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

Follow-up to San Bruno Hillclimb report: I plot here my relative time to distance for 2015 versus 2014. To generate this plot I exploited the fact I'd hit the lap while waiting on the start line each time. When I check the profiles starting from the lap starts they are essentially the same within approximately 20 meters of distance. However, if I were to have started the times at the start of the lap, the times would have been dominated by the delay until the race start in each case. So instead I interpolated the starts from 20 minutes after the actual lap start. To match times at distance, I interpolated times onto 20 meter intervals for each year's data. Since the course is close to 6 km (5.96 km here), this yields close to 300 points for the full course. So then at each distance I can calculate the difference in times: the 2015 advantage, which I plot, is the 2014 time minus the 2015 time. Here's the result: An aside: this is the first plot I've posted her...

After the 2014 Low-Key Hillclimbs came to a successful conclusion thoughts naturally turn to the San Bruno Hillclimb which comes five weeks later. I'd ridden fairly well at the Low-Key series. After running my first ever 50 km trail race at the Woodside Ramble in April, it had been a decidedly down summer for me fitness-wise, neither doing any running races, bike races, or any endurance rides of note, with the single exception of the Memorial Day Ride (4 days from San Jose to Santa Barbara). I was really in a rut, sort of treading water without making any progress. But spending all of September and the first 12 days of October based in Basel, Switzerland gave a nice boost to my training load. The first two weeks weren't much, and indeed the entire second week was spent working without much training, but weeks three through six were a solid mix of long bike rides and decent runs. This gave me a bit of a cram course in base which had me feeling better on the bike than I had...

Today was my first running road race in quite awhile. First since CIM? Maybe. Time really flies. Anyway, I did the Dolphin Southend Running Club's 10 miler at Sierra Point, running out and back along the Bay Trail, past Genentech. The run was in the morning fog, reducing visibility to only a few hundred meters. The trail would appear ahead without long-range context. We started at the Marina, but the boats were only visible on the water well within the final kilometer. The race was a certified 10-mile course. That means if you run the trail, hitting all the tangents, running the minimum distance consistent with remaining on the trail (which was mostly paved, the sole exception being a very short dirt section), you went 10 miles to measurement precision. This was a bit of a fiction, however, since with the out-and-back course, near the turn-around point there were oncoming runners, so basic courtesy required staying to the right of the path. This added a small bit of distan...

Cyclocross world championships, scheduled yesterday in Austin TX, was initially canceled, later postponed to Monday on a "compressed schedule", nominally due to concern over root exposure on heritage trees in Zilker Park. Here's a comment I posted to a Statesman article on the matter: The key questions are: 1. is the threat of sustained damage actual or just perceived? Cyclocross events are held in the mud world-wide. Sure, some work needs to be done afterwards, but that was anticipated when the permit was issued, and it's why fees were charged. People ASSUME exposing tree routes is a problem. Is it really? 2. Was the rain that unusual? Park officials claimed 2 inches, but the NWS showed less than an inch. By Austin standards, that's hardly rare. Some would disagree that a permit should have been issued, but the permit WAS issued, and athletes, support, and fans made substantial sacrifices financially and time-wise to come to Austin. Sure, extreme ev...

Strava just released annual KOMs in addition to all-time KOMs. I think this is great. KOMs have gotten harder and harder, and this makes it more realistic for people to get to share in the glory. The major goal of Strava is to provide incentive for competition, and as all-time KOMs get increasingly optimized, a chance of placing top 3 in segments (and getting a medallion) ceases to be an incentive. One proposal I made was to award medallions for placing top 10%, top 5%, and top 1% of those ranked on a segment, in addition to the present top 3 (a preference given to which one is tougher). Ranking would be using the VeloViewer metric: placing 1st out of 10, counting yourself, is 10%. This recognizes that the more activities with efforts on a particular segment, the more the top ranking in that segment is worth. But people have complained about the 2015 KOMs. Part of the problem is of course that it's only the first week in January and these rankings are very soft. Come March...

Strava challenges are fun, motivating getting out on the bike or for a run when otherwise you might not want to, for example because it's cold or windy or raining. On the other hand, they're distortionary: any time you measure and rank something that thing you're measuring or ranking tends to get more focus than things which aren't measured or ranked. For example, at present Strava challenges are running-based or cycling-based. You get points for running in running challenges, for cycling in cycling challenges. Mixing running and cycling tends to result in mediocre results in both competitions, with nothing to reward balance, which is otherwise probably healthy. Certainly I've enjoyed mixing up running and cycling since I started running in 2008. So how to reward both? I recommend a multi-sport challenge. For example, on a distance basis, use a conversion factor for run miles to cycling miles. For example using Ironman distances, running miles would be equi...