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

As we descended back to the Peets Coffee which marked the start of the week 4 Low-Key Hillclimb route, Rich Hill said to me: "has Low-Key ever done a day with 4800 feet of climbing before?" I paused. Hamilton? Not quite, only 4400. Diablo? Not close. Portola Valley Hills last year? No -- less than 3000 total feet. What about weeks with optional extra climbs, like the Diabolical Double or the Lomas-Marin Ave combo? No and no. "I don't think so. No -- I'm pretty sure not," I replied. I felt good about this, because after 6 intense efforts up climbs with vertical gain from 476 to 764 vertical feet, I was cooked. Details of the route are here . Paul McKenzie designed a route of absolute brilliance, tying together a combination of classic and obscure climbs in the maze-like Berkeley-Oakland-Hills with a minimum of overhead. Of those 4800 vertical feet, 3825 were against the clock, 975 part of the untimed transitions (still timed, actually, but with ...

On Wednesday morning I had oral surgery, getting an implant installed. Fun, fun. But the procedure was a lot easier than I had anticipated, so relatively easy I questioned my decision to get anesthetic, something I normally decline during fillings, for example. It hadn't even occurred to me to ask, as I expected such a scene of blood and gore that no rational human could survive the untempered pain and still maintain either consciousness or sanity. But I suspect it would have gone okay. The worst part was at the end when I was strictly advised "don't do anything to raise your blood pressure for the next 5 days, including any vigorous exercise." No vigorous exercise for 5 days? But I was approaching the end of a recovery week after a solid block of work in Switzerland, and I was ready to get moving again. In particular, Saturday was the Low-Key Hillclimb up Welch Creek Road. But that would be only 73 hours post-implant: too far short of the 120 hour recommendat...

Back in July I designed a jersey for what is at present the Belkin team, but which will become the Dutch Lotto team. It was just a hack. I didn't expect the professionally designed one to actually look similar to any significance: The actual jerseys of the team for the 2015 season were just revealed: Not too bad, I think...

There will be a new point schedule for the 2015 Tour de France green jersey competition : Tour course director Thierry Gouvenou explained the rationale for the changes to the flat stages. "We have made some changes to the green jersey competition next year," Govenou said. "When we are almost certain that the stage will end in a sprint, we will add a little bonus to first place." "Previously we've had 45, 35 and 30 points for the top three positions respectively. Now we will award 50, 30 and 20 points. The person who wins the stage will have a bigger advantage over the others, and it's something which brings the pure sprinters back into the frame for the green jersey." More points for first, but the same points for the top 2 and fewer points for the top 3 and beyond for the sprint stages. From 2013 results, Sagan with his domination in the rankings would still have won. But 2nd would now be Coquard, a GC rider. All of the sprinters would hav...

Despite an early afternoon meeting for which I risked tardiness if anything went wrong, I felt a strong need to test my fitness on the Noon Ride, Wednesday edition, which climbs my favorite climb anywhere: Old La Honda Road. After the cheap LR44 batteries I'd last installed in my Powertap gave up the ghost a few weeks into my Basel Switzerland experience, I found some superior 357's (silver oxide) in a local combo department store / food store. This should have had me up and running but I didn't have the tool to remove the cover on the hub. I eventually brought it to a local shop, to see if the guy there could remove it with an open-end adjustable wrench, but it was too tight and the metal wrench risked damaging the flats on the hub cover. So I decided I didn't need power all that much in Europe and to wait until I got home. Indeed, the cover was on quite tight for some reason, and after applying some Tri-Flow to the interface between the cover and the hub, applyin...

The 2015 Tour was announced, and although it has a brutal series of Alpine finishes, it's a relatively short one. The total distance is only 3344 km, historically low, although this distance falls right on an exponentially decaying schedule I fit to the distances from 1945 to 2010. Here's the plot: I like long Tours as I find them more epic. The "epic" aspect doesn't show up well on television, but I have limited exposure to the television coverage anyway. However, I appreciate the finishes more if the riders have worked harder to get there. Modern racing has, however, to a large degree neutralized long stages. There's a constant temptation to shorten the routes and focus more on providing novel aspects each day to get people to watch Eurosport. Maybe I'll go to watch some of the race next year. The concentration of Alpine stages facilitates this.

For running races of up to 4 hours, my Garmin Forerunner 610 has been my GPS of choice. It's compact, relatively light, fits well on my wrist, and has decent recording accuracy. I have a wrist strap for the Edge 500, but that unit is cumbersome for a wrist-mount. And my iPhone is too heavy. DCRainmaker image of Forerunner 610. See his review here . The issue with the Forerunner is it's very finicky. Here's what I did today during the Dolphin South End Runner's Club San Bruno Mountain "12 km" trail run (actually closer to 13 km, according to my GPS data). Turn on, acquiring GPS signal during warm-up run. Run with the GPS on, to record warm-up run. Finish warm-up run, then hit "stop" and "reset", to lock in the warm-up as a separate activity. Don't turn off the 610: intent is to keep GPS signal active so I'm ready to go at race start. Approximately 10 minutes later, with 10 seconds to go before race start, hit "start...

For Low-Key Hillclimbs I have a mass-adjusted climbing score, which is based on the product of the rider mass and the rate of vertical ascent. This isn't a power calculation, but is related to power, and the units differ from power only by a factor of the gravitiational acceleration, which is roughly constant. The natural units of mass for international sports is kilograms, but this is the United States, and people here are more accustomed to dealing in pound-equivalents (pounds formally being a unit of force or weight, not mass). So rather than require riders to calculate their mass in kg, which they may be less likely to recall than their weight in pounds, I default to having them enter pounds, with an optional unit specification which can allow for other units (I presently support pounds, kilograms, stone for my Britophiles, and slugs to be pedantic). But people mess up. One friend specified his mass as "10 stone 8 pounds", a mixed unit I can't handle (my parser...

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...

After 6 weeks in Europe, a combination of some work and more vacation, there's a bit of culture shock coming back the the United States. Sprawl: flying into SFO, the sprawl across the East Bay was extensive. Residential development in Europe tends to be more clumped: areas of density immediately adjacent to rural. Suburbia is much, much less extensive. Being immersed in English: this feels wrong, sort of like cheating. I'm not complaining, though! tasteless food: I cooked some California brown rice and cooked it. The taste, or rather lack, was a bit of a shock. In Switzerland, all of the food I had was rich and flavorful, fresh and good. A lot of food in the US tastes empty and stale, produced for quantity rather than quality. California stops: after assembling the Ritchey Breakaway and riding to the train on Monday morning, after my return Sunday night, at the first intersection I hit where I had right of way and cross-traffic a stop sign, a driver did a California st...

Adding to my collection of profiles for climbs I've done, here's one for the Axalp climb, approximately 10 km west of Meiringen, Switzerland, on the south shore of Lake Brienzersee. First the profile. I used my Garmin Edge 500 for position and altitude. On the climb up, I lost GPS signal for a bit, which resulted in a data gap. Since I take the data straight from the FIT file, I rely on Garmin's distance determination, which would normally be good if my Powertap had been functioning, but the super-cheap alkaline LR44 batteries I got off Amazon don't last as long as silver oxide 357's with which the Powertap ships. As a result, I needed to rely on the Garmin's GPS distance determination, which doesn't interpolate across gaps, unlike Strava's distance determination. It was easy enough to convert latitude and longitudes into distance, but the Garmin's smarter than that: local variation in position turn straight paths into zig-zags, and the result...

There's a great rush of satisfaction in knowing you've gotten things right. Of course, we have infinite options, so the probability of picking the "optimal" is mathematically zero. If true optimization is the goal, we're doomed to failure. Some steadfastly hold themselves to this standard anyway, and indeed they meet with the failure which is mathematically certain. I'm not talking about this sort of pathological optimization, I'm talking more about when faced with a cloud of uncertainty, options taken did a pretty good job. I write this on a train from Bern to Basil, having started in Meiringen. In this case, the choice was fairly simple. I popped open my SBB.ch app, typed in "Meiringen" to "Basel SBB", and it gave me a bunch of options, all starting with a trip to Interlaken Ost, then transferring to one or two trains to Basel. All took around 2:36. Instead of buying my ticket with the app, as I would normally do, I got it a...

After my epic ride of L'Alpe d'Huez, Lac Bassen, and Col Sarenne the day before, I found myself back at the Campanile Süd in Grenoble. I'd thought to find someone closer to the centre ville, something with a bit more character, but I was tired and having difficulty navigating the twisting roads of the city, and so turned on my Garmin Edge 500 navigation and followed the route I'd programmed to reach the Campanile. The Campanile is relatively cheap, has decent wifi, and provides a simple but nutritious breakfast. I decided to go with the safe bet. Luckily there were still rooms available. I checked out the next morning, left my backpack (my sole luggage for the trip) at the desk, then set off for Chamrousse, which had been recommended to me by a friend. If you go into Strava Segment Explorer, zoom into Grenoble, and move the climb selector over to "HC", the Champrousse climb becomes the obvious candidate. It was used in the Tour de France as a time tri...

Low-Key Hillclimbs week 1 is done, and it's the first time Montebello was coordinated by someone other than Kevin Winterfield or me. Huge thanks to James Porter for taking the controls while I'm away from home and getting the series off to a successful start! We had an issue with water: surprisingly, 450 ml/rider wasn't enough at the end of a climb for which the median climbing time is well under 1 hour. But otherwise the day wasa big win. A big feature this year was the unusual (by historical standards) heat: the temperature was as high as 95F/35C for the day. This isn't especially hot, but it is by San Francisco Bay area standards, where the ocean breezes and the bay tend to maintain moderate temperatures year-round. Inland, at the central coast, things heat up. Bill Bushnell photo With Low-Key Hillclimbs, week 1 is the anchor. It's almost always Montebello Road (1998 excepted), and thus provides a certain standard for comparison for year-to-year. Rider...

As was pointed out to me by Claude B in the comments section of a previous post, Argon has a new aero frame out, the Nitrogen ( web page here ), and with it they show some wind tunnel data: These tests are following a pattern. The Cervelo S5 remains the standard against which new frames compare, and they may be competitive with the S5, but don't beat it. We saw the same thing with the Parlee ESX and Felt AR1. Then lagging behind is a set of usual suspects, including the Specialized Venge and the Scott Foil. The only test I saw where the Scott Foil did exceptionally well was the test data produced by Scott itself. Between the Nitrogen and the S5 is basically a choice between low-yaw and high-yaw drag. The Nitrogen appears to do a bit better at higher yaw. I tend to err towards lower-yaw performance because of ground shear: yaw at the height of a downtube is less than it is, for example, at head-level, let alone at 10 meters. At extreme yaws control becomes a bigger issue...