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

After the bike was done being built (well, almost), Eric took it in for a photo shoot. Here's the gallery for my bike . Eric named the bike Allaban, a Scottish word for "wandering, wanderings, roaming" . It's a spectacular name for a randonneuring bike: surprising it hadn't already been snatched up by some litigious mainstream bike company. Keith Anderson's paint work was followed by SRAM Force shifters and derailleurs, Soma 26 mm compact handlebars, a Cane Creek headset, White Industries hubs, bottom bracket, and variable-bolt-circle crankset and rings, Paul Racer brakes, a Thomson Elite zero-setback seatpost, and a Crane brass bell expertly threaded into the stem by Eric. The Crane, in particular, has excellent sound. For the saddle, I decided to stick with an old Mythos saddle I had from my Fuji Team Al bike: I know it works well for me and didn't want to mess around. For the photos, Eric subbed in a Turbo. It fits. Eric also did something surp...

Recently I've been experimenting with the Garmin Vector pedals, which measure L-R power balance. I've long been curious about L-R balance. How symmetric am I? How does the symmetry vary with different conditions? What I've not done yet is to validate the pedals against my Powertap. One reason for this is I'm out of 357 batteries. I ordered a pack of 20 via Amazon for $3. $3??? That's cheaper than a pair at Walgreens. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with twenty 357 batteries. Anyway, on the Vector, I've had a few issues. One was an anomolous 1-second right-foot-only power spike of 900 watts. I've not looked into whether this was a torque or cadence anomaly. The other was when I was carrying my bike off the train and accidentally slammed the pedal into a metal column. That wasn't a good thing, but it's neither the first or the last time I'll do such a thing. For that ride, the Edge 800 was reporting no left pedal data. Bu...

I knew early on as a nod to my Irish heritage I wanted the bike to be green. Here again was my early "sketch": There I used Kelly Green, which makes sense given the inspiration: But these are just cartoons, and it's a mistake to judge colors in a cartoon. So when it came time to discuss real color, I told Eric to base it based on this: a Lotus racing car: Charles @ PezCyclingNews has based bike designs on racing cars and motorcycles, for example: I didn't want anything so complex. The Lotus I showed is elegant in its simplicity. The green fades to black. The racing inspiration is there, but it doesn't dominate. Painting took awhile. But it was very, very worth it: Credit goes to Keith Anderson , who did the painting.

Once the geometry is down and the components are selected, the fun part begins. Eric starts welding. Unfortunately he's in Springfield Oregon and I'm in San Francisco. But one great thing about going with Eric is he enjoys the process, and posts photos of his progress. This alone is worth a lot to me, and why I think it's good to go with a builder you want, rather than whomever comes it at the lowest price. With me, while price was a factor, it wasn't the main factor, and most of all I was buying not just a welding job, but additionally judgement in putting together a full package which would meet my goals. I have to say these photos are gorgeous. First the fork: Here's the frame in the jig, showing the 73-degree seat tube angle: The seat cluster: Head tube.. simply amazing: Bottom bracket... nothing to say: Pretty much done! No retro lugs here, just clean weld lines. It's almost a shame to paint the thing and cover up that amazing braze work.

I got a new wheel for Cara, a virtual copy (except for hub color) of the wheels for the new bike. Here's a photo: The spec: H Son Plus 23 mm wide rim, White Industries T-11 hub (purple anodized), 28 black DT butted spokes, silver brass nipples. To be added: Veloplugs with electrical tape to help keep them in place. I'm done with 19 mm rims, except the ones I already have, except for time trial or climbing wheels. 23 mm matches up better with tires 25 mm and wider. Better rolling resistance, better puncture resistance, easier flat replacement, and likely better aerodynamics. The only minus is weight: 23 mm rims are a bit heavier, perhaps 50 grams. Total mass: 787.5 grams, no Veloplugs, no skewer. The weight weenie in me cringes, but the wheel's designed to be bomb-proof. 28 spokes and if you break one, you have effectively 14, and can re-true it and still ride. And 2-cross instead of radial means the spokes are pulling against more metal on the hub flange instead of ...

Lake Chabot is a particularly easy-to-reach trail run from San Francisco: I rode my bike about a mile to the BART station, took BART to Castro Valley, then rode from there 5 km to the Lake Chabot marina , merrily spinning by the line of cars and personal trucks lined up waiting to get into the limited-capacity parking lot. This was my 2nd trail run this year after a long break from trail running. I knew my fitness was coming around: good day-to-day recovery and my speed was improving. Rationally I knew I should be ready. I just had to pace myself right. The race started near the Marina. Since the distance was a stretch, my longest run in over a year, I decided go light on the warm-up. But then I'd ridden my bike 5 km up a gradual hill to get there. Off we went down the paved path which constituted the beginning of the course. The pace felt glacially slow, trodding through sludge, but then that's always the case in race. The Strava data show we were around a 4:50/km ...

Tomorrow is the Lake Chabot Trail Run by Inside Trail Racing. It will have been 5 weeks since I ran the half-marathon at their race on Montara Mountain, the Pacific Foothills Trail Run on 18 Jan. I hope to make a good effort, so the question is whether my measurable fitness has improved sufficiently since then to make the 42% jump in distance. So to check, I consider my tracking metrics, ATS and CTS, shamelessly stolen from Coggan and Allen's analysis of cycling power data. Instead of TSS I assign the stress to each day's work equal to the distance run or hiked, not including regular walking. I include today's anticipated 8 km run distance: So for the past 5 days I've done a mini-taper by stabilizing my CTS at its present peak value of around 6.1 km/day. This has allowed my ATS to recover a bit from its peak of past Sunday without losing and CTS in the deal. Then after the race I'll take a week of recovery before looking forward to 50 km in April. So going ...

The next step after playing with BikeCad was to send the link to the project to Eric Estlund. Why Eric Estlund? For one, because there's an excellent local shop dealing in randonneuring bikes, Box Dog Bicycles, and they have a stock frame they sell called the Pelican. Jan Heine reviewed it a few years ago and liked it. But since then manufacturing of the Pelican has been transferred to Eric, who is Winter Cycles . I looked at his web site and really liked some of the work I saw. There was no doubt his work was superb. So I sent him an email. And he seemed enthusiastic, supporting my ideas while not afraid to disagree on occasion. That's what I wanted. After all, I don't know anything about these bikes, other than what I read or what I get from talking to others. So I wanted someone who'd drive toward a design without ignoring my preferences. And here's what he ended up with. All in all, I think I did a fairly good job on the initial design, because thi...

Here's a histogram of my run distances post-injury (starting in October). There's bias for runs over 14 km here, especially in the recent run data. The fraction of the runs which are in those past 8 days are alarmingly high. I need to keep up the consistency I've begun, at least once I recover from Saturday's 30 km race at Lake Chabot, to be ready for the Woodside 50 km race in April. I've had way too many weeks 2 runs +/- 1.

In January I summarized jersey designs I've done for Pro Cycling Manager , a video game where players manage pro cycling teams made up of real-world riders, who in virtual form are supposed to ride similarly to their flesh-and-blood counterparts. I've never played the game, but I like using the model for visualizing cycling jersey designs. I was so happy with Jakroo going live with the Low-Key jersey design , a jersey something I've thought about doing the whole history of Low-Key Hillclimbs . We actually had a leader's jersey in 1996, but it wasn't a full design: Well, I had jersey design stuck in my mind, and during a few Caltrain commutes I couldn't put it aside as abruptly as I'd have liked. I stumbled across a this jersey contest on the Pro Cycling Manager forum. For the January contest I figured I'd enter the Low-Key design. After all, I liked it. I thought the color balance was good: black, but with complementary blue and green highlig...

After putting a box of kitty litter on my pedal wrench to precision-torque a pair of Garmin Vectors, then replacing one of the batteries (which was dead), I was ready to roll. The goal was to ride over to Sports Basement in the Presidio, from where I was going to do the gorgeous run to Sutro Baths and back. It turned out to be a bit more of an adventure than I'd anticipated, including scaling this staircase out of Baker Beach. I don't recommend it, since it ends at private property, presently under construction. The Sutro Baths were spectacular, however: Here's the full thing, with an 800 meter distance shortfall due to my GPS crapping out on me and Strava interpolating a straight line through a very nonstraight trajectory. I love the instant upload from the Strava iPhone app, but the Garmin Forerunner 610 is likely more reliable. This capped off a 103 km running week for me. That's a personal record. That risks being excessive. Less than one week to m...

BikeCad is cool. It lets you play around with bike designs and geometries. Bike geometries are generally over-constrained: each dimension depends on other dimensions, so specifying a set of random numbers will not result in a build-able bike. BikeCad takes care of the constraints, doing the trigonometric operations necessary to convert between angles and distances and postions in space. My idea: a randonneuring bike with modern components and a position similar to my Ritchey Breakaway: comfortable but still race-worthy. When I think of randonneuring bikes I think of a bike built to handle anything: rain, rough roads, dirt, pavement, long distances, climbing, descending, carrying supplies, and most importantly speed. Just because I want these other things doesn't mean I don't want a bike which doesn't handle well on descents, doesn't feel responsive on climbs, and won't allow me to pull through on pacelines without eating a wall of wind. I've described m...

On the subject of pedals... I like Speedplay and have used them for more years than I like to admit. They're light, simple, have a low stack height, easy to clip into, compact, and double-sided (wait, that's implicit with "easy to clip into"), and works fine with standard street shoes (I'm not always wearing cycling shoes). But they don't handle dirt well and the cleats are not compatible with walking. These are okay issues for many bike races, where you clip and go, but for other types of riding, being able to walk gets a higher priority. That's where mountain bike pedals come in. Speedplay came out with a mountain bike pedal, the Frog. But it shares only a few of the assets of the road pedal. It's heavy, clunky, has a large stack height, isn't so easy to clip into (it has a phantom clip-in mode so you need to verify engagement once you feel a click), and doesn't work well with street shoes. So Speedplay announced the Syzr at Interbike in...

My second race of the "year", the first a 4 km sprint in early December in San Diego, was the Inside Trail Racing half-marathon course at Montara Mountain. I felt tired for a few days, then tried to ramp up the training a bit, but then got sore and spent the next two weeks taking it fairly easy. I did manage to get a half-marathon training run in on each of the weekends, but no back-to-back efforts of any merit, something I'd been able to do before the race. Then finally I felt better. But was it too late? Was all my fitness gone? Combatting this sort of paranoia is a good reason for tracking training stress metrics. As I have described, I applied the methodology which is popular with tracking cycling power to tracking running distance: a 7-day exponentially weighted average for acute stress (fatigue), and a 42-day average for chronic stress (adaptation, or fitness). The result? The weekend runs help avoid too much loss of chronic stress (CTS), although my acute ...

After preliminary designs, previews, rider surveys, design submission, multiple iterations of vendor designs, the new Low-Key Hillclimbs jersey is finally ready to order . I went with Jakroo, who did the WeightWeenies kit I really like. They have high quality stuff, ship directly to individuals, and have no minimums. Here's the design: I went with their top-of-the-line garments, including the "Tour" jersey with its "slim fit" option which fits me better than any other jersey I've tried. Indeed the Jakroo fit options are the best I've seen, with men's and women's, a range of sizes, and three fit styles. It's always a small risk trying a new jersey maker but I was super-happy with taking that risk in ordering the Weight Weenies jersey. I had 20 people respond that they wanted to buy a jersey, 19 of those wanting the full kit. Now that it's time to put down the money it will be interesting to see how many follow through. But a...