I mentioned it's been awhile since I did a bike update.  Three log hits for this entry. 

First is my current mileage for the year, my odometer reads 4926, or just over 1075 for the year thus far.  Thus I'm getting the month of June to get ahead for the coming 6 months and to put me on track to possibly even reach all the way to 6,000 on my odometer by the end of the year.  A good portion of this was done over my vacation when I took my bike and every other morning of my vacation I got in a 52 mile ride from Laughlin, NV to Needles, CA on River Rd. which lies West of the Colorado River, then returning up Arizona Rt. 95 through Bullhead.  The 'fun' part of this ride, is when I leave at 7AM the light winds are from the South and in my face, but as the sun starts to heat the environment the winds shift and they come from the North so that by the time I am headed through Bullhead I am facing a steady 10-20mph wind from the North.  Its a good training ride, although portions of the road could really use some maintenance.

Second regards the Tour de Cure in East San Diego County.  The ride was the 21st of May.  The Tour de Cure is the American Diabetes association annual fund raising ride.  The ride is held around the country in different locations and the Spring, and this year only ride in San Diego (last year I helped organize a 100+ mile ride over Mt. Palomar, but we not holding that ride this year).  At any rate the 62.5 miles includes over 6,000 feet in elevation gain and generally draws between about 250-350 people.  We departed at 7:00AM and headed up into the mountains of East San Diego county.  Unfortunately it was a hot day with the temperature for the day hitting well over 90 degrees farenheit.  I was 5 minutes late starting so I got to ride without the benefit of a group for almost the entire day.

After the first 10 miles the route starts heading up and the next 22 miles (on the metric century course) are predominently uphill as your elevation goes from ~1000 to ~5000 ft. above sea level.  It took me from 7AM till 10AM to reach this halfway point and by the time I got there my left foot was numb... never a good sign so I spent a little time at the halfway point in the shade and watched one or two people drop out of the ride.  Then I started the return, fortunately it is mostly downhill (along a different route) but unfortunately it does have some good uphill sections.  In the end it took me till Noon to finish the ride and I did the 62.5 miles with an average speed of 13.9mph.  All told it was a great ride and we raised quite a bit of money for the ADA.

Finally, I'm going for a ride tomorrow with the NCCC again.  It's been like 5 weeks since I last rode with them and we're doing what is now known as Route 58.  Jeff Gross who lays out the Saturday rides has started posting them on his wife's website, so the route for tomorrow is here: http://www.kimberlygross.com/PageManager/Default.aspx?PageID=932815&NF=1.  The nice thing with Jeff's new system is he includes a map so you can get a feel of where the ride should go if you are unfamilar with it.  In this case he recently added a new portion to the end of the ride so instead of it being a 34 mile ride it's a 38 mile ride.  I put it into my topo software and came up with the following elevation profile which I'm including to test embedded graphics in my cross posting.  The total elevation gain for the ride is about 2500ft, and it should be a good ride.

Of course I've skipped over quite a bit in this quick update.  Let's see I've been managing to keep up a minimum of once a week to work on my bike and several mtn bike rides both with co-workers in Carlsbad and on my own up in the Mountains of Big Bear, including the use of the Sky Chair at Snow Summit to explore some of the Southern side of Big Bear Lake.  I'll try to get organized enough to post one or two pictures from up in the mountains this weekend.