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I love biking, but I HATE hills. I suck at climbing them. I get tired and have no endurance. But, if you want to actually take advantage of the gorgeous biking around this area, you have to climb hills. And I decided that I’d climb one of the biggest in the Bay Area – Page Mill. An elevation of ~3000 feet. It’s the second time I’ve done it and it was horrible. It was cold and the wind almost blew me over. I thought about turning around countless times, but something kept me going and I eventually made it to Skyline. And from there on out, the ride was a piece of cake – just cruise down Skyline, fly down Old La Honda, and take Portola -> Alpine -> Foothill Expressway back to the start of my ride.

I also took along my Garmin GPS device for the ride, which was a boon since I just discovered the wonders that is MotionBased, which allows you to track your rides. The data from my ride can be found here. But, if you’re lazy, you can just look at the picture below:

My ride took 3 hours, but I embarrassingly did only 2hr 40min of actual riding (the rest of the time was spent catching my breadth while climbing Page Mill). Fun facts include riding 31.30 miles, hitting 29.4 mph (according to my bike computer, I hit 33.4 mph, but whatevs), and climbing and descending ~2900 feet. Well, there’s always room for improvement, so once the weather gets a little warmer, I’ll hopefully be able to do the same climb and even extend it out to descending King’s Mountain Road, making the ride about 5+ miles longer.

Motionbased is really cool and if you have a GPS and like outdoor stuff, this is definitely an application to check out. It takes a lot of frustration out of mapping my rides using Google Maps and integrates the data on elevation, which certainly underscores the difficulty of my ride today.

Oh yes, and before I forget, these rides are part of my training for the June 8th Tour de Cure ride. If you’re so inclined, please donate to support me on my Tour de Cure page!