American River Parkway, 23 Sep 2007

I've been craving a longer ride for a couple of weeks; every weekend I've been riding up Mount Diablo, in preparation for the Mount Diablo Challenge, and that usually uses up my budget of riding time for the weekend. So I planned ahead for this weekend that I'd do Diablo on Saturday (as usual) and then ride the American River Parkway on Sunday.

Essentially, the American River Parkway has a paved bike path that runs 32 miles from downtown Sacramento to Folsom Lake. The path crosses maybe 3 actual roads; the rest of the crossings are basically driveways.

At the beginning of August, before I'd bought the road bike, I rode my MTB (with slicks) up the Parkway. It took about 6h 45m total to ride up and down the path, and that includes the 5-mile detour I took off the path into downtown Sacramento (I had no idea there were two identical-looking bike paths starting in Discovery Park...) and the long amount of time I lazed around at Folsom Lake. Total ride was about 69 miles, and I was definitely dragging on the way back.

Now that I'd been riding the road bike for a while, I kept thinking I wanted to go ride the Parkway again. As luck would have it, the weather was a bit gloomy Saturday morning and I ended-up not riding on Saturday, doing family-stuff instead. On Sunday, I sucked-down a gel
and hit the American River Parkway path at Discovery Park around 1130 under partly-overcast skies, temperatures on the low-side of seasonal around 73F. I stopped once for a few minutes to suck down another gel and refill my water bottle at one of the many parks along the way, but was surprised to arrive at the end of the path after 1h 45m - averaging 18.3MPH for 32 miles and about 850 feet of total climb.

One interesting moment came when I passed a large mass of bicyclists at one park; they were about to launch the Third-Annual Mustard Seed Spin and there were 400+ young cyclists ready to go; I admit I was happy to be ahead of the massive bunch, but it was great to see so many enthusiastic youngsters on bikes.

The end of the path at Folsom Lake is at a normally popular beach called Beals Point; since the lake is unusually low right now, the beach is dry and the only people I saw there were other cyclists, including an interesting couple on a tandem. I scarfed a Clif Bar and spent longer chatting with the tandem couple than I'd planned to rest; I started back down the bike path around 1340.

About half-way back, I stopped at a park to have one more gel and met a few of the Sacramento Bike Hikers that were sweeping the Mustard Seed Spin. In a pleasant small-world moment, I mentioned that I drove SAG for the Breast Cancer Fund's Bike Against the Odds last weekend, and they said “oh yeah, we rode that!”. As I spent a few minutes at this stop, the last of the Mustard Seed riders arrived, and, after I took off, I started encountering groups of them. Again, it was pretty impressive to see these youngsters spinning along on a wide variety of bikes completing at least a 13-mile ride. At the Mustard Seed start/finish, they had a balloon arch, kids with horns, cheerleaders (!) and many parents, and they cheered me on as I passed, even though I wasn't a participant.

After I passed Sac State, I picked-up the pace a bit and was averaging around 20MPH for much of the remainder of the ride; I rolled-up to my car in Discovery Park 3h 58m from when I rolled away, averaging just over 16MPH for the entire ride and about 18.7MPH while rolling. My recovery snack was a Balance Bar washed down with Costco's version of Gatorade.

Compared with my previous ride at the beginning of August, I felt considerably better this time, and spent far less time on rest stops. Apparently, Trails.com voted the American River Parkway the “best bike path of 2006”, and it is easy to understand why. It is very pretty, well-maintained, easy-to-access and has water and restrooms in many places, really quite a gem.