All posts by Mike

Very nice day, very short ride, started easy, ended hard

Ride reports (not Tu/Th)

75 degrees on February 4th. Clean air too. Kind of ridiculous but awesome!
Normally it would be a longer ride on a Sunday, out to the coast, or maybe up Redwood Gulch, something of substance. But Kevin had to catch an early train to see his girlfriend, and is still nursing a sore left leg from a slight fall he had on Thursday when trying to get past the closed gat at the base of Huddart. So, easy ride south through the foothills & back.

And it was easy, all the way to the southern-most point of the ride, the location of our former store in Los Altos. Yes, had to take a look and see if anything had moved in yet. No sign of life, still up for lease, and part of me hopes it stays vacant for quite a while. My life would have been a whole lot easier had the landlord been willing to make some concessions regarding staying there a while longer with reduced rent, and we would have had no issue with signage advertising the space was available for lease on short notice. But the past is the past, right?

Well, up to that point the ride had been easy. Not terribly adventurous, aside from a minor detour showing Kevin the “shortcut” path that runs from the end of Robleda. It’s not too challenging and OK on a road bike in dry weather. But about that return…

As I mentioned earlier, Kevin had a train to catch, and on Foothill, became something of a train engine himself. I don’t know where his sore leg went; it was all I could do to stay on his wheel (and we picked up another guy on the way, who was also working hard to stay on the train). Kevin held that pace pretty much the full length of Foothill, thankfully letting up a bit, on request, for the climb up Sand Hill.

Yes, it was really nice to be in shorts, regular jersey, no legwarmers, no base layer, no long-fingered gloves. 75 degrees nice. Wow.

Back from Cambodia, back to routine, different photo

Tues/Thurs 7:45am ride

What, you were expecting the usual photo of West Old LaHonda?
Got back from Cambodia Wednesday 4:30pm, took a shower, made it to work for the last couple of hours. Most people probably would have just slept after being up for 27 hours straight including a 15 hour plane ride from Singapore to SFO, but I’m not most people. But hey, at least I took a shower first, right? Maybe the real attraction to heading to the shop right after the trip was getting to ride my bike on familiar turf again!

My plan (remember, there’s always a plan) worked. Stay up pretty much from beginning to end of the journey home (that 27 hours previously mentioned, and then continue to stay up until normal sleep time in California. The idea being that you’re so tired that you fall asleep and don’t wake up until the alarm goes off, avoiding getting up in the middle of the night feeling like it’s the middle of the day. Got all that? Learned it from trips to France. Just trust me; it works. At least heading east.

So the alarm goes off and I’m feeling kinda sorta maybe OK! Time to do the regular Thursday ride. And it’s not as cold as when I left either. Did I bring home some of that warm Cambodia weather with me? Just myself and Kevin this morning, probably a good thing because it wasn’t going to be fast. Blame all that on the closed gate at the bottom of Huddart; that must have added 10 minutes to our time up the hill right?

Running behind it would have been easy to skip the West Old LaHonda segment, but routine is important to me. I want to put off as long as possible any sign of a date I can look back to and say, that’s when I started cutting the ride short! And of course, a very good thing we didn’t because it was the beautiful gorgeous view of the coast. A view that normally would have been at the top of this entry (as has been the case countless time before) except that, on my ride home from work tonight, I saw something even-more-beautiful. One of those super-moons rising above the east bay hills, with the bay below. So I stopped while climbing Jefferson to try and get a decent photo, which kinda sorta worked, but not really. I’ll try to do better next time a super-moon comes around while I’m riding home at night.