Seaworld Splash Triathlon Bike Course

Well, that should be nice and challenging....just what I needed after Jack's...more stinkin hills!

A buddy of mine also said he thought thsi tri was bit more technical than most around these parts. I am going to miss out on this race because it is full. I had planned on registering this weekend and registration has been closed. My son and I were going to do it together.

I am going to plan for 2006, but he will pick up a few kids races. He gets pretty fired up when he looks at the distances and realizes how quickly he should be able to cross the finish line.

Good luck to everyone.

First Question: What software package did you use for that?

Second scarcastic comment: You call them hills!! That's only like 125 ft. of elevation change. Guess we're spoiled here in Upstate NY, we got much bigger hills than that to climb.

I would love to be able to see what the elevation changes really are on my bike routes. Maybe some day I'll have some cool software to do that too.

Chris.

From a Houston perspective an overpass is a hill!! I know they aren't much, but I've never ridden on anything bigger than an overpass and I have too much weight to drag up any hill. The last tri I did was almost flat. We'll see how I do on this course.

The software is a neat little package that I found on the web called TrailGauge. It is shareware and you can download the demo version for free. The demo version is limited to only 15 points on a route. It costs $25 bucks to register and the full version has unlimited points.

It works by downloading maps from various different free map services. For the US it hooks up to Terraserver and will download the topo map and the satellite map. You give it a lat/long pair and it downloads the appropriate map. It also has time and speed estimation for a particular route and it will upload and download routes to my handheld GPS. (Garmin) And it will produce a route card with a map, elevations, and estimated times.

It's a UK company and the download is about 3 mb. You can register online and have the install key delivered via e-mail. I had the installed, registered, and my first map/elevation done in about an hour. The website is

http://www.trailgauge.com

Also, I used the maporama website ( http://www.maporama.com) to convert an initial street address into lat/long to set the map location to download.

Brittain

Thanks bfraley! Funny story -- I downloaded Google Maps which shows the elevation based on the cursor location on the map. I spent about 20 minutes yesterday tracing the course trying to get a feel for the elevation. (Imaging me slowly tracing the road with my mouse, while trying to read the elevation) This looks very close to what I saw in my not-so-scientific tracing. Check out that climb to the finish!!

South central Texas is FLAT. Riding in Marble Falls, Texas(Tx hill country) felt like the Pyrenees.

I wanted to do this one so bad and I put off registering. When I finally go to register it was closed...I'm near houston so the rollers woulda felt like the alps. I love to climb...well at least what I call climbing (overpasses). I'm gonna have to sign up early next year. I even had a place to stay and my weekend planned down there. Oh well, Ya'll have fun and someone have a race report with details about the course.