It’s been a couple weeks but I wanted to record the results of my ride for Diabetes – Tour de Cure here in San Diego.  The 2009 tour used the same 71 mile route used in 2008, and since I still haven’t gotten back to where I’m riding my 40 mile weekend rides, I limited myself to the 71 mile route instead of the century (100 mile) route.

The 2008 tour – well it wasn’t one of my best. It took me 5 hours and 45 minutes to complete. My average speed with my Garmin was 12.6 for the route (note the Garmin’s speed is based on time stopped at lights and rest stops… which while accurate isn’t what I want to measure, which is jsut my speed when not being penalized for stops including traffic signals)

Unfortunately I didn’t capture my bike computer’s numbers last year but I recall it being pretty low. The Garmin also estimated that I burned ~4741 calories on the ride, and recorded a max heart rate of 185. (Note: the higher the max heart rate the worse baseline shape you are in.)

This year my bike computer had me completing the ride with an average speed of 15 mph – which was great since I was shooting for 14.5 and would have been satisfied with anything over 14mph.

As for the Garmin it said 5 hours 15 minutes to complete – a 30 minute improvement.

My average speed with my Garmin was 13.7 mph – this time I actually managed to mark the time spent at rest stops – I stopped at 2 rest stops, # 4 and #5 and so I can see they accounted for 20 minutes of time, and even if I get motivated average my speed for the 3 legs of riding between them. My average speeds on the 3 legs surrounding the rest stops were 14.0, 14.4 and 15.8 respectively. Admittedly there was a nice wind blowing from the NW near the end of the ride which helped push me down the coast on that last leg (although as always I had to fight it as headwind for 7 miles down the bike path first.)  By the way, the rest stops put together by the organizers are great on this ride (both years) and there is a great deal of support along the well marked route.

It was also a fairly cool day, a blessing since as I recall it was hot on April 19^th in 2008.  Overall it was a great ride, and they had a couple bands lined up to play after the ride.  The organizers learned from last year and did a much better job of spreading out the start time so people finished closer to the same time, instead of those on the long rides finishing after most of the festivities were over.  Of course I’ll be back to ride again next year, and encourage everyone to join me.