Birmingham 10,000 feet revisited

Strava achievements, 4 personal bests, 3 second bests, and 4 third bests

Today, I incorporated one of my favorite climbs into a 10,000 foot climbing route. Rouge Roubaix was a long hard race on Sunday, and I took Monday almost completely off (1.9 mile bike ride with the kids). So I wasn’t sure how my legs would feel today. I started out easy, but then when my heartrate soared into Zone 5 on the first climb with what I thought was just a medium effort, I decided to hammer the rest of the ride. I ended up setting four personal best times on climbs, 3 second bests, and 4 third bests.

Heart rate zone summary (25 minutes in zone 5!) and calories burned (3944)

The ride itself was awesome with very little traffic. Everybody must have been out of town for spring break. I guess I couldn’t get enough of the dirt / gravel roads from Rouge Roubaix because I added Cahaba Beach Rd in the downhill direction – very, very similar to the dirt sections of Rouge Roubaix when you ride it in the downhill direction. I normally ride it the other way (uphill). I also added a new climb I have never done before which basically parallels Oakdale and ends at the same spot. The climb begins in a drainage ditch at the bottom of a neighborhood, climbs very steeply at first (>15%) and then rolls its way to the top at an average of almost 7% – shorter and steeper than the Oakdale climb. I did four Cat 3 climbs and one Cat 4 climb pretty much one right after the other at the end of the ride. Whew, that was painful!

Lastly, I snapped both of these photos on the steep climb leading up to Renfroe when my Garmin was getting close to ticking over to 10,000 feet!
Garmin annotated – about to tick over to 10,000 feet.
Purple flowers next to the road at the same spot as the Garmin pic.

And finally the TopoCreator map and Garmin .GPX file in case you want to try this ride yourself! A couple notes of caution – inspired by the photo below from a toy airplane instruction manual – most of the descents are crazy fast and dangerous so use caution and don’t go as fast as I do until you have had a chance to do them as many times as I have (e.g., I have descended South Cove almost 60 times!)

Use lots of caution.