Sensible people got out on early rides today, beating the heat. Kevin and I didn’t get to be sensible; we were doing mechanic support for Foster City’s annual community bike ride. Normally that involves inflating a whole lot of tires; still did this year too. But as you can see in the photos, well, some bikes weren’t ready for prime time, and a few were downright death traps. Well, that’s why they have us at the event. We got the two bikes in the photos, plus an assortment of other bikes with “interesting” issues, reasonably safe to ride.

By the time we got out on our own ride, it was precisely noon, allowing us to take full advantage of our high-temp training in France as we rode through Woodside in the mid-90s (not all that bad, really), up Old LaHonda in the mid-80s (yeah, would be nicer to climb in cooler temps), La Honda back up to mid-90s (most of the turtles didn’t even like that, choosing to stay in the water at the duck pond, instead of sunning themselves on the floating platforms), back to the mid-80s on the coast, 75 to 85 climbing Tunitas, and back into the mid-90s at the bottom of Kings.

It wasn’t an easy ride; the Interbike trade show kept me from riding both Tuesday’s & Thursday’s morning rides, and Kevin… well, he should have ridden, but slept in. The result? 24 minutes up Old LaHonda instead of 22, a couple extra minutes up Haskins too, and Kevin was pretty slow on the middle (steep) section of Tunitas. He did recover on the flatter section up top, picking up enough speed that it was tough to stay on his wheel!