We're now days from May yet it's 40ºF and snowing.  This is actually a nice boon as I haven't been able to really do anything outside recently.  Rather than my usual barefootedness I spent this winter in wool-lined house shoes or insulated shoes when out so my foot muscles have atrophied.  Then I wisely jumped back into my old conditioning routine now that spring is bringing about the sloughing off of my winter hibernation lethargy and I was working out barefooted, managing to get another stress fracture in my foot.  It's mild and I've been a lot better about staying off it than I was last time so hopefully it'll only set me back a few weeks (It's been two weeks now and it's feeling a lot better).  This next winter I definitely need to be better about keeping my training motivation up when the mercury start trying to hide in the bulb.

That's it for now; I just wanted to knock the dust off.  I'm still lagging on the photo processing but hopefully I'll get some new stuff added in the next few days.

I took advantage of some late season powder and got in a good ride yesterday. It was unbelievable how good it felt to get out. I've been stuck inside with really no energy due to this flu and chest congestion for just over two weeks and we had company prior to that so it's been almost a month since my last snowboard session.  Loveland was ready for me too, giving the best conditions I've seen out there this season. They've cut down on the amount of grooming they're doing and the late season traffic is really light. Amazing powder and packed powder everywhere making for smooth, quiet rides.

Here's the Google Map chronicling the ride:

Loveland 4.08.08

And the Google Earth version, which handles photos stacked at the same location:

Loveland 4.08.08 Google Earth file

There's some wonkiness with the GPS log unfortunately. I apparently accidently paused the GPS so I missed some runs and caused a weird teleport line when the GPS resumed. I'm too lazy right now to manually split the tracklog to get rid of it. Feel free to ask for a refund.

Hopefully I'll get another ride or two this season before they close. If not, this was certainly a great ride to close out the season and transition to mountain biking season.

As usual, here's the Google Map page:

Golden, CO - 4.04.2008

And here is the Google Earth version, now even complete with speed, heart rate, and elevation 3D overlays.

Golden, CO - 4.04.2008 - Google Earth file

I'm trying to get back into the swing of processing and sorting photos, so I whipped up another bike report from one of my first few rides in Colorado. I found the setting that controls the track resolution on the map page as well. I turned it up on this one for better display; hopefully it doesn't cause the page to load too slow now.

Here's the map page:

South Table Mountain - 10.04.2007

And here is the KMZ file for the Google Earth users:

Google Earth version

I've been using a program called RoboGEO to bulk tag my photos and export a web page and Google Earth files. Here's an example from one of my last rides in Austin:

Walnut Creak - 7.16.2007

It looks as if RoboGeo throws out a lot of resolution on the tracklog in order to decrease rendering time of the map so that's why the route has a lot of jagged points. This one has some bad data as well because I forgot to turn the GPS on until we started into the ride and I didn't clean up the extra logging as I spun around the parking lot during my cooldown.

I also created a Google Earth KMZ file that shows the actual tracklog. It's available here:

Walnut Creek 070716 Google Earth KMZ

Here's a shot of Fáelán on his recent birthday, standing proud and surveying the offerings that were made unto him.

His actual birthday party was held at his daycare.  Much better to let paid professionals deal with a screaming horde of three year olds than us parents.  Parenthood has already stressed my liver enough.