All posts by Mike

Back to normal, sort of? Solo ugly ride up Redwood Gulch

Ride reports (not Tu/Th)

A next-gen Tour de France in early training.
Thursday didn’t work out so well; Kevin got as far as, well, less than halfway to the START of the Tuesday/Thursday morning ride and couldn’t go further due to vision issues caused by his epilepsy meds. Usually it’s not too bad, but Thursday, not so good. He told me he’d catch up, that I should go ahead to see if anyone else was at the start and let them know. I did ride to the start, nobody else was there, and eventually I get a text from Kevin telling me it’s just not happening. Not a good thing; my riding has been a bit sucky lately and I need the miles!

And then today… Kevin can’t make it because he’d been throwing up most of the night, apparently from a new restaurant he and his girlfriend tried last night. I’d wanted to do an easy ride to Pescadero and back via Tunitas, but on my own, I really didn’t feel like heading over the other side of the hill. But I did need something “real” and about the only thing “real” is either Page Mill or Highway 9 via Redwood Gulch. Page Mill wouldn’t be long enough (and I’d done it just a week or two ago anyway), so Redwood Gulch for the win. Or loss.

I wasn’t even going to pretend to have any speed or power today; I literally took it easy, without wishing it were otherwise. A rare thing for me. However, I did note that I was 52 minutes into the ride when I hit Purissima, which is noteworthy because, back in the day, way back in the day, it took 54 minutes to ride from about where I live now (just a few blocks from where I grew up) to visit my then-girlfriend in Sunnyvale, quite a few miles further-on. Was I that much faster then? Dumb question.

I did the mandatory stop at the Los Altos Peets, getting a medium (OMG did I call it a “grande” when I ordered it??? How gauche to do that at Peets!) Caramel Macchiato and an egg & ham thing, fuel for Redwood Gulch. And then on to Steven’s Creek and a relatively-leisurely pace up Redwood Gulch. I told myself I wasn’t going to push it, I was going to start the climb in my lowest gear and just leave it there… and I did. And I survived! The climb from the end of Redwood Gulch up 9 to Skyline… that seemed to be the toughest part. Just seemed to take forever. But eventually, I got there, and it’s always a pretty easy run heading north on Skyline.

Overall I was pretty happy with the ride. My weights in about the right place and I never felt like the next pedal stroke would feel like one pedal stroke too far.

If you envision a ladder of increasing ethics, this must surely be the very top

Personal stuff


Sadly, this truly was the pinnacle of ethics for John Snow; it could be said that his only direction from here would be downhill, and indeed, John Snow’s character took quite a slide after this speech.

I don’t believe that a slide, a decline in ethics, is inevitable though. The key is never achieving a level of comfort in a way that you no longer question yourself. Climbing the ladder doesn’t mean it gets easier. In fact, the opposite is likely true; while climbing the ethical ladder, you can look back and see how far you’ve come, maybe even recognize mileposts along the way. That provides incentive to keep climbing. Once at the top, and we’re making an assumption there is actually a top, a place where the highest ethical standards are a given and others see this… that’s where it gets tougher, because there could be a temptation to cash in. Awareness of that temptation hopefully provides the incentive to continue asking the hard questions, continue to challenge yourself from within.

But none of it happens without a foundation of transparency and trust. You have to trust others, even when they have not yet proven themselves trustworthy. If we fail to trust others, we are not giving them the chance to grow. They may aspire to the lowest expectations we have for them. They may even betray our trust, and that will hurt. But you can’t let it change your direction. You can reach down and help them climb the ladder themselves, but you can’t become comfortable with a lower place on that ladder, a place where ethics are situational and not absolute.

Not sure what got me started on all of this. I think it had something to do with my brother Tom’s birthday, but can’t really track it all backwards. Probably has something to do with my Father and his frequent lessons that we’re not defined by what others do, we’re defined by what we do. Turning the other cheek was kind of his mantra.