Low-Key Hillclimbs: another successful series!

The 2012 Low-Key Hillclimbs are done! And it was an extremely successful year.

This was the year of the Junior, as the men's overall was taken by Adrien Costa, who capped off his successful year with the win in the Mount Hamilton Thanksgiving climb, beating Irish Hillclimb champion Ryan Sherlock in a tactical race. Adrien set the Strava KOM (beating a false match to Jacob Berkman's Mt Hamilton Road Race data; the road race doesn't do the time-sucking summit road), and broke David_Wyandt's long-standing record from 1998. Ryan, finishing second, also beat David's time, not giving him three of the top five times. To be fair, it's off-season for Ryan, but then again it's also off-season for Adrien. After third place Eric Wohlberg, fourth place also went to a junior, Andrew Biscardi. This is the best year yet for Low-Key juniors, the previous best arguably Menso de Jung's excellent season in 2006.

In the women's rankings, it was Lisa Penzel who finished at the top of every week's climb until Hamilton, when she finished third to Melanie Spath and Katelyn Connell. Melanie is Irish women's time trial champion. Lisa may have lacked the training volume for Hamilton's long distance. Despite that, she posted a very fine score for third place.

In the tandem division, it was the Paul's: McKenzie and Chuck, who took the overall. They were the most successful all-male tandem in Low-Key history: more often tandems are mixed male-female. Second place went to another excellent climb from the Brehmers: Dan and Winnie.

In the team competition it was all Team Brown Zone, who did it all. They delivered excellent rides at the climbs, they had a custom team kit which looked really good, and they produced an amazing team effort in coordinating the West Hwy 9 climb. In every way they deserved the position of top Low-Key team. Western Wheelers was a very strong second, while the Sisters and Misters of No Mercy was a solid third.

I missed the final climb due to a family event in Philadelphia. But it was great following the results as they appeared on Strava, then Pat Parseghian did an amazing job of preparing the Low-Key watch-timed results, and resolving the ambiguities which always pop up as tired riders gasp out their numbers. Results seem excellent.

I'm super-grateful to everyone who helped with the series.

One curious fact: turn-out was the best since 2009, but it was larger that year, the which was the best turn-out for a Low-Key climb since 1998. That's strange since conditions were excellent and turn-out has generally been excellent this year. Post-Lance-Armstrong-burnout? Perhaps. But there's also just random variation in turn-out, and the difference is within expected statistical variation.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Marin Avenue (Berkeley)

Image
On Saturday, I got an email from Tim telling letting me know that Murphy's Spring Classics was going to start up Marin Ave. I'd missed that. Murphy announces his courses the day before, and indeed it was already well into the night before when the course announcement went out. I'd skipped over the details, jumping straight to middle and end games. Marin? I laughed at the irony, because not long before when he'd told me he was choosing to repeat the Nifty Twn Fifty which we'd done together last year versus selecting Murphy Mack's Stage Mullett two-day, I responded I didn't think I had it in me to ride Marin Ave two years in succession. Well, so much for that. I was committed, so I went downstairs to swap my 11-26 cassette for my Recon 12-27. The name is easily overlooked: "Marin Ave" fails to strike the same impression as, for example, "Redwood Gulch" or "China Grade". But among those in the know, Marin Ave is infamous i...
Read more

hummingbird feeder physics

Image
I couldn't figure out how the hummingbird feeder worked. Why didn't it overflow? Forces need to balance, of course. Neglecting surface tension, there liquid level is higher in the inner reservoir than in the feeding chamber, so there must be a corresponding pressure difference. Suppose the pressure in the inner chamber were zero. Then the column height difference would need to be atmospheric pressure / (density of liquid × gravity). But this is over 9 meters! Obviously the height difference is only approximately 1% of this. So the pressure difference inside versus outside is only approximately 1%. The inside is only slightly below atmosphere. So air is getting in. How? Does it diffuse through the liquid? If this were the dominant mechanism, it wouldn't take long for the pressure inside to go from 99% to 99.3%, for example, which should be plenty to push the column of liquid down in the inside chamber and thus push liquid out through the holes. It would over...
Read more

Gallium Pro geometry

Image
On Caltrain yesterday, I was surprised to see among the usual set of commuting bikes a SRAM Red-equipped Argon Gallium Pro. The bike immediately stole your attention. The design was one which has been trending: clear-coated carbon with plenty of text detail so the viewer is sure to realize he's gazing upon the result of advanced, proprietary engineering and not at yet another paint job on the same old OEM frames being pumped out of the same old Taiwanese factories. But it worked: the bottom bracket area was huge, the downtube a large-diameter "inverted Kamm tail" design seemingly designed to maximize wind resistance, the top tube a broad, eccentric shape which screamed "vertically compliant yet torsionally stiff". All it lacked were the pencil-think seat stays Cervelo popularized, but this was a machine designed for stiffness over anything else. It seemed dramatic overkill, since the bike was small (the Argon "XS" I suspect). There wasn't muc...
Read more