A bit warmer than last Thursday, which was a bit warmer than the Tuesday before, which was a lot warmer than the Thursday before that! I’m not sure of what the average daily minimums are; obviously there is a day of the year with the coldest average temps, with them rising on either side. All I know is that 39 degrees feels pleasant, and 53 up on Skyline? Heavenly! OK, I just looked up the monthly stats, which show an average low temp of 40 during the months of December & January, with a forecast 3 degree rise going into February. Curiously, temps drop off much more rapidly (from September-December) than they rise.

Today we had Todd, Stu (who hasn’t been with us for quite a while), both Kevins, Eric & John. The two Kevins were the only guys in a hurry to get up Kings, posting 26:20 or so, while the rest of us were a few minutes behind. But even the fast guys were content with a relatively-easy pace the rest of the way, not the norm for the Tuesday version of this ride!

I was looking forward to a bit warmer temps this morning, and got that… maybe just a degree or two, but in the right direction! Sure, we had a bit of ice & wheel-slipping on the final Kings hairpin, but it actually felt nice & comfy up on Skyline. And I’m sure it must have been really nice on west Old LaHonda but we never got there. Why? Because we (myself, Kevin, Nigel, Mark, John & Todd) got to Sky Londa and realized we were missing someone. The other Kevin. The guy who flies jets (as opposed to my son Kevin, who rides uphill as if he’s jet-powered). The guy who does the walk-around of his plane before taking it up into the sky, but apparently has a bit of trouble fixing flat tires. We never found that out until later; when he didn’t show up after a few minutes, we retraced the route backward (which meant riding north on Skyline, the “ugly” direction), but no sign of him. After getting home I got a text from him; apparently after replacing his tube at the top of Kings, the tire blew off the rim, leaving him stranded. Why he didn’t yell to one of us I don’t know, but guess he was close enough to home (he lives up there) that he was able to walk back. Guess I’m going to have to teach another tire repair class, but this time to the guys I ride with!

It was a BEAUTIFUL morning, and I’ve got no pictures to prove it! Once again the GoPro Hero2 fails me. That darned thing has found so many ways not to work, and the problem is that, used on a bike, you can’t tell if it’s working or not because you can’t see the screen. But Strava proves I rode, and claims an average temp of 34 degrees. Yeah, but it felt like 35.

Just four of us on this cold morning, myself, Kevin (pilot), Nigel and an increasingly-rare showing by Marcus (the other Kevin, the one not the pilot, had a doctor’s appointment for tonsillitis; supposedly he’ll be getting them removed, but not sure if that happens after they’ve become really really bad or have had a chance to heal). Just barely made it up the hill under 30 minutes; nobody seemed to be in a big rush, and you just don’t go quite so fast when it’s cold. Thankfully no ice on the roads; it’s been a while since the last rain (and supposedly will be a while before we see it again!).

We did take a brief stop on west-side Old LaHonda for Nigel to take a few photos; if he sends them I’ll post them here. Meantime I’ve got to figure out what makes that GoPro camera tick… or what makes it fail, or something, before I decide it’s more trouble than it’s worth. If you have time, sure, you can stop and make sure it’s working fine, but I don’t add any extra padding to my ride calculations… as if I’d want to get up another 5 minutes earlier anyway?

Which brings up something else… the trip to France in July… is it even remotely possible to consider a flight out of SFO at 6am, if it means saving 25,000 award miles for Kevin’s ticket and about $100 on mine? Compared to a flight at a much-more-reasonable time of 8am? How many $$$/minute for sleep? My guess is that anything before 6:30am gets a very high value in my accounting formula! 6:30am is at least close to 7am, which I consider reasonable. 5am is nuts, and for a 6am flight, I’d have to be at the airport by 5am, which means leaving the house at 4:30am, which means getting up at 4am. And in all likelihood I would not have gotten to sleep before 1am, taking care of last-minute details.

It’s just not that much fun when you wake up, expecting to get out on your nice bike for a nice ride, and it’s wet outside. Not what the forecast said. Cold, yes. Wet? No. So we rush to get the rain bikes ready, which involves moving the seat & seatpost over from Kevin’s former rain bike (which he’s now using to commute to school) to his new rain bike, the way-cool Foundry with disc brakes. I ask if he’s got a tape measure to set the seat height right; he acts like it’s no big deal, tightens it down, and we take off. But not before dad wisely grabs an allen wrench and puts it in his back pocket.

Kevin, Kevin, John, Mark & darn, forgetting his name, tall guy, friendly guy, commutes back and forth between here and the UK on a regular basis. Grrr… just can’t pull the name out of my head. Hate that! He was claiming to be out of shape and slow, so the two of us rided up the regular way, while the rest of the guys did the Thursday thing and rode up through the park. Good idea we did it this way, because the two of us just barely made it before Kevin (not the pilot) and Mark came barreling up the hill.

And that was pretty much the end of it for Kevin. He stayed ahead of me for about half a mile, and then faded, fast. He was barely moving at one point, saying that his legs felt awful, probably because his seat height was maybe an inch and a half low. And maybe just not feeling great in general. Whatever the case, we headed back down 84 while the rest of the group did the “real” ride (which includes west-side Old LaHonda).

Regarding Kevin’s new bike, a Foundry cross bike with disc brakes… yes, I’m quite jealous. He doesn’t have to worry that he’s grinding through his rim on long descents, and in general has far better braking power in the wet stuff. If Trek doesn’t come out with something like it soon, I’ll probably get a Foundry myself. It really is a cool bike (and we’ll finally be getting more of them in next week).  –Mike–

What sort of world exists between my ears? Some hybrid cross between virtual and virtually-proven? It shouldn’t be so annoying when the GoPro fails me (again!), and I should be more forgiving of myself for doing something really stupid like hitting the “stop” button (the one that says I’ve stopped riding) instead of the “lap start” at the base of Kings, only to figure it out when I’m looking for my time after a few minutes and seeing… time standing still! Sure, I’m slow, but I can’t stop time. It only seems like it.

That aside, it was actually a pretty nice morning to ride. The forecast fog had apparently come and gone (looked to have been everywhere, since most roads were pretty damp), leaving beautiful sunshine (you know, perfect conditions for recording the ride, if my GoPro had worked) and temps around 40. Pleasant! Would have had a pretty decent time up the hill (with a little bit of work I was able to figure out the missing section), but about a quarter mile from the top came across Kevin (My son, not the pilot) recovering from a seizure, so nice guy that I am, I stopped and waited for him. Actually it has little to do with being a nice guy; if Kevin delays getting back on his bike, he’ll get an awful headache, feel terribly lethargic, and just want to go home. Experience has taught us the need to get him back into the swing of things very quickly! This is not something covered in the epilepsy literature, but frankly, very little is.

Nice, tidy group today. Eric, both Kevins, Mark & John. Pretty civilized pace; so civilized even I was able to carry on a conversation at times. A good day to ride. –Mike–

Funny how cold your house can feel at 60 degrees, after the heater’s kicked off, and you’ve climbed into bed. You want a couple of blankets and you may even consider snuggling, even if you’re not the snuggling type. Later, say 3 or 4am, it’s considerably-colder, yet you don’t notice when you get up to use the bathroom. “Cold” seems to be very much relative to the situation. And so it is that you go to bed, cold, thinking about how bitterly-nasty it’s going to be in the morning, but knowing you’re going to ride anyway. But the funny thing is, sure, it really is that cold, the “bitterly nasty” variety even, but you face it stoically, just something you have to do, and once out there, it really doesn’t seem so bad.

Which is a good thing, because if you thought much about it, 30 degrees really should feel that bad! January 3, maybe just three months since it might have been in the low-60s, maybe 5 months from when it will be that comfy again. When it is that warm, in those wonderful few months between May & October, you just can’t imagine what it will be like again to be riding all bundled up, seeing your breath and watching out for black ice on the road. You actually entertain thoughts of wanting to be someplace else, as if the weather in the winter here is something you should flee from. How spoiled we are! Sanity creeps back in though, sometimes shortly after the shower after getting home, sometimes a few hours later, when you realize how good you feel because you rode, how great the fresh clean air feels against your face when you’re flying through it at 35 miles per hour, and how you’ve managed to keep your winter weight to within just a few pounds of your summer “fighting” weight.

So against that backdrop, you wonder why nobody else showed up for the ride this morning, just myself and Kevin. Are they sensible, or us nuts? On a normal winter morning, we’d have 6-8 people on our ride, and see half a dozen or more others descending Kings as we’re heading up, or cresting the east side of Old LaHonda as we finish the west. But not today. That’s OK, we still had a very nice ride, at a modest pace, with me forcing myself to stay seated the entire time (my normal “style” is to spend at least 25% of the time climbing out of the saddle). Good day for that, although I did find myself walking a bit stiffly when we made an unscheduled stop at Sky Londa so Kevin could use the bathroom.

Turns out there was someone else out on the road this morning; as we hit the top of Old LaHonda we found Millo waiting for us. He’d mistakenly thought it a good idea to leave 15 minutes earlier, to make sure he wouldn’t get dropped off the back on the climbs. Not something he had to have worried about this morning!

You sure dread getting back on the bike after a week off, especially when that week involved getting fattened like a pig by eating… well, pig! Christmas ham, in this case, along with all the stuff that goes with it. A holiday that’s an excess in more ways than one. Normally I would have ridden last Sunday, but that was a wash-out in multiple ways, mostly because we were open that day in our Redwood City store (normally closed on Sundays, but always open the Sunday prior to Christmas) but also because that was the day we got a month’s worth of rain in one afternoon. Oh yeah, also the day I bought my wife a car.

Then Tuesday was Christmas, and the combination of being Christmas and being wet outside kinda killed off any possibility of a ride that day. Wonder if anyone showed up for the morning ride? The ride that I maintain we do, no matter what? Well, there are two yearly exceptions to the no matter what. One occurs when it falls on Christmas day, the other New Years. But New Year’s day it’s because we ride up Mt. Hamilton instead, so guess that counts for something!

So today, this morning, it’s a week since last on the bike, but once out the driveway, it felt good. It felt good to approach the start and see a bunch of blinking lights on each rider’s bike. It felt good even heading up Kings Mtn, at least for the first third of the way, while I managed to try and stay on the fast guys wheels. And it didn’t feel terrible when I got dropped and arrived at the top just a minute or two later. And, at about 40 degrees for most of the ride, maybe 5 degrees warmer on average than last week… well yes, that felt good too!

A few days ago I was really wondering how bad climbing Mt Hamilton next Tuesday was going to be. No more. I know I’m not going to be fast. But I know I’m going to feel good.

There are definitely some new gloves in my future. I have tried EVERYTHING. The garage is littered with gloves that didn’t fulfill their promises. The biggest myth? “Waterproof.” Don’t ever believe it. Even the $120 Gore gloves I got last year soak through in 45 minutes. But today wasn’t about water, it was about cold. 29.4 degrees for a low, with it rarely getting above 37.

Some wonder how in the world you can stay comfortable when it’s that cold outside, but truthfully, it’s not that bad.

Thermal tights, base layer, jersey, wool socks, shoe covers… pretty much everything’s fine except for the hands. Today I was using the Bontrager RXL Thermal Waterproof model, which have done well for me when temps were in the low-40s. But today? My fingers definitely could have been more comfy. Time for more-extreme measures. I’ve ordered up the Bontrager RXL Split-Finger model. XL size, so I can even use a liner if I have to.

My ultimate glove would have something to warm the very tips, maybe battery powered?

Overall, it was actually a very nice, almost social ride. Eric, Jan & Mark today; Kevin stayed home with an ingrown toenail. A little bit of ice on the archery-range corner near the top of Kings, and then a fair amount more at Sky Londa (Jan actually slipped a bit there).

We weren’t in a big rush, but still got back in reasonable time, indicating we weren’t total couch potatoes out there. Looks like our last dry ride for a while though; Sunday looks pretty nasty, and Tuesday, which happens to be Christmas… not much chance of getting out that day! Nor for someone with kids anyway.

According to Strava, the average temperature on this morning’s ride was 39 degrees if you believe Kevin’s download, 34 degrees if you believe mine, or a low temp of 35 with a high around 42 on my Bontrager Node 2.0 computer. Any way you slice it, it was a good 5 degrees cooler than any other ride so far this year, but a very long way off the all-time Tuesday/Thursday-morning record of 23 degrees, recorded on a December day in, what, 1998? That was an epic day, one that defined “layered” clothing. Today? Not so bad. Still got to work a bit on the gloves though; my fingers have yet to find a glove that keeps the tips warm.

Let’s see, we had Kevin, Kevin, Karl, Eric, George, Mark, Todd, and a rare (lately) Marcus showing. And again, I didn’t feel all that bad going up the hill. Whether by sheer willpower or something else, the bad days seem to be behind me, hopefully for good. Even my weight seems reasonable, a rare thing for winter. I even tried to sprint a few times, something I’ve stayed away from for quite a few months. There’s some power in the legs, something I can tap into on-demand. It doesn’t last forever, but that’s been the case for a decade or so. But if I’m careful, if I know I’ve got some time to recover afterward, I can give it a try and not be dropped afterward.

I like that.

What a beautiful morning! Sure, it got down to 42 or so at the start, but we’ll soon be seeing considerably-lower temps than that, and on the back side, that being west Old LaHonda, it felt almost balmy, probably mid-50s.

Kevin (my son, not the pilot), Eric, Chris, George, Mark & Todd this morning. I got up King in just a couple seconds over 28 minutes which, for this time of year, I can live with. Yes, it would have been nicer had it been 27-something, and I’ll get there. No more mental limitation; I’m going to push until it feels like I’m about to explode. On the upper reaches of west Old LaHonda I even managed to ditch Kevin (thanks to Mark taking off as soon as Kevin reached for a drink; looking at the video, I think it probably was just coincidence, but catching Kevin off-guard like that is probably the only way I’ll ever get a chance to drop him anymore).

Oh sure, some might think Kevin was slowed down a bit by a kidney stone issue.