Bike Life, News

65 Miler on a 65 Degree Day

3,800 Calories

Phillip and Scott went on a 65 mile road ride on Tuesday. We left from Salvagetti and headed toward Golden. Our first real climb was up Lookout Mountain, which put us up around 7300 ft, or about 2000 ft of vertical gain. The climb was done at a totally reasonable pace because we were shooting for about 75 miles for the day.

See a picture of our route or you can see this in 3D by Downloading the detailed route for Google Earth

Download Google Earth

(Time for preemptive excuses) We both had some sort of flu/cold/hack thing only 2 days ago and neither was close to 100%.

Okay, okay. So, we are way up high and it is a perfect day for road riding, so we decide we are going to head toward Evergreen. We shot up to I-70 and got on for a couple minutes and got off on exit 254. We immediately stopped at the first convenience store for some snacks. We were at 30 miles at this point. We each ate 1 banana, our respective energy bars, half of a cream cheese danish (which was scary) and a super-power-but-not-a-real-color drink. We took off feeling okay for a the next few minutes.

We climbed toward Evergreen on Evergreen Parkway, but turned off on Kerr Gulch… Oh My God fun! We flew down that road and definitely were never under the speed limit. The GPS showed about 46 mph on one stretch. This put us back out at 74, which we followed down to Morrison. We headed around Red Rocks and proceeded toward Golden.

About 200 yards after we crossed under I-70, we had a strange situation come up. We could see tumbleweeds trying to cross the road. In a car, this may be common, but never on a bike. And these were not little ones, they were huge! As we came up to them, we were picking up speed really quickly. About 5 feet before them, the wind became really strong and the dirt and tumbleweeds started spinning and flying. We grabbed on to our bars, closed our eyes and pedaled. The wind pushed us both a few feet over and the tumbleweeds didn’t touch either of us. It was pretty scary, though. Especially if a car would have been right there at the same time.

The rest of the ride was pretty casual. The weather was perfect and their were many people out enjoying it. The route back to the store was the Clear Creek Bike Path for most, then back down to 32nd to Cherry Creek Path.

For our next rides, we will post a few days ahead on our Twitter Account. Sign up and follow so you can join our next ride. It definitely won’t be quite so long, but it will be super fun.

Stats:
Phillip – Lemond Something Aluminum, Shimano 105
Scott – Jamis Eclipse, SRAM Red

Calories burnt: 3,800
Flat Tires: 1

Leave a Comment

  1. Ted Taylor says:

    Great story, Scott. 3800 calories, huh. That’s 1.08 lbs of body fat. It would be nice to have a KML file for those of us that have Google Earth.

  2. Scott says:

    Great idea. I added the KML file and a link to download Google Earth if someone so desires. Playing back the route is really pretty interesting.

  3. beth pedrick says:

    The first time I rode Kerr Gulch I hit 50 MPH. Pretty scary when you have never been on that road before. There are a few turns that come up on you pretty fast going that speed. Not a fan of riding on 70 – I ALWAYS seem to get bitten by flies?! Boo.