{"id":91,"date":"2009-05-03T19:11:13","date_gmt":"2009-05-04T02:11:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/alc8.meballard.com\/?p=91"},"modified":"2009-05-14T22:06:10","modified_gmt":"2009-05-15T05:06:10","slug":"tour-of-the-lakes-80-miles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alc8.meballard.com\/?p=91","title":{"rendered":"Tour of the Lakes (80 miles)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday was the Otis Fashion Show, an event that I volunteer at every year (and generally the only time of the year that I wear a tuxedo), which made riding before the show impractical.\u00c2\u00a0 So after working a good part of the day, and seeing the show, I went and did a nasty 80 mile ride called Tour of the Lakes…\u00c2\u00a0 One interesting thing about this ride is that it combined a lot of rides that I have done as training rides or independently (including Toluca Lake well before), although this is the first time it has been all at once.<\/p>\n

This ride started in West Hollywood, which made for a nice quick ride from home to the start point at West Hollywood Park.\u00c2\u00a0 The idea behind this ride is passing by a bunch of water features, all while staying in the Los Angeles area.\u00c2\u00a0 We rode out with 26 people, initially heading down to Culver City and then heading west on Culver Blvd, until we reached Tanner’s Coffee in Playa Del Rey, passing by Playa Vista area wetland preserve.\u00c2\u00a0 From Playa Del Rey we headed north by the Del Rey lagoon and up through Marina Del Rey (including of course the Marina area), then heading up Washington Blvd and down Dell Ave to pass through the Venice Canals.\u00c2\u00a0 From there we headed up through Santa Monica and we were supposed to head up to San Vicente and Ocean, but there was an Walk\/Run event, so we instead turned early but later went over to San Vicente, and made our way over to the 2nd pitstop at San Vicente\/Montana, a Noah’s\/Jamba Juice\/other.<\/p>\n

From there we continued over to Brentwood\/UCLA, and headed up into the Bel Air area, and up to a street called Stradella (which includes a view of the Stone Canyon Reservoir).\u00c2\u00a0 It was good to finally do Stradella, since last time I was supposed to do it, a couple of people and I ended up going on Rosscomore instead, and now that I have done both, I prefer Stradella as the steep sections are shorter, and it rolls more.\u00c2\u00a0 Finally we worked our way up to Mulholland and over to Beverly Glen for a pit stop at a Starbucks in that area (a common stop while up on Mulholland).\u00c2\u00a0 That was followed by a trip back to Mulholland the hard way (up a steeper hill to a higher height), and the continued on Mulholland all the way east to the 101 freeway.<\/p>\n

After heading up a few more hills, and then down, we ended up at the next water feature, Lake Hollywood.\u00c2\u00a0 After Lake Hollywood, we went down to Franklin, and continued east over into Silverlake.\u00c2\u00a0 Unfortunately along the way, I got a bit of a cramp in my right leg, but I was able to stretch it out on some downhills.\u00c2\u00a0 Being out drinking the night before with a lot of work, then combined with a heavy bicycle ride, and running out of electrolyte tabs (Nuun), is a bad combination.\u00c2\u00a0 Next we had\u00c2\u00a0our Lunch stop at Say Cheese\/Trader Joe’s\/Whole Foods, where I had a nice sandwich and cheese samples from Say Cheese.\u00c2\u00a0 After finishing that up, it was time for a trip over to the actual lake in Silverlake as well as the Ivanhoe Reservoir, which we basically completely circled.\u00c2\u00a0 After leaving that water feature, the 2 other people I was riding with (for the rest of the ride) and I mis-read the directions, and had our first extra loop.\u00c2\u00a0 After realizing that and correcting the path we headed up to Griffith Park, over the hill that is Griffith Park Drive, and headed into the San Fernando Valley.<\/p>\n

As we got over to the Warner Brothers Studios, we missed out second turn.\u00c2\u00a0 In this case we missed that the small sign for turning left said the street name, but the big name on the street sign said a different name, combined with 2 of us being used to continuing a loop around the studios.\u00c2\u00a0 After a bit of extra riding into Burbank, we went back and continued to the area near the next water feature, Toluca Lake.\u00c2\u00a0 Unfortunately, you can’t actually see Toluca Lake, as all of the land around it is privately owned (so unless you know someone on the lake or have access to that country club, too bad).\u00c2\u00a0 From there we went over to Vineland, across Ventura, over to Cahuenga, and up to a street called Multi View.\u00c2\u00a0 At this point, we had already done a ton of climbing, and I just wasn’t up to another climb to Mulholland at that point.\u00c2\u00a0 Fortunately we did have a SAG vehicle, so I took that up the hill, and then joined the two other back along Mulholland.<\/p>\n

Now back on Mulholland the three of us continued over to Franklin Canyon, which had our final water feature of the day, the Franklin Canyon Reservoir.\u00c2\u00a0 We took Franklin Canyon down into Beverly Hills, which I gained a nice final wind along that part of the ride.\u00c2\u00a0 We made good time down into Beverly Hills and back along Sunset into West Hollywood and then onto San Vicente for the final and nice downhill to West Hollywood Park.<\/p>\n

After getting to the end, we found out that only about half actually managed to complete the ride.\u00c2\u00a0 It was a nice ride, although a very difficult one with a lot of hills.<\/p>\n

\"Tour<\/a>

Tour of the Lakes (click to view full detail)<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yesterday was the Otis Fashion Show, an event that I volunteer at every year (and generally the only time of the year that I wear a tuxedo), which made riding before the show impractical.\u00c2\u00a0 So after working a good part of the day, and seeing the show, I went and did a nasty 80 mile […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[36,38,35,17,10,37,39,16],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alc8.meballard.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alc8.meballard.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alc8.meballard.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alc8.meballard.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alc8.meballard.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=91"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/alc8.meballard.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":104,"href":"https:\/\/alc8.meballard.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91\/revisions\/104"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alc8.meballard.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=91"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alc8.meballard.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=91"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alc8.meballard.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=91"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}