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

Call me Fred. At least that was my name as I lined up yesterday for the San Francisco Giants Half Marathon. We lined up on Terry Francois Boulevard, on the opposite side of Mission Creek from Pac Bell Park. When I looked down at my left shoe I saw a "D-Tag" plastic-encapsulated timing chip which clearly identified me as Fred. An offer for the ticket had been posted to a mailing list I read on Thursday. I'd just gotten back from a 20.3 km lunch run, which I'd finished fairly briskly, so by my usual standards I'd not be ready to run again until Sunday. But this was too good to pass up, a "big" race happening less than 2 miles of home, and at a distance longer than I'd raced before on the road. At the starting line they had three self-selected groups: under 7 minutes, 7 - 9 minutes, and over 9 minutes per mile. I expected to be around 7:10 - 7:15 per mile, or around 4:30/km. On my lunch runs, this had been a fairly good pace, and I'd on...

Last post I noted there had been a difference between the reported lap time up Old La Honda and the extracted time for the segment. The lap time had been reported by Strava as 18:12, while the segment time was quoted as 18:22, a ten second difference. But looking at the difference between the point at which the end of the segment was tagged and the end point of the lap I had a difficult time imagining that was worth ten seconds. After all, while I slowed there, not just coasting but actively braking to check for cross-traffic, I never came to a complete stop (law enforcement: my account here seems to have been hacked). So it occurred to me I was assigning the full error on the segment time, but assuming the lap time was correct. Back when I was making suffer score test files, I used a 3 second sampling time, the same as is used by my Android phone. Since each sample represents 3 seconds of ride data and since there are 3600 seconds in an hour, I generated 1200 samples. I figu...

After working at my job for close to year, I decided it was finally time to indulge in the Wednesday Noon Ride this week. The weather was perfect: warm but not hot, a so-very-welcome liberation from the tights and long sleeves which have been part of virtually every ride I've done this year thanks to San Francisco's persistent "marine layer". And Matt has done a great job of championing the often-neglected Wednesday ride which has climbed Old La Honda since the Egyptians were first domesticating cats. I'd done two of the Friday rides so far and the experiment was generally a success: out the door by a drop-dead time of 11:30, back before the 1:30 pm time when the cafeteria shut down its main lunch service. Obviously it's not something to do every day but since my typical lunch break is a line-dependent 7-12 minutes it takes to go to the cafeteria, buy something, then get back to my terminal, it'd still be doable to go even once per week and still ave...

By now, I think most cyclists reading this would be aware of what Strava is. Strava's exponential growth model is dependent on users defining segments. Segments are what provide the arenas for competition which provides the incentive for new users to join, then those users define segments, etc. There can be only one king of a hill, but if you have an unlimited supply of hills, then everyone can be a king (or queen). But the weakness of allowing anyone to define a segment is there's limited quality control over the segments. Here Strava has a check: a "flag" option whereby users can tag a segment as flawed in various ways. But responding to tags requires human intervention, and human bandwidth is unlikely to keep up with the exponentially user growth model. So at least until they develop a way for automated tag resolution (for example implementing some sort of "thumbs up" versus "thumbs down" voting scheme where segments can be voted off t...

Ron Brunner photo of parking lot at Diablo summit I just saw this on the official Mount Diablo Parks page : What is a Road and Trail Plan? A Road and Trail Plan is a recommended management plan for the roads and trails within Mount Diablo State Park. At this time Mount Diablo State Park is developing a Road and Trail Plan for the park. The staff at Mount Diablo State Park is very excited to be able to a part of this process. This plan will be used as a long term guiding document and takes into consideration all of the elements of the park's values, goals and mission. Key components in the Road and Trail plan are: Maximize visitor uses and experiences. Reduce potential safety conflicts. Minimize natural and cultural resource impacts. Coordinate with local and regional planning efforts. Provide access to surrounding public lands. Public input An essential part of the Road and Trail Plan is creating an opportunity for the public to provide meaningful input. The park...

Garmin announced today the launch of the Vector pedal. Pretty exciting stuff. I've written a lot here about the then-Metrigear Vector. This certainly looks a lot like the Metrigear version did. Of course the devil's in the details, and I know a lot of development has occurred since Garmin bought Metrigear. It will be very interesting to see how this plays out. I know that when I'm riding sometimes I feel asymmetric, that my left leg maybe isn't working as hard as my right. But that's based on perceived exertion... now you'll be able to see real numbers. And for tandems. I don't think there's another option (other than the Look/Polar) for independently measuring stoker and captain power. How many times have I seen a guy pulling his 8-year-old kid on a Trail-A-Bike and the kid (or kids in the case of the linked version) are slacking off? Slap some Vectors on that puppy and keep an eye on those little parasites. For portability it's...

Last week I decided I wanted to do a short-ish running race, something close to home and easy to get to. Fitting the bill perfectly: Dolphin South End Runners' Club Brisbane "Scenic" 12 km race. I'd proposed to Cara that I ride down there, do the race, then she could meet me at the finish and we'd do a little post-race ride together. We could do something flat, as she's just getting back to outdoor riding after back and knee issues. Instead, she said, she'd go down with me at the start and while I ran she'd do a little loop in Brisbane: a circuit with e little hill which has been used for the Brisbane Circuit Race. The start (Cara Coburn). So as I got ready to start, Cara left on her bike. I mostly did a few form drills and rolled my legs and shoulders with a massage stick. Then I did some shoulder stretches. This race was a mixed 5 km/12 km start at a ball field in Brisbane, near the eastern base of Guadalupe Canyon Road. Both courses...

Strava recently debuted its "Suffer Score", which attempts to quantify in one way how hard an activity was. Suffer score, they claim, is based on heartrate: ride further or harder and suffer score is higher. Suffer score is a good move for Strava. Strava's market segment is informal competition. Other web sites have logged how far people ride, and where, but Strava really locked into the demand for competition: competition via social networking. To date these rankings have been based primarily on speed over "segments": routes defined by users, for example on roads or trails, typically up climbs. They then added contests for volume: most miles ridden in a week and most feet climbed, for example. But with Suffer Score, they combine the two: a metric combining both quantity and quantity. Why's this important? Of course not everyone can climb fast enough to compete for KOMs on popular climbs. But a heartrate-based metric levels the playing field to ...

The trend continues that the big bike companies (manufacturers isn't quite the term, since so few of them actually manufacture anything... perhaps "branders" is a better term...) are delivering aerodynamically optimized road frames designed for use in mass-start road races. These bikes go way back, at least as far back as the Kestrel Talon. But the use of the bikes at the top pro level really began with the Cervelo Soloist (Bobby Julich won Paris-Nice on the bike). Then the Cervelo SLC and SLC-SL really got things rolling. Then Ridley came out with the Noah and Felt with the AR, and Fuji with the SST. And these are just the bikes of top-level pro teams. Kestrel updated the Talon (and Talon-SL), and Litespeed came out with its stunning Archon-CF; neither of these bikes got pro-level attention, however (Kestrel briefly sponsored third-tier Rock Racing, but Rock used their stiffer RT-800). Yet except for the Cervelo, all of these frames seemed to encounter resistance...

It's been regularly chilly in San Francisco this past month. The marine layer blows fog in from the coast, and while it can be toasty warm in east of the Bay, on San Francisco streets sweaters, jackets, and scarves are common. Here's a photo I took from the train on Sunday as the evening fog engulfs San Bruno mountain: I wrote a little Perl script to download and process data archived on Weather Underground for Mission Bay, one of the warmest neighborhoods in San Francisco. Data are recorded every 15 minutes. For each of the years 2006-2011 for which data are available at that weather station, I took daytime (6 am to 9 pm) data from the period 08 July to 07 August (the past month as I write this) and binned the data between 6 am in 9 pm in 1 F bins. I then generated cumulative distribution plots for each year. So for each temperature I indicate the percentage of daytime samples which were less than the given temperature. There's a clear pattern here. For 2006...

On Sunday morning I forgot the San Francisco Marathon was happening. It's easy to do -- there's not much said about it. The primary publicity is of inconvenience more than anything: car travel across the race route would be delayed. My first encounter with watching a marathon was when I lived in the Boston area and watching The Marathon was virtually mandatory on Patriot's Day, the day which marks Massachussetts' emergence from a long, grey, cold winter. The huge number of runners in the race were dwarfed by the number of spectators, with many sections stacked on both sides with cheering viewers. Later I lived in Austin, Texas, and while the marathon there wasn't in the same class as Austin, it was still a popular event, and people would follow the race and cheer the runners all along the fast route. San Francisco, on the other hand, despite providing probably the best terrain for a marathon in the country, treats the race as a necessary evil to be gotten...