Soldier Creek 10 Lap Challenge/Santos Ride

I never did post about my Santos ride from last weekend.  I will keep this part short:

I went to Santos to ride the 23 or so miles of landbridge out and back.  I was feeling awesome and keeping a nice pace of around 9.5 mph.  At about the 15 mile point I was coming down a whooptie-doo and at the bottom of the whooptie do was a pool of sand.  Of course my front wheel came to a halt, and tossed me off the bike.  The front wheel was bent so bad it was hitting each side of the fork when spenning.  So, using man-muscle, I bent the rim back into semi-ridable shape and made it back to the car.  20 Bucks and 40 minutes later my rim was truer than when I got the bike in the first place. Big ol' bummer though, since that really wrecked my rhythm and I didnt get back out for another lap of Nayls.  The new shoes worked great, however I wasnt wearing the proper socks, and they seemed to bunch up at the toes and bug me a little.

Every Wednesday a local meetup group does what they call the 10 lap challenge out at the 1.4 mile loop at Soldier Field near the Environmental center off 419 in the Longwood area.  This last Wednesday was my first time out there to give it a try.  It doesnt sound very difficult, but it is alot harder than it sounds.  The terrain is pretty fast and flowing with numerous little bridges over the creek(s).  I started off really slow and worked my way up to a pretty good rhythm and completed 10 laps in an hour and 19 minutes.  Unfortunately, I did not set my lap timer correctly and I didnt get my lap times down.  My feet felt great, but I know for a fact now that the garmin 500 without the speed sensor is absolutely not measuring distance correctly.

For example:  The Greenway map shows the ride from landbridge to 484 and back to the landbridge trailhead is right around 22.3 miles.  My ride over the weekend displayed it as only being 19 miles.  The 10 laps out at the E-center showed up as being 12.2 miles, when a guy out there who was using the 705 was coming up with 13.5 miles.  That kinda screws my average speed/etc up. Lets calculate this.

According to the Edge 500 I did 19.5 miles in 2:08 moving time with an average speed of 9.1 mph.  When in actuality I did 22.3 miles (according to the OMBA epic map) in 2:08 which would be 10.4 mph.  That is an enormous difference, and considering the last 8 miles were ridden on a rim that looked similar to a potato chip - I think I could have done a lot better. Im going to keep working on getting my landbridge lap down under two hours and the 10 lap challenge down closer to an hour.