I took Thursday off, so no need for a rest day on Sunday.  It was a hot sunny day, and I elected to go give my new bike shoes and clips a try.  I wanted an aerobic session, so I set a HR cap at 155.

Here are the details on Strava.

Just about the same speed as I have done a very similar course and distance, but with a lower overall heart rate.

I like the shoes.  It’s a lot easier to maintain a good cadence and I felt plenty secure.  Stopping and getting my feet out is going to require a bit more practice.  I was generally OK, but once I toppled over at an intersection.  I have also not completely mastered the method to get my foot back in the clips.  It took me a couple of trie each time to get the toe lined up right.

Another beautiful day!  Sunny, around 80F.  Nice breeze blowing.  Perfect beach day!

I wanted to go for a final bike ride for the trip, but I wasn’t in the mood for anything heroic.  So, I decided on a route that would take me through about 40km of winding back roads through Truro and Wellfleet.  These are smooth paved roads, with very little traffic.  But there is a lot of ups and downs.  I wanted to keep my avg speed over 25km/h, but not push it very hard.

Here’s a link to my ride on Strava.

Tomorrow:  Back to reality.  Probably a erg session, and then back to OTW on Sunday.

I visited the nice people at the Ptown Bike Shop and they fixed my bike.  I had apparently bent my derailleur tab.  He also adjusted the brakes, pumped up the tires and sold me a new seat (much more comfortable.  Very happy with how this went.  I walked in and walked out with a fixed bike 30 minutes later.

So, today, I was set for an adventure.  We had invited a family that we have been friends with for decades to come down and visit us for a few days.  My friend John is an avid sportsman.  He canoes, runs, bikes, hikes and all that stuff.  He brought his bike with him and we did yesterday’s adventure up in the Provincelands together.  Today we decided to do the Cape Cod Rail Trail end to end and back.  This is about 22 miles (35km) of reasonably flat, generally shady, smooth paved bike path that meanders through the interior of Cape Cod.  Some of it is very pretty, but much of it looks a lot like the view out of a train window.  Backs of buildings and woods.

John and I tend to push each other.  And today was no exception.  He rode lead on the way out, and I rode lead on the ay back.  So, I was pretty fresh halfway through and he was a bit toasted.  By the end, I was completely destroyed.  The last 5 miles were very hard.  The other challenge for the bike path is that, although it is flat, it is crossed by many, many streets.  Each crossing requires you to slow down, look both ways for traffic and then proceed.  There is also a significant amount of slower traffic on the path.  The result of all of this is a fair amount of speeding up and slowing down, which makes it a bit harder.

Here is my heart rate and speed.  (I was drafting along happily in the first half and out front for the second.)

If you feel like exploring my ride any further.  You can look at it on Strava.

About 60km.  About 23km/h.  On my son’s bike, since I broke mine with my slide on the sand.

Thunderstorms forecasted for this morning so I decided to not row.  I went for a bike ride in the early afternoon instead.  I headed out to the west of my town, where it gets quite rural.  If you live out there, we say you live in the middle of nowhere, so viola, the tour of nowhere…Tour de null part.

It was 45km of rolling hills.  Nothing too steep, but challenging for a novice,  I did it in 1:43, so a speed of 26.6 km/h.  The main point was to get some good low intensity aerobic training, and on that point mission accomplished.

WHo knewthat Google Earth can give you plots of elevation, speed, and even HR from GPX data?  I had no idea!  I found this when I was playing with the data from my run in Austria from yesterday morning.

A good 66 minutes or UT2/UT1 and another 10 minutes above that.

Tomorrow:  Steady State row on Quinsigamond.