Saturdays Ride: 7/14 - It's not the distance, it's the elevation gain

Saturday morning - no sleep in for you!  We gathered in the cool pre-dawn darkness at our Nob Hill rally point and headed out for a 53 mile loop around the city.  Details on the route are here.  The main thing about this ride, is that it has a long, long hill on it.  We basically reversed the route from last week and instead of a fun 8 mile downhill, we had a grueling 8 mile uphill slog.  But remember, cycling is fun - right?

Cruising north on the Bosque

We started off the ride with 12 10 11 12 riders (a new Penultimate record although counts kept changing as we went - some how basic counting eludes us) as we wound our way through the neighborhoods and south past the airport. The best part of today's ride was that most of us were sporting our very visible and nice looking team jerseys! Go Domo!

At the Alameda open space about 1/2 way

We biked north on an eerily empty Bosque trail keeping a respectable 16 mph pace until we were most of the way to the top, when hordes of runners and bikers suddenly appeared.  While it is nice to have the trail to ourselves, always great to bike by so many happy and friendly people out enjoying the morning.

At the bottom, just starting up the hill.

At this point we started the slow climb going East on Tramway.  It is a long slow slog of 8 miles up to the base of the tram.  The other bad thing is through quirks in geography, you can see the entire length of road the whole way, which makes your crawl up the side seem very slow (at least for me - others on the team went up like rabbits).  The kicker?  At the end of this, you take a left and do the short spur up to the base of the tram.  It is steep with segments of about 11% grade.  One of our new riders split off here, so 10 9 11 riders made it to the top for a little rest and refilling of the water bottles.

Victorious climbers celebrate in their achievement.

From here we headed south along Tramway slowly loosing all the elevation we just gained. Another rider split off, which left 9 8 10 of us left.  At this point of the ride the main motivator was FOOD - so we snaked through the neighborhoods heading west toward breakfast.  As usual we ended our ride at our wonderful jersey sponsor Serafin's Chile Hut in Nob Hill where we met up with some family of riders to enjoy a well earned breakfast!  Not bad for a Saturday morning - 53 miles with a ride time of just under 4 hours. (More GPS details here - thanks Diane and Val for the info!)

Calories don't count if you eat shortly after your ride - right?