Fuel for the ride

Cezanne makes fun of me because I like to take pictures of our food.  This was breakfast this morning (along with 2 cups of Peets coffee).  Cezanne only gets one pancake even though I'm always trying to force more food on her.

These were banana/blueberry/blackberry buckwheat pancakes with strawberries on top.

I had to take a pic from this angle, pretty thick.  They kept me full on my 3-hour ride today.

http://connect.garmin.com/activity/1967608

I used the "lap" function on my Garmin 705 for the first time today.  I wanted to do a sort of 20 minute TT to see how I would feel.  I started it after riding for an hour and 40 minutes.  I wound up going for about 23 minutes, 91 cadence average, and my average heart rate was only 164 bpm.  As a comparison, my heart rate last September for the Mission Bay TT portion of the triathlon averaged 175 bpm for 27 minutes.  

For my "trial TT" today I averaged 19.8 mph which I don't think is too bad considering there were just over 1,400 feet of climbing in that 7 miles.

I recently downloaded a program for Apple computers called "Ascent."  It's basically a biking training data repository program with a little more functionality than Garmin Connect.  It gives you time in HR Zones (power too if you have that), the grade at any point of the ride, the steepest gradient during the ride, your average VAM (climbing rate), as well as all the usual min, max, average stuff (speed, heart rate, cadence).

My average VAM during my trial TT today was 1200 meters per hour.  That is pretty aweful when you compare it to Lance's TT up the Alpe d Huez in 2004.  He had a VAM of 1790.  Carlos Sastre won the Tour de France on the Alpe d Huez this year doing a VAM of 1650 and the favorites behind him had a VAM of 1550.  Got all this data from a bicycling.com article.  I'm a nerd.