Blueberry Hill Training Ride

Description:

For today’s cycling exercise, I chose to do some hill training.  It’s best to pick a hill with a nice name, because then it doesn’t hurt so badly, or at least it sounds like a nice destination.  So today I chose a place the locals refer to as Blueberry Hill, and whose official name is “Pleasant Ridge”.  I got fooled by its name the first time I discovered it many years ago on a two day bike trip from East Lyme, CT to Poughkeepsie, NY.  I had planned to ride on Rt 55, but that was a long route with heavy traffic.  Checking the road map, I found a short cut called “Pleasant Ridge”, and I went for it.  Boy was I surprise!  They really should call it Thigh Buster Mountain.  Today I am revisiting it on purpose, because I choose to be abused.

I left my house at 7:30 am while it was a pleasant 70 degrees.  Traffic was light through the normally busy Red Oaks  Mill intersection.  I breezed through that and was soon out of the traffic zone and onto the Dutchess Rail Trail.   I ride that often and my brain soon went on autopilot and I sped past my exit.  A half mile later I realize that I missed my turn.  I continued on, changing the route a little to a longer, flatter ride.  That was a good trade-off, except today was supposed to be hill training day.  Oh well.

The first 15 miles were flat, quite and scenic.  Then I reached the hills, starting with a couple warm up hills before the big long one.  I hit 44 mph down one of them.  A couple years ago I hit 46 there, my all-time max.  It’s scary because there are some S-curves on the way down and I always hold back a little.   But the last drop straightens out then safely flattens, so I let it rip for the last 500 yards to max out.

Blueberry Hill started at mile 18 and climbed steadily for 2.6 miles at about 8% grade.  I was able to climb it non-stop, although slowly, so I was happy with that.  I stopped at the top to have a nectarine. (It would have been more appropriate to have some blueberries, but the farmer’s blueberry stand is no longer there.)  After a brief break, I enjoyed the downhill ride.  The slow climb had dropped my average from 16+ to 13.5 mph.  The descent was so steep and curvy that I had my breaks on most of the way down, and my average did not recover very much.  By the end of the ride though, it recovered respectably above 15 mph.  It’s interesting to look at the elevation graph by time rather than distance.  Since this was an out-and-back route, the elevation-by-distance is symmetrical, while the elevation-by-time shows the skew between the climbs and the descents.

Around mile 30 I picked up my originally planned route to add another hill climb just for fun.  When I turned the corner at the start of the hill, I saw a couple experienced riders 100 yards ahead of me.  I slowly gained on them and latched on behind for a short down hill.  Then on the next steep rise I blew by them and soon lost sight of them in my rear view mirror.  Oh yeah, I still had some juice left in these legs!

Statistics:
Zoom and pan the map to see my ride.  Click the name or select view detail to get more information at Garmin Connect.