All posts by Mike

A ride much better than its separate components

Ride reports (not Tu/Th)
Turkeys at the start of West Old LaHonda! We see them several times each year, but the flock is a lot larger than usual lately.

Interesting morning; did NOT expect to wake up to wet roads!!! Actually, expected to wake up a lot earlier than 9:15am too. Not sure what’s up with that. Not like I’ve actually gotten enough sleep for a while, so not a bad thing really, just an odd thing.

So we waited for the roads to dry. And waited. And waited. Eventually, around noon, things were looking good so Kevin and I got out there, and gave the roads in the hills a bit more time to dry out by heading south a bit then up Page Mill. Page Mill, that one road you just can’t get a rhythm on. Or at least I can’t. Hate that first part, all the way up to Foothill Park. From there on, it’s steep enough you can establish a good grind, but before that, those ugly little bumps and even that gradual lead-in from the start of the timed climb at Arastradero… it all makes you wonder why you’d want to climb it. Which is likely why we don’t climb it very often! Yet, today, the moderate speed forced by Kevin’s still-angry knee and still out-of-shapeness seemed almost pleasant.

From the top we descended West Alpine and yes, the lower parts felt quite a bit colder than the 49 showing up on my Garmin. Felt good to bottom out and get into the sun again, and even better to make the turn up the hill to to Duck Pond detour.

This is what Raynauds disease looks like (a circulation issue that cuts off blood to extremities when cold, and it wasn’t that cold!).

The climb from 84 to West Old LaHonda isn’t so bad when you haven’t ridden 84 all the way from the coast; Kevin kept up a reasonable pace. West Old LaHonda was its usual pretty self, with a large flock of turkeys greeting us near the start.

By the time we got to Sky L’onda I’d pretty much lost feeling in my fingers and switched to the heaviest winter gloves that I had brought along, just in case. Good thing. Should have put them on much earlier! They didn’t even start to come back to life until half-way through the post-ride shower.

What is it about F150s?

Tues/Thurs 7:45am ride

Strava shows our location and speed being 35.1mph when the truck came upon us, angry that we were in the way. Just prior to this we had been doing 40. I’d actually seen the truck long before he got to us, and knew he was flying.

So kind of skipped over Sundays ride didn’t we? The plan had been West Alpine, but got a text 3/4 of the way up Old LaHonda that my wife was heading to the ER because her stomach pains from the past few days weren’t going away. Not much I could do, since you can’t go to the hospital with anyone anymore (Covid-19 restrictions), but Kevin and I decided to stay on “our” side of the hill, so she could get in touch with us if we needed to. Basically we rode the normal Tuesday/Thursday ride in reverse, which, curiously, is about 2 miles shorter when you substitute climbing Old LaHonda for descending 84. Weird thing, that.

After a bunch of tests it’s determined she’s got appendicitis and it’s gotta come out. Which, these days, is basically outpatient surgery. Again, with Covid-19, a lot of things have changed and pretty sure you’d be in & out same day for anything less complicated than a heart transplant. I picked her up around midnight and she’s been resting uncomfortably since. I’d show a photo of the three small incisions they made but that’s not the sort of thing I do. OK, actually it is, if it were me, but she might have different ideas about privacy. Well, not might, she does. 🙂

OK, now to this morning’s ride. This was the first ride in a couple months where I didn’t feel like I was riding with all cylinders firing, and Kevin, Kevin and Jeff rode off ahead pretty quickly. The funny thing is, I actually slept OK last night and felt ok getting up. Maybe it was because I wasn’t getting feedback on my power, because I forget to replace my power meter battery? Thankfully, I felt better as the ride went on, eventually dropping younger Kevin without realizing it, on the West Old LaHonda climb. Actually I did realize he wasn’t there, but didn’t know he was having knee issues and would have appreciated the company. He never seems to think like that when I’m in difficulty though!

Making the ride more interesting than usual was the idiot in the F150 that was flying down 84 behind us and then pulling ahead at the bottom before coming to a stop in the middle of the road to yell at us. Kevin was talking with the guy while I was taking pictures. Kevin was keeping his cool, surprisingly so, while this guy was going off about how awful cyclists were. It was only in hindsight that I realized Kevin (or I) should have asked the guy, “Are you threatening us?” Because there really wasn’t any good reason to call the CHP on him as he didn’t actually try to run us off the road; it would have been his own sorry butt that would have been in danger from stopping in the middle of a highway, not ours.

The irony is that Kevin and I are always watching out for cars and trying to give as much room as possible and, if someone’s really flying downhill, we’ll find a place to pull over and let the idiot go by. In this case, we were nearly at the bottom of the hill and going fast enough it didn’t seem like we’d be holding anyone up. I’m guessing, if we weren’t there, he might have shaved 4 seconds off his drive.