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

I was shocked when I looked back through this blog and observed that it had been two and a half years since my last trail race, the Golden Gate 30 km by Coastal Trail Runs. I remember that run well: the pain of the wrong turn, breaking down toward the finish. Two and a half years? Where had the time gone? Obviously, I've not been idle, but between cycling events, road running events, and a few unfortunate injuries focus drifts and suddenly you open your eyes and the year has jumped 3 digits. Clearly I had to fix this. And so after an extended period of bikeless December travel where running became my only outlet for self-exertion, I decided to continue the momentum through early 2014. Goals: it's important to have goals. With each year it's important to try for something new and challenging, something outside the comfort radius, something which will be hard. And an anomalous addiction to Ultra Running Magazine has me telling myself that a marathon distance is just...

Dirt climbs are fun, and while I've not ridden up this one (I've hiked it, and I've ridden down part of it), I decided to make a profile for it since it was recommended to me by a friend. Montara Mountain is often overlooked when cyclists think of large climbs in the Bay area. The reason is that unlike many other large hills, there's no paved roads to the top. However, this was not always the case, and the "Planet of the Apes" route follows what was the inland road ("San Pedro Mountain Road") between Pacifica to the north and Half Moon Bay to the south. This road was replaced by the Devil's Slide portion of Highway 1, and nature quickly asserted control. The "road" is now in many places little more than single-track, it's paved past evident only in broken patches of crumbling asphalt. This route begins at Grant Ranch, the southern extreme of Planet of the Apes. It then climbs steeply to a "Y", a left the route to Pa...

With the job I started back in late October, I've not been devoting much time or energy to training. Yesterday I got out for 50 miles on my bike, a ride cut short by a broken spoke on my Velomax wheel. Velomax wheels are designed with double-threaded spokes: one end threads into the nipple at the hub, the other end into a threaded hole in the hub flange (held there with Loctite). The idea is to avoid the stress-riser of a J-bend in the spoke at the flange side, supposedly improving spoke reliability. But this "theory" overlooks the fact a spoke can bend and rotate about a threadless flange hole, whereas with a threaded hole, the spoke end orientation is fixed, and any lateral pressure on the spoke will place a lot of strain on the spoke where it enters the hub, and since I take my bike onto the Caltrain bike car where bikes are stacked laterally, all it takes is someone's pedal in your wheel to supply lateral spoke force. Indeed, it is at the entry point of the f...