On Bicycles, and.... what else is there?

The happy group at the start of MDR. This past weekend I did the "Memorial Day Ride" ("MDR"), a supported bike tour between Los Gatos and Santa Barbara organized for the past 22 years by Janine Rood. The route alternates between the original "coastal route" and a newer "inland route". The coastal route, held on odd years, follows Highway 1 through Big Sur while the odd-yeared inland route tours the parched hills of Hillister, Pacines, Bitterwater, and King City on the way to Cabria and San Simenon. From San Simeon to Santa Barabara the two routes share the same final two days. 2011 being odd, this was a coastal route year, but the same landslides which diverted the Tour of California from its planned Big Sur passage did the same to MDR this year, so inland it was for the second consecutive year. So odd and even switch: next year will be coastal, Caltrans permitting. The inland route is 370 miles or so in four days: a long first day of 1...

Quick post today..... I estimated the power taken for Contador to do the climb to Nevegal, which took him 20:58 from the checkpoint at the base of the climb to the summit: 600 meters climbed in 7.30 km for an average grade of 8.2%. For direct comparison with Horner's Sierra Road climb I used the same numbers: 65 kg body mass, 6.8 kg bike, 1.5 kg of other stuff, 0.32 m² CdA. I reduced rolling resistance from 3% to 2.5% since Contador was on time trial tires. I still assumed 3% drivetrain loss. I used a power-speed model including inertia. I assumed he started the climb at 40 kph. The result: 6.24 W/kg. This is lower than the 6.56 W/kg I had for Horner on Sierra Rd. Horner's VAM was 1916 m/hr while Contador was 1750 m/hr. Of course it's not a fair comparison as Contador had finished two brutally tough stages immediately preceding the rest week the day before, and may not have fully recovered. It seems riders aren't having rest days as productive as the...

After much speculation and indirect guessing, I finally got a time for Chris Horner climbing Sierra Road during stage 4 of the 2011 Amgen Tour of California. Recovox News VeloNews posted Rory Sutherland's power data , with analysis, for the climb. Rory started the climb in Horner's group and finished 1:15 behind. According to the article, Sutherland's time was an impressive 18:02. However that puts Horner's time at an amazing 16:47. I'd put maybe 2-second error bars on that number. For example, if Sutherland hit the base of the climb one second after Horner, then Horner's time would be one second longer. But I'll stick with this estimate. Sierra Road climbs 536 meters according to my numbers. So plugging that into Chris Horner's 0.280 hour ride and you get a VAM of 1916. Generally in the Tour de France if you see a VAM in excess of 1700 that's extraordinary. 1916? But in addition to overcoming gravity when you climb (producing ...

This past Wednesday I took a "long lunch" to go watch the Tour of California stage of Sierra Road. As a consequence, I had to work late and didn't get home until after 9pm and had to skip my planned SF2G rides that week to still get a project done, but it was all worth it. I even went in for a bit on Saturday. But you can't take races like the Tour of California for granted in the United States. History has shown over and over that each year may well be the last. I rode with some SF2G buddies to just before the summit of Sierra Road. There the road was blocked for some reason, even though it was still an hour and a half to an anticipated finish. So I was denied the last 100 meters. The climb was fun: I was enthusiastic at the start, dodging other riders, caught up in the crowd, until I looked back and realized I was in my 34/21, a gear well beyond my present fitness for this hill. I backed off to the 34/23 and took it easier the rest of the way, even thoug...

Tomorrow is only the third summit finish in the history of the Tour of California, the first two being the San Francisco prologue from 2006-2007 which finished on the top of Nob Hill. Tomorrow's climb is a bit tougher... 2007 Low-Key Hillclimbs I first encountered Sierra Road in Grant Peterson's fantastic Roads to Ride South, a book of route profiles of Bay area climbs from the 1990-era. It became for me an obvious candidate for the Low-Key Hillclimb series which Kevin Winterfield and I organized for the first time in 1995 . And the series will revisit it this year, in week 2 . My next encounter was when I did the Devil Mountain Double in 2000. That was quite a different experience, as it came after having already climbed Mount Diablo, Morgan Territory Road, Patterson Pass, Mines Road, and San Antonio Valley Road. Post-bonk, with tired, legs, it was an exercise in survival. But I did, and finished the 200 miles, albeit after dark. The Tour of California had the br...

I'm really enjoying the recent series of VeloNews bike test articles. First it was aero mass-start road bikes ( April 2011 issue ) and now it's "endurance" bikes ( June 2011 ). This one is especially interesting because while there's already plenty of windtunnel data out there, vibraton data is less readily available. Wind tunnel tests are extremely trickly because the result depends so strongly on the size of the bike chosen, what's bolted on it, and the position of the rider. With vibration testing, we're getting closer to fundamental engineering, and I would hope the results would tend to be less dependent on assumptions. VeloNews isn't the first to do such tests, of course. I've already commented on Champoux's work in which he analyzied the spectral distribution of vibrations transmitted to a bike frame using a treadmill with a bump attached. Hastings did a study , also with a treadmill with a bump, at M.I.T. comparing old Cerve...

I rested on Friday. I'd had a solid three days: an excellent lunch-time run on Tue, my pre-BTWD stickering ride on Wed, and my 167 km round-trip commute on Thu. So on Fri I was pretty much cooked. Time to refuel for the weekend. But when I'd flown out to New Jersey the previous Thu night for a cousin's wedding, the red-eye had left me with a sore throat, congested, and tired. Allergens were in abundance in the area, or maybe I just caught something on the over-crowded plane. I managed a 7.5 mile run on Friday, and a quick 25-story stair run with sluggish legs on Sunday morning, but it was a very light weekend overall. So while my head was feeling crappy, I felt otherwise well rested by Tuesday when I did my run. Then I was fine on Wednesday and Thursday, even if my congestion persisted. Saturday I was feeling sluggish and devoted myself to some much-needed chores. But then today (Sunday) I was just completely dead. Allergies? A cold caught from air travel? ...

Bike to Work Day to me is No Excuses day.... I don't have to decide if I'm riding to work, I am riding to work, the only decision is how. Sure, I could do the Bayway yet again, but BTW day is a day to place a slightly higher emphasis on the commuting and a slightly lower emphasis on the destination of that commute. So I signed on for the SF2G Skyline ride. Skyline is hillier, longer, and takes longer than Bayway. However, once you get to Skyline Boulevard, the highest point in Daly City, there's minimal stopping. From a pure riding perspective, it's clearly superior. However, I hadn't done it since my new job moved me further south, and with a big-company as opposed to little-company atmosphere, more reluctant to get into work any later than 10 am (usually I'm in by 8am). Despite going first to the wrong BART station, I arrived at 24th Street BART in plenty of time: around 6:15 am. There were already a good number of riders there for the 6:30 am depar...

Today I rode the SF2G Bayway route on a stickering Mission. A few of us met Debbie Leight at Ritual Roasters in the Mission.... she had rolls of RouteArrow stickers in yellow, green, and blue: yellow for before the turn, green for the turn itself, and blue for post-turn. I was assigned yellow. The others weren't quite ready and since I wanted to make sure I got to work by 10 am I left. I was impressed by how well the roads were marked. I contemplated that perhaps I'd not have anything to do, since others had marked the preceding days. But Debbie had said there were unmarked sections "past Oracle", more than half-way. I put down a few arrows, though... one to cover an arrow which had been pointing the wrong way, and another along the shoulder where I thought arrows further to the left might be missed. I still had plenty. The Bay Trail near San Mateo and Foster City is always fun. Gorgeous views.... it's called the "Feral Cat Freeway" by SF...

The results of my ongoing learning experience with Caltrain and Clipper... Checking online, asking conductors, and calling on-line help never provides the whole truth. I'm given fragmented information, partially true, partially wrong. Yet I continue to chip away at that vague thing we call reality. That hyperdimensional fractal volume whose surface can never be perfectly realized, only approximated to ever-increasing resolution... Here's my understanding for how Clipper Direct works with monthly passes on Caltrain: 1. Each month you deposit via Clipper Direct at least sufficient pre-tax dollars into your "account". 2. Using the website , you can then purchase "transit products". These can be one-time or recurring orders. In my case, I have a recurring order for a monthly pass between zones 1 and 3. 3. This monthly pass will get you on the train for the first nine days of the month (at least this worked for me this month). 4. If at some point dur...

Yesterday as I rode the train into work I turned on my phone to watch the official video feed of the Giro d'Italia television coverage. 12 km to go, and the pack was split on the final, steep but short climb. A group got off the front, including two Garmin-Cervelo riders. They did a nice leadout, but the protected Garmin rider, who turned out to be David Millar, was able to take only second place to an Italian I didn't recognize. The screen froze on the top five stage finishers as I was approaching my stop, so I turned off the phone. stage profile (from PezCyclingNews ) At work, I later checked CyclingNews for the results. Only then did I learn that, on the descent prior to where I started watching, Wouter Weylandt had fallen to his death, thrown off the edge of a steep descent to fall "twenty meters" to the roadway below. I was stunned. I'd been blissfully ignorant of the tragedy as I'd watched the stage finish on the train. Most of the riders h...

As I was flying back home from Newark Airport yesterday I was bored.... the movies were of no interest, I'd forgotten to bring a book, and the battery on my ThinkPad T60 lasts only 25 minutes. Not even enough to get past the Wikipedia page on Henri Desgrange, which was cached there, let alone amuse myself by working on my code for 4-dimensional mazes, which I'd planned to do. Okay -- backup. I pulled out my HTC smart phone. At least I could review the photos I'd taken of my cousin's wedding. Sorry -- battery dead. So I was stuck reading the copy of Technology Review in my backpack. Nothing wrong with Technology Review, it's an excellent magazine. But it's nice to get away from thinking about technology too often. I think this is one reason engineers are so attracted to cycling. Bikes are so amazingly elegant in their simplicity. Technology's review theme was the top 10 emerging technologies of the year. There among those listed was solid sta...

Here's the AAA's explanation of why they oppose SB910, the bill which would require a 3-foot passing gap when motor vehicles pass cyclists. Thank you for your inquiry relative to AAA's position on SB 910. Our official position is not a straight oppose, it is an 'oppose unless amended'. We don't take issue with the 3 foot distance rule when it can be safely accomplished. The problem is how to address situations when a 3 foot distance cannot be maintained or met. Current language in the bill would require the vehicle to slow to 15 mph of the speed of the bicycle to pass. But this is problematic for several reasons, as pointed out in the bill analysis, the link for which you provided. Law enforcement has issues with this approach as well because it can cause a drastic decrease in speed differentials between the vehicle passing the bicycle and other vehicles on the road depending on the posted speed limit. Not only can this cause rear-end collisions, and...

Shamelessly stolen from The MASH SF web page ... this video is from Steve, who finished second in the fixie category: MASH TWIN PEAKS MAIN RACE from Storts on Vimeo . It looks surprisingly benign. However, some people didn't like it so much: photo from John Prolly photo from John Prolly photo from Bici Girl Here's Kyle, who won the oh-so-close fixie race: photo from John Prolly and Chris, the geared bike winner, following a fixie rider who show's how its done when your riding "a la Desgrange ": Bici Girl photo And Kate, the women's winner: John Prolly photo Compilation of photo sources: mine Bici Girl John Prolly Steve's video

Sunday I rode my Ritchey Breakaway out to a new bike shop in San Francisco. No, not a replacement for the Weight Weenie void left by the closure of Bike Nüt (insert a moment of somber silence.... okay, we can continue now); it was MASH Transportation, a new shop which seems to be marketed towards cycling culture and urban riding (more the fast messenger than the hippster crowd), and apparently, alleycat racing. Indeed I wasn't there for the shop itself, but rather to the race they were organizing: a timed event to the summit of Twin Peaks and back. From MASH 2011 Twin Peaks Time Trial This is racing in its purest form: get from point A to point B (and in this case, back) and we don't particularly care how you do it. There were two groups, one for fixed-gear bikes (no freewheeling, a penalty if it had mechanical brakes) and one for "geared" bicycles (bikes with a freewheel, allowing for coasting; no penalty for brakes). First the "qualification": rid...

The San Francisco Examiner devotes more than 1/3 of its content to sports, and of course a popular subject is the San Francisco Giants, who won the Major League Baseball championship last year. During the season in 2010, they won 92 games and lost 70 , a 56.8% winning fraction. As of last Friday they are 12 wins and 12 losses, only a 50% win fraction. Obviously, one concludes from reading the headlines, something has gone terribly wrong. The issue is I've not read past the headlines. Maybe there's compelling arguments made for how the team is playing. But invariably in the analysis of baseball and everything else, there is a lack of appreciation for the statistics of random numbers. Baseball games aren't fully random events, but there is clearly a random component to them. I think everyone recognizes that luck is a big factor. So a quick test: I'm going to assume the Giants had luck on their side last year, since they won the division (and ended up going on...

A legislative analysis of SB910, the 3-foot passing rule for drivers passing cyclists, is here . Last time I noted that the AAA, an organization which opposes virtually all initiatives to improves cyclist rights, infrastructure, or safety, is the sole listed opponent. Excerpts from comments from the analysis, and my response: Enforcability.... How can either (the driver or a police officer) be sure that the driver is not 3 feet, 3 inches away rather than 2 feet, 9 inches? This argument could strike down almost any law in the vehicle code. If the speed limit is 65, how can I be sure I'm going 64 mph and not 66 mph? If the law required headlights after dusk, how can I be sure it's one minute before dusk and not one minute after dusk? Obviously enforcement carries a burden of proof, and behavior requires a margin for uncertainty. So while 2 feet 9 inches may be questionable, 1 foot 0 inches does not. And it's the really close calls which we care about. Ironically...