A trip to Jurassic Park

Sunday morning at o'dark hundred I met up with Mandy for a 3 hour tour.  The skipper wasn't able to join us on this tour though but we figured it out for ourselves.  Our tour was a bike ride to visit Tower Hill for the first time of the year.  We started at 6:30 so we could beat the heat and get the workout done early.

There were rolling hills throughout the ride but the Tower hill is it's own special bugger.  It is a climb that lasts about 1 mile.  It is tough for the first half of the climb but then it levels out to a smaller grade incline for the top half.  We hit the top of the tower and were almost at the perfect half way point for the 3 hours that Mandy needed for her training plan.  We had a detour planned on the return trip of the ride to stop at a gas station for water bottle refills but first we got to ride down the Tower hill.  It is one hill where I don't squeeze the brakes too much since it is fairly straight and low traffic.  I think I topped out around 31mph.  My Garmin says my max speed for the ride was just over 39mph but it doesn't show that anywhere on my speed graphs so I'm going with the 31mph that is on the speed graph.

We did our detour to the small gas station that is off a back country highway only to discover that they are closed on Sundays.  That's okay we had other options and luckily enough water to get us through to those options further into the ride.  After making our way to the next gas station option we began making our way back to Mandy's house.  We were peacefully riding along when Mandy spotted something out of Jurassic Park.  It was a large snapping turtle and it had huge claws.  Mandy was brave enough to snap a photo and she gave the turtle plenty of distance.  It was just sitting right there on the side of the road.

It was definitely a unique sighting...we've seen quite a few small turtles crossing the road but never one this big or mean looking.  We returned back to Mandy's without any further crazy animal sightings...except for the buffalo but he seemed happy in his yard!  Once we got back, we quickly changed out our shoes and took off for a 20 minute transition run to get our legs used to switching from the bike to the run for upcoming triathlon season.

We finished up the workout and had some recovery smoothies made with a mixture of fresh and frozen fruit and protein shakes.  The smoothie tasted awesome after a long hard workout.  It was a great workout and left me feeling better prepared for triathlon season.