Unpowered Ride.

I managed to finally get out around town and do some mountain bike riding. Cullen was kind enough to loan me a bike, and his good one at that. We didn’t set any speed records and stopping for a snack on the way home wasn’t exactly hard-core, but it was great to get our and see the local riding areas. Turns out they are really pretty. Too bad we forgot a camera.

Captures and geeky GPS tracks after the break. (Click through for more.)

Cullen has a a Garmin mountain bike computer, if memory serves, it is a Edge 305.

It was fairly painless to get all kinds of information about our ride and export a KML file for Google Earth. Here are some simple captures of a few interesting views and the KML file too. Total ride length around 15.6 miles (25 km) and 1550′ (475 m) of vertical climb. Not Olympic, but not bad for a couple of professional desk pilots. The Garmin training software will show you all this against many variables, including time, distance and if we were foolish enough to were a heart rate monitor, it would have shown us the reason behind our discomfort in detail.

There was some struggle to get the KML, apparently we needed a converter tool to work with the GPX file. I found a very interesting Google Maps plugin that lets me display the KML (or GPX if I had it) directly.

Ride Overview KML

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mountainbiking, gps, garmin, santacruz