On Saturday I went for a ride up towards the reservoir in the hills west of here. I was interested to see how difficult it would be, to gauge my relative fitness since riding up there last time I was here. I was fairly pleasantly surprised – I rode the entire way from home to the reservoir without any stops other than those required by traffic lights. It was tough, but I made it up all the hills without any real issues, even the annoyingly long and steep one near the end of Stevens Creek Boulevard.
My plan was to do the circuit – keep going south and come back into civilisation on Saratoga, and then follow that, basically, back home. But that plan went a bit pear-shaped when I ended up going the wrong way – since I couldn’t remember the route and my phone had no reception. I did discover that the maps on the iPhone are cached a little, but sadly I hadn’t happened to look far enough west before, so although I had a very low-zoom overview, it was too far out to have street names, making it pretty useless.
I ended up going down Stevens Canyon Road, but after a while I became certain I’d never been down here before. Plus I got to a t-intersection where the continuation had “No Through Road” posted, and the street that met had all it’s letterboxes on the main road. So I presumed both went nowhere. As it turns out, the street off – Redwood Gulch Road – actually goes through to highway 9, which I could have taken back. D’oh.
So instead I just retraced my steps all the way back to Stevens Creek Boulevard and home from there. All up it was about 32km, which isn’t half bad… I wanted to do at least 20km, and had forgotten exactly how far everything was… I want to work up to being able to do about 60km comfortably, which will give me the range and stamina to tackle the roads through the western hills all the way to the coast (but probably not back… could be a problem.. :) )
Unfortunately, despite stopping at the shop just before Stevens Creek Boulevard for a litre of Powerade/Gatorade, by the time I got home I was feeling a bit crap, and just continued deteriorating from there. I ended up lying on my bed, dozing, for most of the afternoon… last I recall it was still daylight, when I fell asleep. I was mostly fine by the morning, though.
