Author Archives: Mike

How many guys to fix a stuck chain?

Posted on by
1

We're thinking if we all peer intently enough at the stuck chain, it will give up and fix itself. Or something like that.

Not just the normal through-the-park ride this morning, but a run down the “middle fork” of dead-end Skyline roads (Star Hill/Swett), since west-side Old LaHonda is still closed on weekdays (we know; we rode by on Tuesday to check).

We were heading back up at a pretty good clip until Nigel had a nasty case of jammed chain, bringing him to a quick halt and giving the opportunity for our full complement of bike & tech-savvy guys a chance to feel pretty stupid and helpless as we first tried to pry it out (failed), next thought about cutting the chain (which we quickly realized still would have left the jammed part… jammed), then remove the crank (failed again) and finally remove both chainrings (success!).

The worst part was that this ate up a bunch of time, requiring us to head back via Tunitas and down Kings. Well, it was pretty cold up top (46 degrees) so Karl, Nigel, Kevin & Jan decided that the best way to get warmed up would be to really punch it on that gradual climb back up to Skyline. Ouch. I dropped off the back for a bit but gradually clawed my way back towards the leaders. Despite what seemed like a pretty good run up there, Strava, as usual, shows “There are no accomplishments for this ride.”

Check out the "speed" line (blue) to see how long we were stopped

But there could have been accomplishments! I just checked the downloaded data, and found, for this segment, that subtracting the time we spent stopped for Nigel’s chain mess, we would have had one heck of a great time! If you can believe the data, some of us would have come close to a new Strava record for that segment. How? My total time for that segment was 33:57, but we had stopped for about 16 minutes, 38 seconds. That leaves just over 17 minutes actual riding time. Not bad!

It’s not me that’s slow; it’s everyone else getting too fast!

Posted on by
3

I’m not riding all that badly; 27:50 for the climb up Kings, for mid-May, isn’t atypical for me. Everybody else though? They’re definitely going faster. Today we had Karl, Karen, Eric, Marcus, Kevin (not the pilot), Todd & Jon, and it didn’t take long for me to completely lose sight of them. I thought that maybe Kevin (my son) would be riding a bit slower, since he’d missed several rides last week due to a kidney issue resurfacing (his epilepsy meds like to create kidney stones), but no, he made it up the hill in a “clean” 26 minutes (meaning 26 flat, not 26:59). Of course I wasn’t there to see it, but Strava seems to confirm his claim.

Strava. I could post the Strava thingee here, but at the bottom it would say “There are no accomplishments on this ride.” Strava, you could learn a thing or two about salesmanship! Why not just come out and say it? “You suck!” And why am I so addicted to the darned thing?

Overall I’m looking at numbers for my rides that really aren’t that bad. What’s changed is Kevin, who, at this time last year, had yet to get under 30 minutes up Kings, and two months later was at 26:30, and this past month has hit 25:30. I’m still better on the flats, and I’m still better if the ride is long enough (over 60 miles).

But what will happen in France? I’ll tell you one thing, it won’t be me carrying all the extra stuff up the hills this time!

Tour of California Stage 1 challenge

Posted on by
Reply

Three cyclists in the break enjoying a light moment early in the first stage

So the Tour of California is back, you really want to see it, but you don’t want to go a long way to just catch a quick glimpse of them and then poof, they’re gone. Hey, if it’s in your back yard, no biggie, go see the parade of world-class cyclists that you read about and see on TV and once a year shows up here. But when you have to drive two and a half hours to get there… three+ hours on the way back? Plus losing out on a bike ride?

So I had an idea. What if you could design a bike ride that would cut across the course multiple times? Not as easy as it sounds; you’ve got to get maps and write down estiamted times that the race will pass various points on the course and then study the roads that criss-cross the course and see if something can work out. And it did!
Sorry I don’t have a way to overlay the actual race course with the route Kevin and I rode, but it all worked out pretty well. We started our ride at 10:30 and have plenty of time to get to our first intercept at 11:17, then rode 5 miles to the next intercept at 11:44, another 12 miles to see them at 1:10 and then a pretty tough 20 miles including the steep climb up Coleman for our final visit at 3:10.

Somehow it all worked out, even managing to get home in time for Mother’s Day dinner. 53 miles, not that much climbing (but quality!), moderate speed (would have been faster except that we were often in heavy traffic and once in a while not sure which way to go), but a lot better than watching it on TV and not riding!

Bike to work hero or opportunist?

Posted on by
Reply

Pretty amazing feat today by Patrick, our Redwood City service manager. By carefully studying the map of “energizer stations” available on the Peninsula for Bike to Work day, he managed to score swag from 15 of them! The toughest part was getting an early start on the day, since the stations closed at 9am.

Makes my morning ride seem insignificant, although any time I can do Kings through the park in less than 29 minutes I’m pretty happy (and tired!).

It’s not a real ride if it doesn’t have mountains

Posted on by
Reply

I’ve mentioned in past entries that sometimes I don’t look forward to getting up early to go climb Kings with people who are going to finish a day earlier than me, and how sometimes the first half of the climb I’m wondering just what the heck I’m doing.

Today was not one of those times. Thank goodness for that silly 100-mile perfectly-flat ride on Sunday! It made me appreciate again just how special it is to climb a mountain, to be on top of the world looking out at the bay on one side, the coast on the other. Flying downhill, speed limited by my nerves and not my legs. It felt good. Really good.

Karl, Karen,Todd, George & Marcus this morning; neither of the Kevins (don’t know where the pilot’s excuse was, maybe work, but my son has suddenly developed some sort nasty kidney pains again, requiring a visit to Kaiser for testing and pain meds). What a beautiful morning it was… warm enough that, for the first time this season, I could do the morning ride without leg warmers! No record time up Kings (28-something) but I felt OK, and our alternate route down Tunitas to the “plateau” and return via Swett was actually fun, especially since Karl and George were being kind to me (Karen, Todd and Marcus had turned back at Star Hill to get back earlier).

Hard to believe that just two weeks earlier it was wet & 40 degrees up on top. This weather is a change I like! And mountains… another change I like. Never would have appreciated them as much if not for that 100 mile flat ride two days earlier.

Kevin comes full circle; Delta 50k 2005, Delta Century 2012

Posted on by
Reply

Kevin’s first organized ride was the Delta 50k in 2005, 7 years ago, when he was 12 years old. Prior to that his longest ride had been 10 miles, so it was a bit of a challenge for him, to say the least.

Kevin in 2005 at the Delta 50k's first rest stop

He’s still annoyed that I billed it as a 25 mile ride (which is what I truly thought it was going to be at the time) but was actually 33.

Today, Kevin removed the last monkey from his back as he rode the 100 mile event (which was actually 98.1 miles, but who’s counting… I mean, besides myself, and Strava). You can find the write-up (and lots of photos) on his original ride here.

That photo on the left was, as they say, the beginning of the end, or the end of the beginning. From that first organized ride he went on to do several others of similar length that year, and was soon climbing Old LaHonda and later on, Kings Mtn.

Kevin in 2012 at the 80 mile rest stop on the Delta Century

Fast-forward 7 years to today. 100 miles is a distance Kevin can knock off without giving it much thought (he’s a pro at the Redwood City/Santa Cruz loop), and it probably helps that he’s 6 or 7 inches taller than in the old photo, and weighs substantially less. Yet today’s ride was one of his most-challenging in some time, because it’s virtually pancake flat, a whopping 420ft of climbing (even though Strava and Garmin erroneously report it at 1400ft), and also quite windy, and the combination can be a lot tougher mentally and an HC (beyond category) climb used in the Tour de France.

Did I mention it was windy? Pretty much the entire 50 mile outbound segment was into a pretty stiff headwind, something that’s not nearly as big a deal on a hilly ride as it is when it’s flat. And cross-winds strong and consistent enough in a few places that you were literally riding your bike at an angle.

A bridge too-crossed on the Delta Century. 3 times across the same bridge maybe?

Of course, there are advantages to riding into a headwind, because it’s something I can do relatively well, while Kevin struggles in the same conditions. It’s one of the few times I can actually ride him off my wheel if I wanted to. OK, it’s the only time I could do that, since any climb of substance and he’s way ahead of me.

So how was the ride? Flat, windy, and fairly warm (up to the mid-90s in a couple of places). Picturesque? After you’ve passed the 25th or 33rd or whatever boutique Lodi vineyard, they all look pretty much the same. The various bridges between the various Delta islands are interesting, until you realize that the curiously-looped course sends you a couple of them multiple times (three times for one of them, I think!). We started the ride just past 8:30am, finishing just before 3pm. Not too fast (that darned wind!) but still pretty enjoyable with good rest stops and friendly cyclists and darned few cars. Amazingly few cars in fact! There were a few levee roads that went on for several miles without a single car.

Will we do it again? Not really likely; a perfectly-flat century is one of those things on your bucket list that needs to be crossed off, and while you’re riding it, you question why it was on your bucket list in the first place. But that’s actually easy to explain; it needed to be revisited by the new Kevin. And I needed an opportunity to be the stronger of us again, something that’s not going to happen very often anymore. –Mike–

Yes, we rode Thursday

Posted on by
Reply

Sorry to be so late on the Thursday ride report! Life just kinda got away from me, with things getting pretty hectic at the shop as business ramps up with the relatively-nice and expected-soon-to-be-great weather. Of course, the weather wasn’t quite so relatively-great yesterday morning. No rain (that came later in the day), but plenty of fog & drizzle up on Skyline to greet Kevin (my son, not the pilot), Karl, Karen, Todd, Marcus… trying to remember who else? Think that’s it.

Since it was a Thursday we rode up through the park, and since we rode up through the park, I was off the back a bit more quickly than normal. Kevin rode on ahead with Marcus, and the report I later got from Marcus was that it took several attempts to dislodge Kevin from his wheel on the way up.

Since west-side Old LaHonda is still under repair (and likely to remain so for up to another month!) we rode down the other side of Kings (Tunitas Creek), over Star Hill and down Native Sons to the end, as we did last week. It would have been pretty routine if Kevin hadn’t busted a spoke just after turning around at the bottom, causing enough of a delay that we had to shorten the rest of the ride a bit and head back the same way and straight down Kings instead of 84. Just 28 miles total instead of the usual 31, but the steep climbs out of those dead-end roads define “quality.”

Most-exciting race finish ever? Close anyway!

Posted on by
Reply


Forward to 43:30 into this video for the fun~ The setup- This is the last 7k of the Tour of Turkey, Stage 7, May 1 2012. The guys off the front are getting chased down by the pack, when one guy, Keisse, takes off on his own. You’d think this was going to be a normal pack-chases-leader and gets him just before the line. You would be so wrong; what happens is unexpected and has the announcers (and possibly yourself) screaming. If you want to shorten it down, go to about 47 minutes. –Mike–

My winter is over

Posted on by
Reply

It took a while, but it’s all coming back now. It wasn’t easy to admit that the last few months, I really wasn’t looking forward to my Tuesday/Thursday-morning rides. Or I should say, I didn’t look forward to getting up early for them, and getting run into the ground on Kings. Once out there for a while, I always felt better, and never, ever, did I later feel like it would have been better to sleep in. It just took a bit of convincing.

But this morning was different. I was in control going up Kings, and by that I don’t mean fast, but that it was up to me to determine how gassed I felt. My heart rate responded linearly to my effort, and my lungs felt like they could deliver enough oxygen to allow me to feel the burn in your legs that tells you yes, you rode hard. If you wanted to. Oh, and it doesn’t hurt that the scale shows my weight coming back down again. I like that too.

Cool? Yes, it was still cool up on top, but 46 degrees when you’re able to put out some effort doesn’t feel that bad. I’m looking forward to Thursday! Providing it doesn’t rain. I’m done with rain.

Real ride, fake ducks

Posted on by
Reply

Real or fake? Seemed real at the time. Looking at them now, no way. Decoys.

Kevin was off doing the paintball thing with his friends so I was on my own on the road today, which isn’t such a bad thing sometimes. It’s good to get out there on your own for a few hours, ride at a pace that’s not a compromise but rather a reflection of your own strengths & weaknesses, and make random stops along the way when you see something interesting without having to think about whether it’s interesting to anybody else.

Like those ducks I came across in the duck pond on the shortcut between LaHonda and Pescadero Road. I never thought they might not be real, which in retrospect seems pretty dumb.

But getting to the ride itself, it was up Old LaHonda and down the other side, over Haskins to Pescadero, Stage Road to San Gregorio and then, instead of the usual run up Tunitas, I headed up 84, which, even though it means nearly a thousand feet less climbing, always seems like more of a grind.

The "shortcut" through LaHonda, and location of the ducks (Reflection Lake)

But that wasn’t different enough; when I got to west-side Old LaHonda I took that to the top instead of continuing on 84 and then did the unthinkable. I went down Old LaHonda on the other side. For only the second time in my life I think. I’ve never understood the attraction to descending Old LaHonda, and I still don’t, yet so many people do. Some day I’ll figure out why.

The silliness of my route didn’t end with the Old LaHonda descent; I was determined to get in 100k, so I did some additional looping around in Woodside before getting home… and ended up with 62.3 miles. Didn’t even have to do a lap around the block!

For more ride details, check out the Strava entry here.Biggest disappointment was a 15.9mph average speed. 16 sounds so much faster! 5987ft of climbing, so technically not a “hard” ride (you need 1000ft of climbing for each 10 miles, so 300ft short) but you could have fooled me.