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

Working from home today due to a follow-up appointment with the oral surgeon, I was pleasantly surprised by FedEx which delivered my Low-Key Hillclimbs kit. And I was very pleased with the result! Here, for reference, was my post on the design. Here's a brief photograph, taken by Bryn Dole, who also ordered one: Compare and contrast with the preview: It came out pretty much exactly as expected, with one small detail: I implemented a drop shadow as a translucent black layer, which forms grey on white but darkens other colors. Somehow that came out as grey on colors as well. But it still works. It's a very minor detail. Also, the green on the front extends a bit higher than I'd anticipated. But the rest of the design came out extremely well. And the fit: perfect. It's a lightweight jersey which fits me snugly, perfectly suited for hillclimbs (okay, perhaps a skin suit would be better for hillclimbs, but this is still excellent). And the pockets are a ni...

Training for my upcoming 50 km race was going so very well. And then my tooth broke. The result: I had to get a tooth extracted by an oral surgeon. No big deal, right? An hour of unpleasantness, and it's done. Business as usual. But no such luck. I ended up exhausted. I did a few runs on the days following the procedure, very short runs of a few km each, but then something just dragged me down. Maybe it was allergies. But I think it was a cumulative thing, and the oral surgery was the straw that broke the adrenal's back. So for the first four days last week I was work from home, with essentially no exercise. Then I commuted, by foot and train, to work on Friday. Saturday I rested again, then today (Sunday) I got in a nice little ride with Cara. Another chance to get on the Winter Allaban. It was fun, although I couldn't resist a little test riding over some scarified pavement on the shoulder of Great Highway. Obviously, the bike was a lot more confortable there...

I was going to do a post on UCI rule 1.2.064 bls, but Inrng already covered most of what I was going to write following Kuurne-Brussels-Kuurne. Here's the rule in case you don't want to click on that link: 1.2.064 bis It is strictly prohibited to use sidewalks/pavements, paths or cycle paths alongside the roadway that do not form part of the course. Non-respect of this requirement is sanctioned in accordance with Article 12.1.040.14 bis, without prejudice to any other sanctions that may apply. The winning break at E3 Harelbeke yesterday. Photo by CyclingNews : Cycling's a weird sport. Actually, when you think about it a bit, this rule is just weird on its own. You can't ride on sidewalks, pavements, paths, or cycle paths along side the roadway that do not form part of the course . This, apparently, is in contrast with roadways which are not part of the course, which are fine. I thought it was already well established that in a race, any race, you must com...

The UCI reforms appear to be moving forward, with a goal of professionalizing professional cycling. The reforms have been summarized in various stories ( like this one ) but the primary source is the UCI's Info Reform newsletter . It's good stuff, and while San Francisco has gotten some recent insight into realpolitik , so far I've been really happy with Cookson's new term at the head of the UCI. Things honestly appear to be moving in the correct direction. A big issue is the professionalism of professional cycling. Professional bike racing has tended to be ruled by chaos as much as any formal organization. Historically the race promoters have called the principal shots. They want to invite who they want to invite to their races. That typically meant balancing considerations for attracting the best teams, local teams, teams with charismatic riders, and notably in the case of the Tour of California, teams who bring big money race sponsors. It's all been a m...

When I rode the finale of Milan San Remo I took a wrong turn approaching the Poggio, finding myself on an amazing climb winding into the hills. I eventually realized I'd gone the wrong way, but my thought at the time was "wow -- there's other climbs the organizers could add to this route if they wished". And for 2014, they decided to do so But when it was announced that the Pompeiana climb was being added to the course, it was decried by traditionalists as breaking up what was the traditional opportunity for sprinters among the monuments. The only other "sprinter's classic" is Paris-Tours, and that's more of an end-of-season consolation prize, hardly on the level of Milan San Remo, Flanders, Paris-Roubaix, Liege-Bastogne-Liege, or the Giro di Lombardia. I had to laugh a bit at this, because when Eric Zabel won in 1997 it was considered an enormous accomplishment that a sprinter won. He went on to win 4 out of 5 years. Then the following year Mar...

Still suffering the after-effects of oral surgery, and mourning the loss of my missing tooth, I took solace in watching a pirate feed of the Eurosport coverage of 99.7 of the final 100 km of Milan-San Remo. Unfortunately I lost the feed during the final 300 meters... So why don't I pay for cycling.tv? Because I keep telling myself I'm not going to watch these races any more. Except for this one. Special circumstances. That's it... The result : my man Cavendish didn't win Milan San Remo after all, his sprint tempered by the freezing rain, and once again I sold the remarkable Fabian Cancellara short as he finished an amazing second in a medium-group sprint. Katuscha's Alexander Kristoff took advantage of the work of his teammate, Luca Paolini, to win the sprint. Both of them pack some beef on their frames, something which likely worked to their benefits in staving off hypothermia. Cancellara's 2nd place has continued an amazing streak of podium finishes fo...

These past four months I've gotten to see three of my favorite book series I've every read get made into video. As a kid, two of my favorites were Tolkein and Conan Doyle, in particular the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, and the Sherlock Holmes series. I don't need to describe why these both are absolutely brilliant. As an adult, I got hooked my Michael Connelly's series, the most famous Harry Bosch detective novels. These books have a gritty darkness, along with a veracity which is attractive. There's always plot switches at the end, and it's fun trying to anticipate these. I wouldn't put the books on the level of the others, but they're definitely worth reading. All three of these authors were made into video recently. The first I saw was The Hobbit, the Desolation of Smaug . I'd see the first Peter Jackson Hobbit film when that was released in 2011. Peter Jackson apologists argue that this should not be judged based on fidelity with Tolkein,...

Ah, well. My running streak ended at 7, as today I decided the best approach was simply to rest. I watched 3 episodes of Sherlock, season 2 episodes 2-3, and season 3 episodes 0 and 1 (0 doesn't count). Oral surgery just left me totally drained. Tomorrow: Milan San Remo. My prediction: Mark Cavendish. Headwind finish makes it very hard for a break to stay away. Cavendish has a strong team, he has the experience, and he has the acceleration and timing needed to take it. He just needs to get over the Cipressa.

Each day this week I felt like not running. My right leg was bothering me a bit and I was even hobbling a bit at work from a sore something-or-other (foam rollering was "productive"). Lunchtime would come, my usual running time, and I couldn't go out: too tired, too much work to do, yadda yadda. But then I'd take a not-too-late evening train, despite succumbing to temptation and eating first thing after riding my steep commute route from the train to home, put on my running clothes and trot down the hill. And after a solid weekend running in the Marin Headlands, every day I did this: Mon, Tue, Wed, and Thu, my legs magically felt better and I got a wonderful run in, taking advantage of daylight time's later sunsets, and running into the night if necessary. Today was going to be the day I for the first time ever made it to 7 consecutive days of running. On Tuesday a 9.5-year-old crown came loose, taking a piece of 18 with it. There wasn't much left. The...

The generalized form of the ATS and CTS metrics developed by Coggan & Allen for the analysis of power meter data is the following: f n = sum { i from 0 to n } exp[ (t i - t n ) / τ] s i where t i is a time associated with point i, τ is a time constant associated with the stress score f, and s i is the stress associated with the activity at point i. For my tracking of running training, for simplicity I've used distance run as the training stress (which I measure in kilometers). Then I've used the conventional values τ for two stress scores: 1 week for an "acute" stress ATS, and 6 weeks for a "chronic" stress CTS. The advantage of this sort of approach versus a more conventional "miles per week" is "miles per week" is arbitrary. You could run 1 km today and if you rested 7 days prior, ATS goes up. Then you could do 30 km tomorrow and if you ran a marathon the week before, ATS drops. Obviously that's not representative ...

It's really worthwhile following the INRNG Tumbler page. I'm glad I do. Because of it, I found this photo of Alberto Contador approaching the brutal finish of Stage 5 of this year's Tirreno Adriatico stage race . Contador won the stage and thus took the lead, for good, in the general classification. Oh, the pain, the pain... But I can't stop looking at it. It helps I've always admired Contador. He rides with style, he pays meticulous attention to equipment details (experimenting with things such as large-diameter derailleur pulleys, lightweight wheels and saddles, and low-friction bearings), and he's always modest and polite in his interviews. Of course, there's the inevitable doping questions: convicted doper Contador who dominated during the peak of the microdose-plus-transfusion era is back due to "a good winter". But training at altitude is no gimmick, and if he indeed went to a structured, focused off-season it shouldn't be too...

Another day past, and another day less until the Woodside Ramble 50 km race. I've been focusing on plots showing weighted average distances (which I refer to as ATS, CTS, after the cycling power metrics of the same names), and to number of runs per week. These plots have been guiding my training. An example is the following: But long run distance is important as well, and that's been increasing. This hasn't been as much planned as it's been based on what I can do: I like to run long, and if I feel good, I try to extend my previous distance a bit. Here I plot the distance of my runs versus the date relative to 18 Mar, where I label training runs as crosses, and races as stars: The long run distance has been steadily tending up, but not fast enough to approach 50 km by 13 April. I've run 3 races so far this year. The first was just 4 km (listed as 4.5 km here because of warm-up). For that race, distance wasn't a factor; I'd already done runs twice the ...

Cara wanted to do a bike tour, so when we were visiting Ely Rodriguez to talk about a handlebar bag, he suggested the Marin Headlands as an excellent destination. The Marin Headlands are just north of San Francisco, across the Golden Gate Bridge, but I immediately embraced the idea. It was a good chance to try out the whole bike touring process: pack stuff on bike, ride to destination, camp out, pack up and leave. The rides themselves would be short, less than 20 miles following the most direct route, but it would provide a good chance to learn what works and what doesn't. On a bike tour, the actual riding is just a part of it, maybe even a minority. This would test the rest. First, I had to reserve the campground. This turned out to be surprisingly easy. Many campgrounds in the SF Bay area need to be booked months in advance, but in March, Haypress campground in the Headlands obviously isn't one of them. I initially tried to get Hawk, which is the most remote campgrou...

In the March 2014 Ultrarunning, page 16, Gary Cantrell writes: "The biggest obstacle to accumulating the mileage necessary to achieve the results we desire is inconsistency". He advocates running every day, maybe for just a mile, maybe for just 15 minutes, but to get in the habit of running every day. So how have I fared? Not well. It's easy to see the biggest killer on my consistency has been races. The solution may simply be to get out and do more super-easy runs after races. But easier said then done: if I feel hobbled, that even running across the parking lot at work is infeasible, it seems better to just let my body recover and not go out and force myself to run out of "habit". I'm doing better in the plot once I get a few weeks out from racing. Yesterday my non-running status wasn't directly from a race, but from my right leg bothering me a little, which it's done since that downhill run on Empire Grade. But could I have gotten a sh...

I initially posted this at 1:59:26 am PDT on π day, which made me feel slightly clever, but then I felt considerably less clever when I realized I'd mistakingly concluded I had 5 weeks until the Woodside Ramble 50 km, rather than the 4 weeks I actually have. Analysis revised... With only 4 weeks to go until my 50 km race, I'm becoming more and more obsessed with it. After Lake Chabois, I took a week off from running, but helped fill the void with cycling, made even more irresistable by my new bike, the Winter Allaban. Woodside Ramble 50 km, Michigan Bluff photography But with "rest week" over, my body fatigued from the rapid ramp-up in riding volume, it was time to start running again. And that meant Caltrain to work instead of SF2G. For Caltrain, it would be folly to take the Allaban, so I've been riding my "rain bike", a 1989 Trek 1500. That bike needs a new drivetrain, the derailleur and 7-speed cassette both well past their replacement dat...

I feel like such a wimp. Old-school is to go by feel. Torque wrench? I don't need no stinkin' torque wrench! Sigh.

Since it debuted last year on selected Garmin riders and on Lance Armstrong, among others, the POC Octave road helmet looked to be a game changer. Combining features which appear to provide a competitive advantage in safety with weights as light as anything else in the market, the POC looked to be the best of all worlds, especially considering the relatively round shape looked to be a good match to my relatively round head. I'm a good match for the Specialized helmets, for example the Prevail which I now wear. But the Prevail is going to need replacing, and the POC was a leading candidate. Just wait to March.... "190 grams in a size medium... certified worldwide". Amazing. Consider me in. The video was posted September 2013, 6 months ago. Then there were the reviews. From BikeRumor :. Tested against the two top selling high performance helmets, the Octal has 20, and 27% better ventilation, though POC isn’t leaning on that for a selling point. The Octal i...

In Dec 2011 I compared Strava power estimates to Powertap measurements for the Cortland Hurl , a previously popular climb for SF2G . Unfortunately the Hurl has gone out of favor with the Google riders, but recently I did a ride with a leisurely spin up the climb, which has been an occasional fitness test for me. New to the ride was my use of Garmin Vector, mounted on my heavy (10.5 kg) Winter Allaban. You'd expect a relatively high watts at a given VAM with the big bike with fat tires at relatively low pressure. So I was curious to see how the watts I reported on the climb compared to my previous trend. Here's the result: The data are sparse, and it would have been a lot better had my Vector ride been at a higher VAM. But it is strongly compelling that the Vector is reading low. The Strava estimates are certainly low in particular due to an underestimation of mass. The Strava method of asking for "bike weight" and "rider weight" omits the weight of eq...

I've done my friend Murphy's "San Mateo Wheelman club ride" each of the three times he's led it. A group of friends get together, ride at a liesurely pace to somewhere, then ride back to the city via public transportation. Or something like that. Anyway, with my focus on running right now, and not very good at deviating from a focus, I volunteered this year, because his ride is such fantastic, relaxed fun that I felt important to support it even if I wasn't going to participate as a rider. This year's route started in San Francisco and worked its way in a dirty, indirect manner to the Ibis Cycles headquarters in Santa Cruz. Consistent with the leasurely, informal nature of the ride, the route was chosen only the day before. It's always exciting to see where Murphy's going to send his friends. After a flurry of reorganization related to who had a car and who was was able to drive a car, I was assigned to checkpoint 2, a new parking lot (empty in...

Five weeks to go until the Woodside Ramble 50 km trail run , which means prime time is now for building my fitness. I have at most 3 weeks of build ahead before I need to taper the distance. Following the Lake Chabot 30 km race, I took a planned week off from running. This was originally going to be 6 days off, but I extended it to seven to do a Saturday bike ride to Mount Diablo with Patrick and others from SF2G . That capped off a week in which I did two solo rides to work, totaling 153 km, making for 276 km total on very little cycling base. That's not exactly "recovery", but at least my running-specific muscles got a break. But it left me tired, rather than fresh and ready to go, on the Sunday of the weekend after Chabot. So a modest 12.8 km on Sunday (actually a bit more due to Strava app problems), then a rest on Monday, but 14.8 on Tue, a solid 22.8 on Wed, Thu another rest, only 1.7 on Friday, but a year's best 32.6 km on Saturday, then a straight-up, st...

Continued from last time... After leaving home I took off for the Embarcadero, where there is an extended section of cobblestones along the MUNI rail tracks. I was really looking forward to how the 30 mm nominal, 32 mm measured Strada Bianca tires and high-rake fork took the rough surface compared to my road racing bikes. And, of course, it handled it quite well. But it was still somewhat uncomfortable. No super-plush ride like that Jan Heine likes to brag with his 42 mm by 650B tires on his custom Rene Herse (Boulder Bikes). But I was fine with that. After the cobbles, I came to the Maritime Museum. There's some vestigal tracks here, no longer used, which can cause issues for narrow tires. I rolled over these tracks, even at a relatively oblique angle, without problem. The wider rubber was much more forgiving. Fort Mason was next. This is a short, relatively steep climb which gave a chance to see how it went up. And it passed: the geometry, despite being smaller trail th...

After the photo shoot , Eric took his saddle back, packed the Winter Allaban up, and shipped it to me. And it looked even better in person than it looks in the photos. Really, it's stunning. A really quality paint job such as the one Kim Anderson did, even in monchrome, is so much nicer than the usual production bike work. Putting it together presented a few issues. One was I was unfamiliar with the Paul Racer brakes. I accidentally detensioned them, and not realizing how tension was controlled, I was unable to get the brakes to retract properly from the rims. After carefully reading the on-line instructions for the brakes I finally figured out how to tension the springs which are responsible for pulling the brake pads away from the rim. The cable pulls them toward the rim, the spring pulls them away. The latter would have allowed dispensing with the brake bridge. But he said he uses the bridge and single bolt mount on his own bike. So I have to be happy with that. The ...