Utah State Road Biker

I know, I know it's been like seven months, but it was winter, and I THOUGHT I MIGHT ride some of southern Utah's highways, but K Jo and I started snowboarding and I started training for The Utah Half, and... Anyway here is my latest adventure on Utah's State Highways: SR-248. To sum up the whole ride, here is a picture: I love seeing flags when I ride because they are such great indicators of wind speed and direction. Yeah, that was my day... wind. I am picking up some shifts at Park City Medical Center so Saturday morning (May 22nd) I went there to become acquainted with the lab. I really didn't feel like driving all the way to Park City JUST to see the lab, so I decided to see what state roads were near Park City. Luckily, I found SR-248. I am in the middle of training for the Utah Half , and today I was supposed to ride two hours. How fortuitous that this road is 14.5 miles long with lots of hills meaning out and back would take two hours. The road starts at SR-224 ...

After much intense thought and many minutes on trifind.com , I finally figured out my race schedule for this year. Now this was no easy task mind you. I had a "rough draft" in my head of the races I wanted to do this year, then my Mom goes and does something like, oh I don't know, schedule the family summer party on a weekend that I had to work. That meant switching my week to accommodate them. That meant switching the races that I wanted to do (for those of you that DON'T know, I work seven on seven off, which means 7 ten hour shifts followed by seven days off so I have to work every other weekend, all weekend, which means I only have certain weekends that I can race). That was still no problem, because I had several races in mind. After a little web browsing (can I still say web browsing?), I found that the races I wanted to do would be on a weekend I was working OR they were already full... I had no idea that you had to register for a half-ironman so early in...

So in my last post, I talked about my goal for 2010, and my goal for January's distance. Today is the last day of the month, so I thought I would post an update. This month I had a goal to swim 5 km, bike 100 miles, and run 25 miles. I a.l.m.o.s.t got there... I only swam 4 times this month and each time, I did 40 laps in a 25 m pool (1000 m or 1 km) so I only got 4 km of swimming in, but I biked 101.8 miles and ran 26.3 miles so I met those goals. Tomorrow I plan on swimming to make up for that 1 missed km, and I will probably bike too. I guess I should clarify. In my last post, I talked about how miserable winter is which makes riding outside somewhat unpleasant. In truth, I only REALLY rode 37.3 miles. That was actual road riding the other 64.5 were "virtual miles" spent on a stationary bike trainer. On a lot of the rides I have done in the past, I usually average somewhere around 18 mph on any given ride. I figure that if I can ride 18 miles in 1 hour, I wou...

Over the weekend, K Jo and I went to visit my parents in EC so she could participate in the Little Grand Canyon half marathon. At packet pickup the day before the race, she asked a guy standing at a table if she could borrow his pen to fill out her registration form. She then did a double take, grinned sheepishly and blurted, "I read about you in my magazine". She recognized the man as Dane Rauschenberg ... see also here (you know you've made it when you have a Wikipedia article about you) who in 2006 ran 52 marathons in 52 weeks to raise money for the Mobile (Alabama) chapter of an organization called L'arche which benefits the mentally and physically disabled. He was featured in a running magazine that K Jo and I subscribe to and she recognized him from a photo in the magazine. He was in Price to run the half marathon that she was running and to promote and sign his book . I bought a copy and K Jo read about half of it aloud on the way home. I recommend i...

We are headed to EC this weekend so K Jo can do another half marathon. She worked this morning and since I didn't really feel like leaving her alone at my parent's house, I did a ride this morning and headed to SR-111. SR-111 starts at SR-48 (New Bingham Higway). It heads slightly north for the first few miles curving to the north west and eventually heads straight north into Magna. Most of it is downhill and it ends at SR-201 after 10.6 miles. Along the way, it passes the junctions for SR-173 (5300 S) and SR-171 (4500 S). Pretty boring, huh? If I had to sum up this ride in one word, it would be disappointing. I started out my ride from my townhouse and headed to 7800 S which eventually turns into New Bingham Highway. When I hit SR-111 I took a picture of the cool end sign, which is different from all the signs I have seen before, and headed North. I was pretty excited about riding this one because I had ridden sections of this road South of SR-48 and it was a lot of fun to r...

Monday was a day off for me and a work day for K Jo and I have been planning a long ride for a while... I am working towards a few goals, namely riding the LOTOJA and doing a Half-Ironman , so I decided on SR-32. SR-32 starts just north of Heber and heads pretty much straight north. It begins with a great warm-up by climbing around 1000 feet in about 4 miles. About halfway up the hill, there is an awesome view of Jordanelle Reservoir and it's dam. It then meanders East for a few more miles until the hill peaks then descends until a short steep climb into the small town of Francis where it meets SR-35 and takes an abrupt left and heads STRAIGHT north, never deviating, for around 6 miles. On the way, it undulates up and down through Kamas, where it meets SR-248, then SR-150 (mirror lake highway). It also parallels a nice little bike path for about a mile and a half just after you leave the town of Marion. The route continues on in a North-West direction through a few more small...

Remember my post about SR-67? The one about the Legacy Parkway? If not, it is the one right before this one... Anyway, there was a photographer there taking everybody's picture which is pretty standard for a racing event like this one. So Sunday after church, K Jo and I went on the website that was printed on the flier we were given to take a look at our pictures. We found hers first and... no surprise... she didn't like it. I thought she looked good, but she is... well, she just didn't like it. Then we looked up mine and Kathy Jo just about fell on the floor laughing... I laughed too, but I was also just a little disappointed... Okay, so here goes: Okay, go ahead and laugh... no, really, go ahead... I'll wait... Okay so if you didn't find it all that funny take a look at this one from the Salem Spring Triathlon I competed in on May 30th: Still don't get it? Okay one more picture. I took this one for an upcoming post about summer, fall/spring, winter bic...