A Saturday Ride from Hell

Enter the hardest cardio workout I've ever had. Period.  It all started out as a simple Saturday ride.

Or so I thought.

Brian, one of the riders today is from Portland and knows quite a few interesting routes around town.  We started off in the city around the Willamette River by the Fremont Bridge and headed up through the city.  The city proper is mostly flat but soon enough you end up having to chug up a series of hills.  If you look at the image below called "Elevation" (from the Box.net Widget) you can see that for pretty much the first 6 miles we were climbing hills.  Not as if these were casual, Mid Western hills... These "hills" are part of the Cascade Mountain Range. 

The climb started out around sea level, but by the time we were done, found ourselves around 1,100 ft.  That's a climb.  It seems like there was no reprieve here either.  The ride for the first 6 miles was pretty much all up hill.  Some sections steeper than others and some relatively mild... which after the steep parts seem pretty darn nice.  I think I saw the steepest grade was around 14%. Yikes!

There were portions of this trek which were really, really steep.  There were a few sections where I swore my heart would explode...

And I have proof

I was wearing a hear rate monitor and once my heart rate hit 179 BPM... To give you an idea of what this means we should consider something called "Maximum Heart Rate" or MHR for short.  Your MHR is said to be the highest number of beats per minute your heart can withstand during exercise.  This is typically calculated by subtracting your age from 220.  Hmm... That gives me a max of 190...

Pretty close

Needless to say this was exhausting.  It was a great workout, maybe the best I've ever had and for sure one of the most interesting.  It's always fun to see how far you can push.

As for the data? If you're a Google Earth user I've saved this route as a KMZ file for you to import and check out.  Make sure to note the massive elevation changes.  Over 1,000 ft. Amazing!

• Download Google Earth - Make sure you have the latest and greatest...
  
• Google Earth KMZ File of the Ride - After importing this try the Play feature.  Since this was captured from a GPS device it has a logical sequence to the data.  You can replay the route via Google Earth and see the exact route.

Also - Below is a bunch of Images taken off of my Garmin Forerunner 305 and from Google Earth.

Thanks to Par and (another) Brian for letting me tag along on this ride.  They even sand bagged it to let me keep up with them... Awfully nice.

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