First Tuesday/Thursday morning ride in a long time that I didn’t feel like I wanted an excuse to bail while climbing Kings. Maybe just because it was 4-5 degrees warmer? A balmy 36 at the base of Kings, climbing to 41 at the top, and finishing the ride at 46! Yay! Summer’s here! Well yeah, not quite, but seeing temps in the low 30s was getting pretty old.

Best time to the top since October 27th. At 35:39 via the park, just… geez… 7 minutes slower than my best time since Strava started (2008). But considering how slowly some of my recent rides have been, this was really good. I felt like I was having fun on the bike again! I could occasionally watch the power creep up for a bit too.

I felt almost good enough to risk including the regular West Old LaHonda loop, but since there’s the potential to have to wait 8 minutes at the top of Old LaHonda at the new stoplight, we couldn’t risk it. As it turned out, good thing, because the upper part of West Old LaHonda was closed off for tree work.

Descending Old LaHonda will never be fun (if you are having fun on it, you’re riding dangerously!), but the technique from a week ago worked well again today. Just get behind the last car and follow it down. That way there’s plenty of crumple zone in front of you (meaning, it won’t be us hitting the cars coming up, it will be the cars in front of us that are heading down).

We rode past the bottom of 84 and they’ve certainly made it clear that it’s closed to all traffic. Even has a no bikes sign on it. Barricades, fencing, and people to police it. I’d really like to take a close-up look at what’s going on. Something to do on a Sunday when there’s likely nobody out there working.

This was the first really nice Tuesday/Morning ride for me in quite a while. I wasn’t fast, but I didn’t feel like I was dying from old age either.