October 2007

The Velo Bella party disguised as a CX race was yesterday, and since we are not the type to miss a party we attended on the guise that The Wife wanted to try her first CX race. Have to thank and congratulate the Bellas and their partners, friends, and sponsors for putting on a great party and race. Lots of fun. The only party pooper was the SC County Sheriff’s office that was being a bit tight on the parking rules; they were threatening citations if you even thought of parking in a spot not painted as a parking space.

There were a lot of strange and unusual looking folks lurking around. OV gets the prize for best tan lines; perhaps he should talk to Roman K. about using the tanning salon to even them out. The Wife was afraid to look, fearing that OV was going commando, but since I peaked under the skirt I can attest that there was some lycra between me and things that may or may not be of interest.

The costume ‘race’ was a total pimp session as a few tried to woo the judges with lap dances, cheers, and who knows what as bribes. I suspect a few of the contestants had a bit of beer ‘lubrication’ to help. There were lots of beer, and pie, and strawberries being handed out as prizes. The Wife and her crew of super heroines were some of the winners, and despite being in calorie deficit mode we still drink beer so the prize stayed with the family.

Some folks actually raced! I did a bunch of cheering, mostly for the women. Of course The Wife got the biggest and most cheers, but I spread them around a bit. Lauren wore the Princess Leia belt in order to get some superpower assistance, but it backfired as she got a flat! And then had to endure the taunts of OV yelling ‘just ride it’ and ’shred that tire’ as she tried to shoulder and run to where her husband could effect a wheel swap. Amy A. wore a bandana dust-mask that matched her sweet custom Rivendell, Janet seemed to glide effortlessly wearing a smile the entire time, and Soni seemed to be in a zone and somewhat oblivious to the my verbal encouragement. After the women finished we stayed for a while to catch up with a few more folks and to cheer on those brave or crazy enough to race on single speeds.

The Wife had a lot of fun, though we will have to see how the account balances as the soreness and bruises deduct from those credits. I suspect she might try it again, but not for a few weeks. Besides, there are more parties not disguised as races coming up.

I did the dishonorable thing yesterday and drove to work.  My legs have been screaming for a few days, too little nutrition and too much pedaling.  So I gave them a break.  I hate to drive; too many incompetent, frustrated, and/or angry drivers on the road that I have to deal with, and that causes stress.

Last time I drove to work I noticed that the HOV (’carpool’) lane has really become the ‘Prius’ lane.  Somewhere between 30% and 50% of the cars in the HOV lane that morning were Prius’, most with a single occupant.  Today’s ‘RoadShow‘ column in the Mercury Spews is dominated with hybrid car/carpool lane questions.  Some folks complaining they cannot get Carpool lane stickers, others complaining that anyone can, etc.   Everyone knows that most folks are buying hybrids primarily to get the carpool lane stickers to try to speed up their commutes.

My commute is roughly 20 miles if I drive, almost exclusively on US 101.  I can almost hit 101 with a rock thrown from our backyard, and there are two interchanges within a mile of work.  My office sits in a building fronting 101, less than 1/2 mile from the nearest interchange.  Lots of freeway, and if I drive straight it still takes an average of 50-55 minutes each way to do the commute during the late commute hours.   Most days I ride my bike to CalTrain, CalTrain to one of the three stations within 2 miles of the office, then ride to the office.  Average commute time is right around 65-70 minutes if I get a limited/local train, down to 55-60 minutes if I get a ‘bullet’ train.  Occasionally I will ride the entire distance (22 miles) between home and office, or vice-versa.  Average time for those trips is around 90 minutes, mostly because of all the stop signs and stop lights.

Not much time saving for me if I get in a car instead of using the train and bicycle option.  Not even a compelling difference between driving and riding the entire distance.  If the MTC could get a good bike boulevard going south on the peninsula, cutting out a lot of the stop signs and signals, then riding the entire way would get close enough to the driving time to do it substantially more often.

The weekend is over, and at the end I feel weak. The calorie deficit is taking its toll.

Saturday The Wife and rode a 50 mile loop of the resevoirs south of San Jose. I did fine, but that is comparative. We did not push too hard as she started feeling the effects of caloric deficiting mid-ride so I never got to the point where I was feeling the effects … at least during the ride. Afterwards the legs were dead, dead, dead. Sunday we heaped injury onto insult by riding over to Stanford for the 40th birthday bash of our friend Josh. Besides the ride, an easy 25 miles, I ran some of the laps of the Stanford track (backwards, to video record the event), and walked a few additional. The Wife thinks that as an Elite Klutz that running backwards was not a wise call; my retort: nothin’ happened, did it? May take a few days for the legs to forgive me for those transgressions. We did not make it to Candlestick point for the CX race, as The Wife booked us for a visit to friends who live on Stanford campus. Too much socializin’!

Some observations from the out and abouts:

• There are a lot more acorns than normal this year, and they are bigger than normal. First started noticing this a month ago when we rode across Nacimiento-Ferguson road to Mission San Antonio de Padua. Once we were on the Hunter-Liggett military reservation, where the environment was mostly oak-grassland, every time the road passed near an oak tree the road surface was littered with a thick layer of crushed and whole acorns. Saw a bunch more this weekend as we road through the areas with oaks.
• Not so much color this year. We saw a few trees changing, but much less than past year.
• The rain storms of the past month have a nice carpet of green sprouting. Love it on the hills and valleys, not so much on our side yard. Looking forward to the ‘golden rolling hills of California’ (apologies to Kate Wolf) transitioning to a nice emerald green.
• Tried Alicat’s suggestion of 1/4 tsp Lite Salt in a water bottle. Electrolyte balance was good, the ‘you are backpacking and using halide tablets to purify water’ taste was not so good. Need to see if there is a non-iodized Lite Salt.

I did get some butternet squash ravioli made, and some of it consumed. But it was a bit painful. As soon as I started making the pasta, a bushing split in the drive mechanism of my pasta roller so it would not work. So I was forced to roll my pasta the old fashioned way, with a wooden rolling pin on the countertop. Time consuming, but it worked. And the results were very tasty. There were actually two batches: one with a sqash, riccota cheese, and garlic mixture, the other with a squash, marscapone, molasses mixture. More variants later, once I get the pasta roller fixed.

I am sitting here thinking about what I should do this weekend.  Late Friday morning and, for a change, my weekend is moderately free.  The only commitment I have right now is to go spend a couple of hours Sunday morning watching our friend Josh run in circles, or more correctly, ovals.  Josh is celebrating his 40th birthday by running 40 laps of the Stanford track and using it as a fundraiser with a goal of $40K.

Guess in the remainder of the time I will work on some landscaping, take a long, slow bike ride with my sweetie, and try out my new ravioli mold (hopefully easier than handcutting all the little buggers), probably with some form of butternut squash ravioli, or maybe some with mushrooms (I love mushrooms), or artichokes.  Lots of possibilities!  Probably should put the lights on The Wife’s winter commuter bike, too.

Love having so little time pressure on the weekend for a change.

We headed down to Hellyer this afternoon for the ‘low key races’. Fortunately most of the rest of the folks read the name correctly and it was low key for the most part. We did a nice warmup set, then set up for a handicap race. Everything stayed sane until about 500m to go and then the attacks started. I am not sure who won, I was with the main group until 1 lap to go then the big horses (Don, Andreas, and a couple of others) decided to play for keeps. Then on to 5 lap team pursuits. As soon as we started the first race I knew something did not want to stay down, and I was working as hard to keep from spewing as I was as keeping with my ad hoc teammates. A few more pursuits then chariot races. I got myself a bit of rest by volunteering to be a holder for several heats. Smart! In my heat my two competitors took a big jump at the start so I decided to play it a bit relaxed; I almost caught one of them when he blew coming into turn 3. What next? How about Olympic style pursuit. OK. And a short points race. Fine. Only 11 folks showed up, but we had a lot of fun and got a good workout. Thanks Keith!

And of course the biggest achievement of the day: a full set of races and ZERO mechanical issues. Myself and the Fuji were at peace.

Update: A few photos from the session are here.

Back in then late 70’s and into early 80’s I spent a short stint working in an R&D lab for W. L. Gore and Associates. One of the perks there was access to Gore-Tex fabric remnants, and one such remnant was fashioned into a pair of rain pants I have used in wet weather for the past 26 or 27 years. Last winter those pants leaked regularly, and it was not at the seams as in past years, so the annual ritual of sealing the seams had little effect on the problem. I vowed to replace them during the summer dry season.

Today is the third storm of the fall. The first one, on Sep 22nd, forced the cancellation of the low-key races at Hellyer but otherwise had little impact on my comings and goings. The second storm as two days ago, on Oct 10th. I was ready to roll out on the bike for my morning commute, thinking the storm had passed during the early morning hours, when the skies opened. I could not bring myself to pull on the old, leaky rain pants and ride that morning. Sigh. The bike was ready for winter: fenders, mud flaps, lights, all the things needed to ride in wet, dark weather of our winters. But I did not have the will yet to get out in those kind of conditions. When I did get to work one of the first things I did was order the rain pants, the purchased I had procrastinated for over 6 months. Soon the pants will not be an excuse that I can use to avoid the bike commute. Even without the new pants I did the commute this morning in dripping, wet conditions. It was a bit of a hassle getting out, again mostly a mental preparation block. Rain jacket? Check. Rain pants? Check. Waterproof socks? Where the heck are those waterproof socks? Took me 15 minutes of searching before I found them safely tucked in a hidden pocket of my travel bag. Sigh.

Mentally I am still no ready for winter. Fall seems to have bypassed my life this year, with summer ending abruptly with the start of winter. I need a good dose of some golden aspens or fiery red maples to help me transition. But this year I will have to do without.

The Wife has this faint hope that one day, one day soon, she will be able to park her car in the garage. Our small, one car garage has been the domain of the bicycles since we moved back in two years ago, and every time we get close to getting stuffed cleared out and organized so a car will fit something comes up and before long the bicycle space has expanded. This past weekend it was time to put a dent into some of the projects and make progess towards that ‘ultimate goal’, using a garage to store an automobile.

Here is what part of my Saturday looked like (after doing the weekly shopping and some sprinkler system repair/maintenance):

• Convert The Wife’s racing bike to a compact double. We got her new racing bike a little over a year ago, and given her problems with hills she opted for a triple which has been problematic all year. The plan to go to a compact double was hatched months ago, but delayed at her request until after the racing season. Part of the devilish scheme was getting her a wide range cassette (11-28) that will give her near the range of gearing she had with the triple.
• Some minor tweaks to The Wife’s backup racer/backup commuter, a late ’80s Mondonico that is her favorite bike to ride. She had it re-painted last winter, the rear spread to 130mm, and went to 10sp Campy shifters. She has had on and off problems with the front shifting since the changeover, the late ’80s era Campy brakes take a lot of leverage to use, and the headset needed a tad bit of adjustment. The headset adjustment was easy, 2-3 minutes with a pair of 32mm wrenches. On to the brakes. Those 17-18 year old Campy calipers are not as bad as the infamous Delta brakes to adjust, but only a shade better and the spring seems to need regular adjustment. I had a spare pair of recent Centaur calipers I picked up when I was going to buy a Ritchey BreakAway earlier in the year, so off with the old and on with the new! I need her to take it for a spin, by I will bet that the braking is a lot easier now. The shifting problems are a bit more of a challenge. Looks like the chain has a preference to drop between the rings on a downshift instead of onto the inner ring. I changed the old 17-18 year old Campy front derailleur for the 10sp Chorus I took off the Colnago this summer, a quick change, to see if that would help. Not a lick better. My current hypothesis is that the outer ring is a mismatch and needs replacing; it is an old Campy Chorus 53T ring made for 7sp shifting and intended to match to a 42T inner ring. I am hoping that changing to a newer 10sp 53T that matches to the 39T inner ring she is using will get the ramps better aligned so it shifts from ring to ring rather than dropping into the void. I will have to wait until Wednesday or so when the new ring arrives for me to test the theory (I could have ripped the 10sp 53T ring off the TT bike … but then what would I do with the TT bike?).
• Swapped the 26×2.1 mud tires on The Wife’s mountain bike for some 26×1.35 CX tires. She has decided to try Cyclocross this year, but would prefer to try it on her MTB rather than her cyclocross bike converted to a tourer/commuter. But she wanted to lighten the (already light) MTB bike up a bit, so I did the tire swap which shaved probably 2-3 lbs off the total package.
• Cleaned and lubed my commuter bike.

Still to do:

• Put the lights and generator hub front wheel back on The Wife’s commuter/tourer.
• Replace the handlebars on The Wife’s commuter/tourer. It has 51cm wide randonneur bars now, she wants something a bit narrower, without ‘anatomic bends’ (that tend to be anything bu anatomic), with a flatter top and a bit less reach. In other words, she wants the 44 cm wide Nitto Noodle bars that I had on another bike.
• Put some more ceiling mounts up so more bikes can be hung along the edges rather than sitting on the floor eating up ‘valuable’ car space.
• Sell or trade a bunch of old components. Everything from Record 1″ threaded headsets to grip shifters to Ultegra 9sp triple gruppo. Probably take a couple hours just to inventory the pile.

Wonder what the odds-makers will give on a bet that we will have a car in the garage by Thanksgiving?

Update: The Mondonico has the new chainring …. and it shifts marvelously. Nothing like having the correct, matched parts!

I am a bit of a map geek. Or rather I am a bit of a geophysical information geek. Since I was a wee tyke I have collected maps and sundry related items. I even started a course in cartography in my early college days, but then the infamous “Greetings” letter came from my Uncle Sam and I was shipped off to exotic places before I got too far into those studies. Never got back to the academic realm of map making, but I did have a lot of practical experience using maps in those days.

On the geek equipment front I acquired a handheld GPS units once they became relatively affordable and small enough to mount on the handlebars. I use it frequently, with downloable ‘map’ sets that provide a lot of functionality. Stranded under an overhang in Pisa during a horrendous thunderstorm and I wanted to know how to find the train station so I can get back to our room in Lucca so I queried the GPS and it showed me two relatively close to where we were standing. Riding into Bolzano for the first time, a quick query helped me locate the Museum of Anthropology then another helped me find a hotel. Cool stuff.

Beyond planning rides, we often use maps, GPS data, and other GIS sources to analyze rides after the fact. It gets a bit tricky, what with sampling errors, incorrect data, and such, but occasionally it is useful. Sometimes the data just hints at possibilities; when I was injured in a suspected hit and run in 2002, one curious piece of data was the GPS interval showing a max speed of 45MPH near the site I was found. That was either a major error in the data, or I got drop kicked by something going faster than the 35MPH limit. As a mis-matched couple, The Wife being a non-climber and I more of one, there are ongoing discussions about hills we climb. For example:

her: that was a gruesome climb, had to be at least a 15% grade.

me: naw, not more than 10% max.

And back and forth it goes until we sit down with maps, software, etc. and get some reasonable, independent estimate of the grade in question. Old days it would have been a map wheel on a USGS topo map then some mental calculations (or a slide rule), with all the attendant problems of sampling error for the map wheel over short distances, interpolation error reading the topo map, etc. These days it is all software driven, either from mapping programs or using data collected by the GPS unit. And for the record, the truth in most debates is usually in the middle: The Wife tends to overestimate, I tend to underestimate.

So far there have been no debates on the gradient of our climb up Nacimiento-Ferguson road from Highway 1 last week. Easy to calculate the average grade for the climb from Hwy 1 to the summit; right around 2600′ of climbing in 7.3 road miles so 6.7% average. But we knew there were spots where the grade was a bit steeper, and some more slack spots. But nothing to tweak the usual gradient arguments. The recorded GPS data from that ride is pretty clean; had good satellite coverage, no major weather events, etc. so a lot of relatively good data. A quick look at the elevation profile shows that in the interior the barometric pressure rose slightly so equivalent ‘peaks’ are higher when we rode in the morning than in the afternoon but interestingly the summit and Hwy 1 elevations are relatively equal coming and going.

I have used GPSVisualizer to produce maps from GPS data for a few years now, e.g. the route of our honeymoon tour. A relatively new feature is slope (i.e., gradient) analysis of a GPS track. They do have one slight problem with this part of the analysis: they labeled the Y axis as degrees of slope, but I am quite certain that we never hit a 24% slope [a 13.5 degree grade is 24.0%; for the mathematicians, the conversion is 100*tan(slope-angle)]. The 13.5 seems more reasonable if I assume it is a percent gradient number. Overall, the graph looks like a pleasant, but challenging, climb. A few tougher spots, some slack spots, lots of ups and downs. Now I need to run a few of my older GPS tracks through this analysis. The map geek lives!