Practice Ride

Today was an exciting day; the team woke up early to prepare for the practice ride. We practiced racking the bikes on the vans (which hopefully won't be on there very often) and then ate breakfast.

We headed over to Lake Sammamish and began our ride. The ride was short, 22 miles but was excellent practice for everyone including the crew who are responsible for directing us on the rode, and who are really the backbone of the team.

I'm riding with a Garmin 305 cycling computer, which is a GPS with a heart rate and cadence sensor (cadence is the rotations per minutes of the pedals or cranks). It tracked our route and can be uploaded to my computer to correlate heart rates, elevation, percent grade, speed and many other things.

The team circling around our project manager Jeremy

Todays route and heart rate speed graph

The program is really neat and it will be cool to have the total mileage from the trip. After the ride we got a chance to practice in the a velodrome and it was a really neat opportunity to ride one of only 20 or so velodromes in the country.

Tomorrow is our first day on the road and the trip is 75 miles, I can't wait!