The Bay Area has excellent roads for not only motorcyling but bicycling, so I've been doing more rides in the mountains under my own power than gasoline power recently.
GPS systems can keep track of your movement in 4-d (time & space), though not always with great accuracy... but good enough to learn a lot about what where hills really are steep and how long that lunch break really was. This techno-measurement stuff is getting to me and I might get a heart rate monitor, but probably not...
You can see some tracks (maybe up to 10 at once?) at http://meb3.motionbased.com/, which is a neat website Garmin put together to show all of this data in various forms. A few snapshots of what it can show in the extended entry.
The best combo of interesting ride + clean data was a local loop: Alpine Road goes gently up Corte Madera creek into the Santa Cruz mountains, then turns to dirt. About 1/4 mile of dirt was enough, so I came down a bit, up the absurdly steep Joaquin, up as high as possible on public roads (shy of 1800 feet), then back down the steeper Los Trancos side of the ridge.
Apparently a bit of dirt wasn't enough, so two days ago I went with a group of people all the way to the coast side of the mountains, via dirt roads to the top of Santa Rosalita peak and all the way down to Aptos. Data quality here is poor, especially deep in the forest
Compare this with a similar ride with a similar group the month before, this time on a road map:
For reference, the return route (rightmost part) is the same on both rides. And no, I don't live in either Los Altos or Los Gatos, no need to lead you straight to my house!
Posted by MBlain at September 4, 2006 02:33 PMCool data!
Posted by: Kevan at September 4, 2006 04:58 PM