Bike Ride

Sandy Owings, a friend from the Bay Area, is visiting town this week. He is a fellow cyclist, and brought up his bike to ride with Francesca and me. And of course, show it off!




Both Francesca and Sandy have Giant TCR Carbon fiber bikes, and I have another friend Chris who has a Felt carbon fiber bike. This of course left me thinking about how nice a carbon fiber bike of my own would be... unless I outdo them all and get a titanium bike instead - haha!

Anyway, we met at Francesca's and decided to ride to Seward Park. This is a nice ride on neighborhood and bike-friendly roads. Much of the ride is along Lake Washington Blvd which has nice views. We rode to Leschi, where Francesca's toe started to bug her, so she wanted to rest it while Sandy and I continued to Seward Park.

Sandy picked up the pace considerably, but he is tall and offers me a large drafting zone. ;) We cranked along to Seward and I pointed out Mercer Island, the I-90 bridge, and downtown Bellevue. Once we arrived at Seward, we took a few minutes to peel off a layer of clothes (it wasn't as cold as we expected) before comparing odometers and heading back. Mine read 14.8 while his read 11.5. That is a huge discrency and puzzled me. On the way back we compared speed and distance, and found our speeds matched but my distance was incrementing a lot slower. Hm... why is this, I wondered?

On one section of the road we were able to do 20 mph, due to a combination of a slight downgrade, favorable winds, and just pedaling hard. In this section I watched my odometer closely - at 20 mph, I should cover 1 mile in 3 minutes, or 1/10th of a mile in 18 seconds. That didn't happen at all, the mileage increased 1/10th over nearly a minute... and then I suddenly realized what was going on: I had my bike computer set to display average speed, not distance! I wanted to tell Sandy I was a bozo, but he was a bike length or two in front of me, and with the wind, he wouldn't have heard me yell. It took a few more minutes after a small hill, to catch up and tell him.

Once back as Leschi, we found Francesca and hung out and chatted at the Starbucks for a bit. I was quite disappointed they didn't have any of their apple crisps left, but I was able to console myself with a tall cafe mocha. Eventually we motivated and got back on our bikes to ride home. Overall it was a great ride - the weather has been cold and drizzly lately, but fortunately we managed to miss such weather.