Data looked like this [as always, click any image to embiggen]:
- Rode just about 21 miles, probably 20 of it was single track.
- Moving time was 3hrs even. Wall time was about 3hrs45min. Didn't seem like the talk/powerbar breaks added up to 45 minutes but it was a bit warm (85-90) and I'm still a noob with a bit more enthusiasm than technique, so a few breaks happened.
- There isn't a lot of steepness in the direction of travel (down or up) nor cross-trail (no cliffs or super-steep drops along the trail). But there are a lot of rocks. This is the stuff my all-mountain 140mm FS is supposed to eat for breakfast.
- It was a good thing I had my new Camelbak with 100 oz. of water given the temps and the lack of places to top-up.
Many (most?) dirt trails in parks and OHV areas are not (yet) labelled in Google Maps. There is a labor intensive way to see your GPS track on top of a labelled map. Use the online park maps and superimpose the GPS track.
Typical default output of a fitness log or GPS UI is like so:
All you want is the track though. In something like SportTracks you can set the background to be nothing. You just have the track over a white background. You can save that as an image. That app was not available on Mac when I gave up Windows a few years ago, so I switched to Rubitrack. That's where the image above came from. It doesn't offer a no-background track though.
However, it does export just the track to GPX. You can import that to another app, like Google Earth. In GE there is a slider too that adjusts the transparency of the background image. At full transparency, you get just the track, like so:
Now you open the track image and the park map image, align them to direction (North straight up is good) and scale and merge them. Here's the park map:
In this case the park map was 26 degrees off from North and needed a bit of rotation to align it with the track image. The scale was about 3 times bigger than what would fit on a screen easily. After getting things oriented and sized properly, the track image was overlaid as a layer on top of the map, and the opacity was set to 30% to allow the map to show through. If I'd made the track image background white it would have been neater. But this way you can see where the layers were.
This was an interesting ride. My favorite of the highly regarded local sites so far. [Others were China Camp and Tamarancho.] The trails here challenge your technique plenty, but if you screw up you have room to avert disaster.
Since I wasn't wasting so much of my energy and focus here on death grip on the bars, I was able to work on one-finger braking on the downhills and slow-crawling on the rocky climbs. After 20 miles of it I was tired but felt like I'd learned some things. It will be interesting to see if I could clean Two Quarry better next time. It wasn't dabs that were the problem, it was trying to climb too fast to keep up momentum. Heart rate hit 189 at one point and I had to just stop and gulp air for a minute. Keeping the thing on two wheels while spinning a little slower in a lower gear takes better balance but I think I made a little progress there.
And I was glad I'd taken the precaution of wearing my elbow pads. Didn't need them this week, unlike a few weeks ago at Tamarancho:
but my buddy John had a rare off and his elbows paid the price:
Oh, and Lepe's hit the spot on the way home.
The fish taco was good. Next time I'd get it with the combo with sides, rice, beans, etc.
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