40 Miles With A LOT Of Climbing

I had the day off today, and so I decided to see about going for a longish ride.

It started off poorly when my chain kept skipping. I flipped my bike over to check it out, and found my 4th gear is now missing several teeth.

Not good.

So I adjusted the rear deraileur, and took off with the knowledge that I can no longer use 4th gear. A bit of a pain, but do-able.

I rode from my house to my work, to see how long it would take me if I decided to ride all the way before work. It's 12+ miles to work with a MASSIVE hill on 8th south past East High. I had to stop once on my way up that blasted hill, but I made it to work in just over an hour.

From there, I rode up to 2100 east on Sunnyside Ave, and south to 2700 south. I followed that road up and around until I hit 3300 south and on to Wasatch Blvd. Here is the view of the hill I climbed to get to the top of Wasatch.

 Now I turned south again and started climbing Wasatch. At the top of one of the hills, I stopped for a quick break and snapped these shots.

My bike taking a nap. It was tired.

Around that curve, I got to descend for a bit before climbing once more.

If you look REALLY closely about 7 miles in from the base of those mountains, you can see my house. ;)

So off I went, down a hill, up a hill, rinse and repeat.  After another vigorous climb, I snapped this shot:

I followed Wasatch out and rode to the base of Big Cottonwood Canyon (25 miles at that point).

There I took a short potty break at a 7 Eleven, then rode Fort Union Blvd across the valley to 3200 west and back home. Total trip 40.02 miles, total time moving 3:13:54.

Oh, and one more thing. This picture is major blurry, but it shows the weather I was fighting on this ride...

61 degrees F, 24 mph winds.  That's right, TWENTY FOUR freaking miles per hour!  Eeesh.  Oh, well. According to LiveSTRONG, I burned 6089 calories on that ride.  I think I may have PIZZA for dinner tonight. I can afford the calories today!

-PB