Tuesday, March 6, 2007

Cycling the Saratoga Loop

J and I decided to bike out to Saratoga, he to get to I's house, and me to burn off some of the cookies I'd had at my folks' place over the weekend. We started off a moderate pace, and J, champion that he is, requested we kick it up a notch. Soon we were at the top of our first hill overlooking the Steven's Creek Reservoir. Here's the map on Google Maps.

The climb up to the Reservoir is about 250 feet, and the view is pretty nice up there. I've been meaning to have a picnic by the river in the valley; it's very lush and peaceful. Next was Mt. Eden, a tough hill for anyone, especially a beginning cyclist. In fact, it was about 1 year and 1 month ago that I had climbed this hill as a newbie and was so tired afterward that S came to pick me up from Saratoga. It's also about 300 feet, but squeezed into a single mile. But it too was conquered, and we wound our way down the hill and made it to I's house in about 1 hour. There I made my questionable decision to take a different route back.

With J dropped off, I decided I wanted to take a loop back. An additional draw was the fact that I hadn't taken the Hwy 9 to Hwy 35 route before, but I knew it had great views of San Jose and wound through the forest most of the way. The climb up 9 turns out to be just over 2000 feet. Who knew? Well, I do now, and it was pretty painful. It's good to know that I haven't lost too much cycling power over my break, but I think it would have been healthier for me to work up to rides like this.

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