December 2007

Sunday (pre-)ride

I wanted to take a look at the San Bruno Mtn. course so The Wife and I took a trip north today to do some ups and downs on the mountain. After the rains of the past couple of days the weather was near perfect, and the views from the top were fantastic. I was wishing for a camera; San Francisco was looking lovely and you could make out all the details in every building. We started with a warm-up ride to the top, or at least it was a warm-up for me on the upper part. The Wife was not liking it so much, and for the first part I was having trouble getting the heart rate above 140 bpm or so on the lower sections. The final ride up I rode with a target time in mind, but I missed it by a couple of minutes. Of course about a minute of that was taken with waiting at one of the stop lights as some fool sat on the detector and refused to turn so I could not go through. And I blew out less than a half mile from the top; need to moderate that section a bit more. I set my target time with no knowledge of past times up the hill; I had been ignoring results from the past. After I got home I found that my target would have put me in the top 3 of my category (Cat ‘Old Fogey’) last year. A tad aggressive, but perhaps achievable. The more interesting revelation is that The Wife now wants to race it on Tuesday; she pre-registered right after we got home today.

Setting the stage(s)

The Wife was very upset that she could not participate in the fun at the Kern stage race last year; a friend chose that weekend for her wedding. The Wife did the Madera Stage Race as an alternative, but had committed to doing Kern in 2008. She wants to do Madera in 2008, too, as a warm-up. Last night I made room reservations for both events, so now the commitment deepens. I might do Madera, but a lot depends on logistics; how to get two of us to stages in different locations at the same time will be the issue. We will have to see who else is at Madera and what type of ride-sharing to the stages we can arrange. Madera is on our anniversary weekend; what a crazy way to celebrate!

Race season is less than 72 hours away, and I just got some new wheels to try, the Williams ‘System 30′. Great deal, seem to be solid and true, and light enough. Normally I would just buy some good hoops, a quality hub, some spokes, and lace the wheels myself. But these were such a good deal I took the leap and bought pre-built. Think I will put the cassette I just bought for the wife, a SRAM 11-28, on for the San Bruno Mtn. Hill Climb on Tuesday then swap back to my regular cassette for the rest of the season.

I am apparently a slackard.  The Wife so much as told her former boss that yesterday when she said all I do is lollygag rides.  And she is determined to help me change my ways, now taking on the role of Coach.

Monday, Christmas Eve, her and I did a lollygag ride with her mother, a recovery from the hilliness of our Sunday ride.   Then on Tuesday it was time for her to put me to work.  The Wife, aka The Coach, took me out for some hill repeats.  If anyone had been around they might have wondered about that pair of crazy cyclists going up and down Ormonde Road, but all the normal folks were celebrating or resting.  Wednesday we stopped on our way back to the Bay Area for a tempo ride from Templeton to San Miguel, and back.  The ‘out’ part was resistance training, with a good, stiff headwind.   We recovered with a great meal at McPhee’s Grill in downtown Templeton (recommended, BTW).  Thursday it was back to some hard efforts on the hills.  The Coach was pleased on some shorter one’s when she was able to stick on my wheel, a feat she did not attempt on the one long climb (Mt. Eden). Today I get a recovery day, mostly so she, I mean we, will not have to risk the rain.   She is bound and determined that I should treat the San Bruno Mt. Hill Climb as a race, not a ride.  For today, I will continue in my slackard ways and go get the crack in the windshield fixed.

We seem to have hit a theme; meet some nice folks (aka Alicat and Merkeley) at a distant location and do a nice rural ride. On the 23rd we met the ‘Dots’ at a location in the Santa Lucia Mountains west of Paso Robles for a pre-holiday exploration of some of the rural roads in the area. The Wife had chosen the route, a loop following Santa Rosa Creek down to the town of Cambria, following Highway 1 south to Cayucos, then going up along Old Creek and back to the top. Out of interest I mounted my trusty old Garmin eTrex Vista to the Colnago and recorded the route; GPS Visualizer cranked away at the data and shows what The Wife already knew: there were a couple of sections a bit steep for her liking!

It was a great ride! Santa Rosa Creek Canyon was spectacular in late fall glory, as were the upper reaches of Old Creek Canyon. The oaks were resplendent, having shed much of their bumper crop of acorns. We wove by orange groves, wound past pastures, spent a short bit of time along the coast, and sailed through avocado orchards. We eschewed the standard energy bars for delectable treats from a bakery in Cambria, and enjoyed the scenery and company. The weather cooperated for the most part with beautiful blue skies, temperatures warm enough, and even the wind demons moderated to a degree. At the end of the ride we had a nice time sitting around and talking over wine and tasty snacks. A hearty thanks to hosts Merkeley and Alicat, who even gave us a good recommendation for a fine Zinfandel (Turley “Dusi”) to pick up at the winery on the way out. More photos are in the gallery here.

A few days ago there was a post to the Silicon Valley Bicycle Coalition mailing list by a cyclist celebrating 1000 miles of cycle commuting this year. That spawned a lot of comparisons by other members on the list of their mileage for the year, and a subsidiary discussion of lengths of commutes vs. frequency of cycle commuting. The end of the year is in sight, and my mileage for the year is a bit meager; a mere 6K miles or so total for 2007, compared with nearly 9K miles the previous two years. And this year a higher proportion of the miles have been on the commute on routes that are flat and uninspiring; I occasionally have to ride the morning trip to the train station as if it were a time trial to keep from being too bored. But for the most part the commute is utilitarian transportation; less stressful than sitting in a car on the 101 parking lot, but not exhilarating and not a way to achieve great racing fitness.

The 2008 racing season is nigh. I plan on riding the San Bruno Mt. Hill Climb on 1 January, unless the weather is hideous, but have not had the time or inclination to get out and actually train yet. So I will race it without any expectations, just a chance to get out and socialize while burning my lungs into oblivion. After that I will have to get serious about doing some intervals, and other good training type rides. And the question arises, how do I weave that into my daily commute? The commuter is a bit of a heavy beast, and it is now a fixie. I could alternate days with the touring bike, which is also a beast. Or I could try to commute on the Colnago and put the monstrous laptop and other necessities into a messenger bag or backpack. None are ideal, all are compromises, especially during the months of interminable darkness. And what about days to rest and recover? Can I plan to work at home 1-2 days/week? I need to plan this out. Especially important as my weekend schedules are tightening up so much of what I do for ‘training’ will have to happen during the week. I do plan on spending at least one night on most weeks at Hellyer as soon as Larry Nolan’s ‘Points Race Series’ resumes.

For the rest of the winter I will be spending some time in the garage on the rollers or the trainer. Not the ideal, but then again the rollers do tend to reinforce some good habits. The Wife has even tried the rollers; she did about 5 minutes last Sunday and seemed to deem them evil. But she reports she spent an hour on them this morning. Perhaps we can get the neighbors to provide entertainment while we spin in place, at least until the evening light is sufficient for some decent rides into the hills.

OK, I know some folks claim to ‘love’ their bicycles, but here is a story of someone taking it to an extreme. Now the questions arise:

• Was it safe sex?
• What constitutes safe sex with a bicycle?
• Was it consensual?
• Was the bicycle ‘of age’?
• .. and many, many more …

I started my current job on 13 December 2006, 53 weeks ago. On 14 December 2006 the co-founder of the company, and the man with the money, distributed 80Gb Video iPods to all employees as a holiday gift. Everyone joked that I had the starting day timed to perfection.

A new employee started on Monday, and today was the distribution of the yearly holiday gift. The man with the $$$ is a techno junkie, and the picture shows what we were all just handed for this year. Nice, almost certainly a better GPS unit than my aging Garmin eTrex Vista (original version with monochrome screen 24Mb of memory, and no expansion slots). But the Vista is small and light enough to mount well on my handlebars, and it has been a great tool while touring. Wonder what the Nüvi would garner in trade-in for an Edge 705?

It rained moderately overnight, maybe 0.3-0.5″ around home, and the forecast for the day is for moderate to heavy rain at times. It was no surprise that the numbers of commuters at the train station this morning was much less than on most mornings. For a while I thought I would be the sole cyclist boarding at Mountain View, then Andrew showed up and then two more just as the train arrived. Four soggy souls, much less than the typical 8-15 that board that particular train in the mornings. In the bike car, in between discussion of rain pants, Andrew related tales of the Cyclocross Natz in Kansas City over this past weekend and showed off a few of his pics. You can see a few of them, too; check out his site, CX Magazine. Looks like it was a cold, muddy fun fest. And we think we are hard core for commuting in a little rain.

Dr. Brooke wrote recently of making her pilgrimage to Trader Joe’s to stock up on cartons of Luna Bars and other easy treats to fuel the fires while pedaling for hours. I am jealous; all she had to do was make a long trip to go shopping. I have a more onerous task; to find a food item that I can consume on long rides that does not taste like cardboard and does not produce copious quantities of extra gas on its way through.

Nutrition used to be easy on days where I planned long and/or hard rides. I would start with a big bowl of oatmeal with some fresh fruit (peaches are the favorite). I would fill my pockets with Clif Bars, and off I would go, hoping to get back to civilization by the time the energy from the bars was tapped. Then it happened. For years I had symptoms of a problem; one major symptom was physical, but there was a blood makeup issue, too. After lots of tests, I made the connection myself: the physical symptom reared its head on days I ate my oatmeal and bars! I cut oats out of my diet and rapidly the physical symptom and the blood makeup symptoms faded. I am allergic to oats!

Since I came to my realization I have been on the search for something I can eat in place of the ubiquitous oat-based bars. I tried PowerBars, and beyond the terrible taste and the fact they do not look like anything I would voluntarily put in my mouth there is the problem of the bloat they seem to cause. LaraBars are OK, but most of the flavors are uninspired and they tend to be slow to get sugar into the bloodstream. A number of newer bars are too heavily biased towards protein or to have a high fat content. I found a new brand, Greens Plus Bars, at Trader Joes a couple of weeks back. The ingredient list sounded like they had gone through the forest extracting from every plant in sight, and the bar tasted a bit like a good compost pile smells. Gels are, well, gels. So far my best choice seems to be to bake some banana bread or pumpkin bread and take slices of that with me. I did contact the Clif Bar folks a couple of years ago, and they were sympathetic but did not see a market for replacing oats with another grain for the few odd-balls like me who are oat sensitive. The quest continues.

No riding today, but I did handle a few bikes. The Wife had volunteered to participate in a service project with the team/club, the VeloGirls, this morning and when we got home last night she had an e-mail saying they needed more volunteers as some folks had cancelled. So bright and early this morning we left home with a bag of tools, a bike stand, a truing stand, and a floor pump to participate in the bike build extravaganza for TurningWheels for Kids. The objective: unpack and assemble 2000 bikes to be distributed to charitable organizations in the Bay Area who will in turn give the bikes to underprivileged and needy children.  It was a whirlwind 4 hours or so,  trying to get that many bikes into shape for kids to ride safely. There were dozens of organizations providing a few  hundred or so volunteers to help in the task.  The VeloGirl group share a corner of the tent with the Bay Area Women’s Sports Initiative (BAWSI) and The Wife ended up spending the first hour or so helping to orient their volunteers on the concepts of left/right pedals, quill stems, training wheels, and such. When we first learned that we would be sharing space with the BAWSI folks I asked if one of the co-founders would be re-creating her signature moment. Alas not, but she did borrow some tools and helped in some of the bike building activities.  In just a couple of hours a few truckloads of cardboard boxes were converted into a fleet of bikes; pink bikes, blue bikes, SuperMan bikes, Barbie bikes,  far more bikes per square foot of floor space than I think I’ve ever seen.

After the bike build ‘xtravaganza a group of us walked a few blocks to Gordon Biersch for lunch. I am trying to comprehend how 6 of the 8 folks that went out to lunch could go to GB and not order beer; pure sacrilege! I’ll give The Wife a bit of break on that count as she did manage to sip down a fair amount of my glass of Winterbock when she thought I was not looking.   Tomorrow I will pay for that beer with some extra efforts on a ride … I promise.