47.46 Miles Fixed Gear

Yesterday my wife was sick. She ended up puking all day. Not sure if it is the flu or something she ate. Since I have not taken any real time off work I decided to stay home. I took the kids to school in the morning. My wife was sleeping so I though about jumping on my fixie for a few hours. Right before I left I got a package in the mail. It was some free biking bibs that someone sent me from Beijing China. Long story but I wanted to test them out since they looked really comfortable for my bum. I normally don’t ride in padded shorts or the typical spandex bike outfit. I am just the camo shorts type of guy I guess. So I threw on the bibs under my shorts and decided to ride out to Redfield, IA. It is a great ride but I needed to be back by 3:00 to start picking up the kids.

The app I use to track my rides is Cyclemeter. Best iPhone app I have every used. One of the features is the ability to post the start and end of your ride to Twitter and Facebook. I enabled the Facebook feature for this ride. One of the features the Facebook integration does is post a map link to Facebook as a status update. The app sends a map updates every 5 minutes. So you can watch along. But the really cool part is that if you reply to the massage the iPhone will read your message to me as I ride. My buddy Brian was pushing me most of the way with his comments. It was great. This feature would be a great tool for a coach to communicate with his/her runners or cyclists on training runs. It would also me cool to track someone hiking up in the mountains. There was a LOL moment when our friend Beth Ann call me a bitch in a comment and the computer voice read it back to me. I started cracking up to hear it read back to me.

Here is the entire path. Total miles was 47.46 in 3:02:19. Total calories burned was 3,797. I only ate a brownie, banana, and a diet coke before riding so I was in a calorie deficit for sure! Still had plenty of energy to sprints of the saddle for 2 blocks into the wind for the finish.

As you can see the rout overlaps itself so you need to zoom in to see the mile markers better.

The bibs were great and my butt felt like it was floating on a cloud most of the ride. I don’t think I will do much riding without padded shorts any more. The bibs are really going to help on long rides. Speaking of long rides this is about the longest I have attempted. I did this same rout a few times last year. It is such a great calorie burner that I need to do it more to get rid of my winter fat. I am making better fitness progress so more long rides are in store. For the next big one I will attempt a ride out of Panora which is the same rout but 12 miles past Redfield. That will put me over a metric century (100 kilometer or 62 mile) for the first time in a single ride. I just need to find the time since this will take 4-5 hours most likely.

Also I should note that this 3 hour ride took my iPhone to the battery limits. I was down to 10% battery when I finally made it back home. I was running the GPS app plus iTunes the entire time. I have ordered 3 iPhone battery backups for the iPhone. They should be here any day now. The battery backup will recharge an iPhone to about 80% of full battery. With 3 of these I should have more than enough battery to keep up with even my longest rides this summer. More on the battery backups I purchased when they arrive.

Here are a few bike photos from a quick break in Redfield.