at my heart rate curve, I see I had plenty left since I rarely went into the “Red Zone”.  That means we can set another record. Hum, I think I hear Ann saying OH NO!

This graph shows we climbed at a constant rate. Franz took his heart rate into the “red zone” very early and kept it there for the entire climb (click graph to enlarge).  Ann’s heart rate was also in her “red zone”.

We took a little easy on the backside, to the second regroup at the top of San Felipe.  From there we lead the large train of riders down, reaching speeds over 40 mph.  After we started to level out we kept the speed up so much than no one came around to take a pull.  Usually there is a sprint finish before the stop to turn on Farnsworth, but we were moving so fast no one tried to sprint around us, so we ended up wining the sprint finish, even after pulling all the way.  This curve shows our speed as we descended.

Later in the afternoon the sun finally came out so Franz headed out on for a bike ride. He was fooled into riding with only short sleeved jersey and cycling shorts. But it was now 60 degrees so it seemed okay. He had intended to ride up Squaw Peak, but having done that four times in the last two days, he decided to go further and ride up the Alpine Loop. That road goes to over 8,000 feet so he figured he would be riding up by the snow we could see from the valley floor.

As he continued to climb, the temperatures kept dropping. heI finally reached the summit and noticed the temperature was now down to 49 degrees. He had tried to do a good time up the climb and had set a new record.

He still felt warm enough due to the climb but the descent down the Alpine Loop was COLD. HeI should have brought a jacket. He did make one stop to warm up a bit and take this photo with his iPhone to send to Ann. You can see a little snow in the distance on the hill top.

Being Labor Day, there was a lot more traffic than we usually find on this rode. This was especially true from Sundance down where Franz had many cars behind so he descended down quickly to not be in their way. That made me even more cold. In fact he was cold all the way back home. Quite an unusal ride for this time of the year.

Utah Velo is a bike club in Utah we bike with and they put on an century ride just for their members.  I think about 35 riders showed up.

We stayed with the lead group of about 8 riders through the ride, which proved a challenge at times.  This group was made up of mostly young and fast riders.  We heard one fellow mention to another one he was trying to turn Pro!  At the last water stop we checked and had averaged 21.6 mph over 75 miles.

We were lucky to get our tandem front wheel rebuilt yesterday, in time for today’s ride.  The local bike shop had ordered a new rim and rebuilt it for us in an afternoon.  The wheel had been damaged on last Saturday’s century ride.

We had a great time on the ride.

Before 6 am, we got up to get ready. The Best Western motel we were staying at had a great breakfast buffet so we fueled up before heading up the 12 miles to Richmond for the start.

We started at 7:30 am, along with two other tandem riders we knew. We rode with them for maybe 15 miles until we had a long gradual climb, where we pulled ahead. Since we had to get back home for a party that day we decided to proceed without them.

We were zooming along and would continue to pickup riders as they would join the long train of riders that were following us. At times we would take a break and move back in the pack. At mile 40 we made a stop at the second rest stop (we skipped the first one). After a short stop we were back on the bike, skipping the 3rd rest stop, and stopped at mile 71 for the lunch stop. They had a great lunch for us.

After lunch we started to form long pace lines again. We were doing much of the pulling, but did move to the back of the pack to get some recovery. About 10 miles from the finish, the rider in front of us did not have time to signal a bad pot hole. Although he was able to miss it himself, without any warning we hit it straight on. It was a real jolt. One of our water bottles flew out. As we came to a stop we saw we had flatted on the front.

After changing the tube we were off again. But when I had to touch the brakes the first time I felt some grabbing, realizing that that pot hole had done some damage to the rim on our front wheel.

We rolled into the finish averaging 20.2 mph, a total of about 5 hours riding time, and about 40 minutes of stopping time. It was a lot of fun. Except for the flat, which could happen on any ride, it was a very enjoyable century and one we would like to do again in the future.

Here are the stats:

When you can compare this with how we did on the recent Ulcer Century, you can see we averaged almost the same overall speed, but my average heart rate was significantly lower.  Must be the clean air up in Cache Valley.

We pushed hard all the way up but did hold back some since we have a fast paced ride with the Utah Velo club this evening. We finished in under 40 minutes, for a new best time for us. The climb up Squaw Peak is 4.3 miles with a 7.4% grade. It is similar to the backside of Mt. Hamilton where the grade is close to 7.9% and the miles of the climb are a bit further.

We felt so good about our climb that when we got home we signed up for another century ride in a couple of weeks.

The weight and heart rate numbers in the table below are for Franz only.

We finished the 111 mile Ulcer Century today.  The teams that were doing the team time trial went off at 7:20 AM and we left soon after that.  Unlike last year, this year we saw a lot of riders go down.  One rider was down at mile 5 as we passed by.  He had a very bloody face standing on the side of the road surrounded by his teammates.

We initially stayed in a big pack and found it took a lot of concentration because some of the riders were less than experienced riding in a pace line than they should be for those 24 mph speeds we were going.  One of the riders to the right of us hit a cone in the road when going through a round about and swerved to the right nearly going down and taking the rider to his right down too.   It is a good thing that we left some extra distance and stayed on the side of the pack because at about mile 20, several riders went down at the front of the peleton we were in.  We heard later that the front rider thought there was a right turn but then then suddenly corrected himself to go straight and someone touched a wheel.

We had enough of that so we decided to only pull, ride by ourselves or draft with a small group.  We started to pass a lot of riders, including the teams and a large peloton formed behind us.  We kept pulling for many miles until the rollers convinced us to slow the pace down and the riders went ahead.  We saw a couple more riders who had gone down as we passed by.  A bit scary.

Our first 62 miles was faster than last year, averaging 22 mph hour up to the lunch stop.  I think we went out too fast because we had to slow the pace after lunch, but still finished with a total time of 5:52, so we met our goal of doing it under 6 hours.  We arrived at the finish line at 1:14 pm, compared with 1:37 pm last year.  Ann had some cramping starting at around mile 70, but she kept working through it.  But you can see Ann looked great at the finish!

Franz’s average heart rate of 148 was significantly lower than last year;s 155, showing that Ann had really improved.

This table shows a comparision with last year.

There are some beautiful homes long Hobble Creek so we stopped on the way back to take a picture of a few of them.

Later in the day I went out on my single bike to climb Squaw Peak.  After making the climb I continued up the Provo Canyon highway to Nunn’s park and then went back down on the bike trail. About half way down I had to stop because there was a moose right in the middle of the bike trail.  I wish I had my camera with me but it was back on the tandem.  I have seen many deer before while on a road bike but never a moose.