Kevin wasn’t happy about this. I’d told him Saturday that we’d be going to the coast, we just couldn’t keep waiting until the fog cleared. Then he arrives at the house and I’m telling him no, we gotta stay out of the fog zone, and I come up with Umunhum.

Last time we visited Umunhum was in 2017, with one ride earlier, sometime around 2011, which for some reason isn’t showing up on Strava. There was also my first ride up it back in the mid-70s.

We aren’t in shape to do a complete loop and return home, opting instead for riding to it and returning to the San Jose Train station for the trip home. Instead of 124 miles (and this wouldn’t be a 124 miles we’d want to do even if we were both in great shape!) it came to about 67.5 plus another three miles back from the train station.

Sure, we were wearing leg warmers and base layers when we left, since the forecast showed temps staying pretty cool, even without the fog. We could have done without; it was pretty nice after the first 30 minutes or so.

It’s actually quite a distance from Redwood City to food in Los Gatos, but I figured if we ate earlier (Peet’s in Los Altos) we’d probably be running on fumes 3/4 of the way up Umunhum. Worked out well and we came across a very nice French Patisserie, Le Fluer de Cocoa! The person helping us was very definitely French too. Kevin, however, chose to engage in English. Why?

Maybe because he was feeling a bit off? I was outside, watching the bikes, but could see inside as Kevin was being taken care of. And as he was about to pay, he just froze in place. I know that one. I came in before he started involuntarily moving all over the place, got him on the floor, assured the woman that, for Kevin, this was normal and he’d be fine in a couple of minutes. Which of course he was.

bUp to now, the ride had been pretty nice. And it continued pretty nice for maybe another 3 or 4 miles before it started getting a bit not so nice (climbing) and then really not so nice as Hicks wound its way up to the base of Umunhum. Each time I’ve climbed Hicks, I’ve thought it won’t be as bad as I remember. And it always is. You do finally get where you need to go, but in the process there’s at least one place where you might have gone into your very lowest gear, and as bad as Hicks is, it’s nothing like Umunhum.

You remember that the first part isn’t so bad, but oh geez, it’s terrible. But a lot less terrible than what comes after it. Umunhum is like Page Mill between Gates 3 & 4, only worse. So much longer. So much straighter in a few of the really steep pitches.

I was going into crazy-sweating mode, as usual, primairly, almost only, on the right side of my head. Guessing this has nothing to do with where I sweat, but more likely how I hold my head when climbing. Would keep pushing the helmet against my head, to try and squeeze out the pads and headband, but that never seemed to work well. I did remove my sunglasses about half-way up.

Gearing. Yeah, I was out of gears. Somehow I managed to keep turning the pedals, spurred on by my Garmin’s countdown (remaining feet to climb), which made it feel like I was getting somewhere. Kevin had finally gotten tired of riding so slowly so he rode on a corner or two ahead, but not so far I wasn’t there to take care of him when he had another seizure, about 2/3rds of the way up the climb. Like the earlier one, not a huge production, just two minutes or so.

He gets back up and moving, once again putting some distance between us until it finally levels out as you head around the back side of the mountain for the first time, just before the final nasty assault, a very short but steep pitch to the location of the old radar building. That last steep part might not be so bad if you don’t have anyone in your group who is going to go charging up it, claiming they’re not showing off, like Kevin.

We spent a few minutes admiring the view, which, from the main visitor center, is primarily to the east (Mt Hamilton) and north (San Francisco), and stopped again on the flat section behind, to get a picture of Monterey Bay. And then… down.

Umunhum is a terrible descent. Too steep, corners banked badly, dramatic drop-offs. And one of those descents where the guy (almost always a guy) who thinks there’s no need for disc brakes… that guy has a chance of becoming a believer on Umunhum.

And me? I was a bit concerned about my carbon rim brake wheels with 54,000+ miles on them but things seemed to be working well. Until, at the intersection with Hicks, we stopped to check things out. Good thing, that. My front rim was delaminating and exploding outward, just barely holding the tire in place. It was so close to blowing off the deformed rim. I was looking at it and wondering if I actually had enough time to let the air out before it would blow up while I’m desperately trying to deflate it.

Fortunately it seemed intact enough at 50psi (normally I run 100psi) to try and nurse it back to the train station. Not much fun doing the remainder of the descents using the rear brake only, and it slowed down our speed just a bit (I wasn’t going to risk riding really fast with a front tire that could blow at any time). Of course, we had nothing but our Garmins to get us to the train station and no untuitive feel for the remaining time it was going to take to get there. But it was going to be close, really close. I’d though at first the train left at 4:02pm but fortunately it’s actually 4:12pm. Fortunate because I’m not sure the Garmin was doing its best getting us there, losing some time and also because Kevin decided to have yet another seizure (and again, important to remember he can feel them coming on ahead of time, get to the side of the road, lie his bike down and get on the ground).

And we did make it! Meeting that same train after Mt Ham a couple weeks ago, we made it by about 30 seconds. This time, a whole two minutes.

In the end I’m happy I got to have another ride on par with the ride up Mt Ham two weeks ago. Reasonably warm temps and a long climb. Mt Hamilton is long because it’…. long. 18 miles. Umunhum is long because it’s STEEP. Much steeper than Mt Hamilton.

The days of  pushing 280 watts for 20 minutes are long, long, LONG gone. Sadly, they don’t seem like they were that long ago, but that’s the sort of distortion Strava provides, because anything-Strava seems like current history; everything pre-Strava is an entirely different world.

Today’s ride was more than a bit wonky. It was to be a one-way affair, meeting up with my wife in the City (that’s what we call San Francisco, right?). And making things a bit dicey was the fact that I didn’t know exactly when she’d be ready to have me drive her back from her appointment. The plan was to be in the Castro to meet her around 1pm at the earliest, 2:30pm at the latest, depending how her stuff went.

So I put together as interesting a ride as I could from Redwood City to San Francisco, including a loop out to Pacifica via Sharp Park and, if time allowed, a climb to the very top of San Bruno Mtn, a place I hadn’t been to since my 3rd place in the race back in, what year? Whenever I was 16, could have been 17.

I met up with Kevin at his place in Foster City and shortly thereafter came across a former employee of our, Burt M, who’d recently picked up a new bike from us, a Trek Domane+ SLR ebike. Although it’s not your typical ebike because it’s designed to be used without the electric assist at all when cruising along on the flats.  It’s the bike that I’m wondering how long I can put off myself, given how poorly I’ve been climbing lately. Burt put on an amazing display of how that bike can literally take years off your age, as he easily rode up Crystal Springs road with Kevin, putting quite a bit of distance on me. 287 watts for 2 minutes, 44 seconds for Kevin on that stretch; I was at 241 watts for 3 minutes, 15 seconds. Could have been worse, and would have, earlier in the ride. Fortunately, by that point, I was probably close to 20 miles in.

The expected routing was to follow Skyline from Crystal Springs north, staying “high” until we got to Sharp Park. But the Garmin for some reason routed us downhill at Chateau Drive, and I was thinking maybe there was a section of road “up top” that wasn’t available anymore and we had to loop downward for a bit to avoid it. But we kept going down. Down. Down. All the way down! I should have put a stop to it before reaching the bottom, but figured I’d still be able to get us easily back on track and it couldn’t be THAT bad.

Well, it is THAT bad down low, hitting an unbelievable number of lights on El Camino in Burlingame, then heavy traffic and pad pavement as you rode further north. Fortunately I was able to get the Garmin to re-route us back up Sneath to where we wanted to be, although we’d wasted so much time down low that the Pacifica “detour” would have taken too much time.

Eventually we got to the base of San Bruno Mountain. It wasn’t recognizable from almost 50 years ago; I didn’t spot the school where the race started from and the road felt a bit familiar but much shorter than I’d remembered. In the race, that early part up the wide 4 lane road (even back then) was a bit discouraging as guys would fly past while I just rode at the best pace I could, trying not to burn up. In the race I began reeling guys in on the upper part of the climb and once on Radio Road (the part Kevin and I didn’t have time for today), I was on fire, but had no clue I’d passed all but two until well after the finish.

It was with great surprise today that I felt pretty darned good on that wide 4 lane section. I normally dislike climbs on really wide roads, but there was something about this one that felt just right. I felt like I could really drive my pedals into it, like it was the perfect grade, something I could keep up for a while without falling apart. Kevin, on the other hand, was falling back. I kept checking up on him, making sure he was ok, not having a seizure, but also wanting to keep my distance and not let him catch up. Yeah, competition. There are so few times I can beat Kevin on a climb anymore. Looking back on it, it’s tough to know how much I might have been holding back, how many watts I had left in the tank.

It was at the top of this climb that I got the text from my wife that she was ready to be picked up, so any thoughts we had of finishing on Radio Road were quickly put to rest. It also changed the plans for the rest of the ride because I needed to get Kevin on his way home ASAP, and he was going to be taking the train back. Well fortunately there’s a train station not too far from the other side of the climb, so I sent Kevin on his way there while I tried to get a new course plot to the Castro. This is one of Garmin’s weaknesses; mid ride destination changes aren’t handled too well. In my perfect world, I could look things up on my phone on Google Maps, plot it out, send it to my Garmin and poof, all done!

Little did I know that the station I’d sent Kevin to wasn’t being served by CalTrain presently, due to the electrification construction. So while riding through San Francisco, navigating some really crazy crap (and I do mean crap; intersections where it looked like your only option were freeway on-ramps, only to discover this tiny bike path stuck in the middle of everything) I get the message on my Garmin, a text from Kevin, that he’s riding back home instead. Fortunately he had a pretty good idea of the routing from a ride we’d done many years prior.

And me? I eventually found my way through the city of way too many stoplights to my wife. Wasn’t at all sure I was going the right way until I saw the huge Gay Pride flag off in the distance.

The ride had the potential to have nothing but crappy memories, but that climb up San Bruno Mountain really changed the tone of things for me. I have some hope that I can still climb, and enjoy it.
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