My troubles with RunKeeper continued today, but this time it was definitely my fault. I finally got upset enough with my iPhone to get rid of it and switched to a Motorola Atrix 4G. The trouble with the new phone is battery life. It doesn’t come close to matching the iPhone. To compensate, I set all applications to “auto kill” as soon as the screen times out. Unfortunately, that means my RunKeeper app was automatically killed just a minute after I started riding. I should have seen that one coming and removed RunKeeper from the “auto kill” list. I think it might actually work the next time I ride… we’ll see. In the mean-time, I used the Google Maps interface to create a RunKeeper map as well as I can remember the ride. The exact roads at the very edge of the ride may be a little off, but you get the gist of it.
Despite the trouble I had with RunKeeper, we had a great ride. Charmaine rode with Kristen and Jess out to the windmills in Spanish Fork, while I rode with Mark and Brett out around West Mountain at the base of Utah Lake. We left Orem just after 7 and returned just before 11. We rode between 71 and 72 miles, depending on which bike computer you look at, making our average speed (including all stoplights and a stop at the gas station) right around 18 miles per hour. We were riding in a paceline, with each of us rotating to the front. It seemed like we got a little faster with each rotation until we were all tired and slowed way down… then the ramp up would start again.
We knew we would be coming back on the same road as the ladies, and we were hoping to catch them on their way home. We had no such luck. They got home about 10 minutes before us, but I think they were still impressed with our time.