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

The plan: after running my 50 km race in April, the plan was that I'd do some climb workouts to find my cycling legs again, ride the Memorial Day Ride (MDR), a 4-day supported tour from San Jose to Santa Barbara, to provide the base, then top it off with some hard climbing to get my top end. Running to cycling transitions are easier than cycling to running, in my experience. And running prepares you for the sustained effort of climbing in many ways better than riding does. I'd been able to run essentially continuously for 5+ hours at the Woodside Ramble 50 km. All I needed to do was to push out my top end and I'd be in for a strong Diablo. The truth: I had some solid climb workouts, albeit slow, before MDR. MDR left me tired, compounded by other life pressures like work, looking for a new place to live, and finally dealing with the process of organizing my life to move. My weekends were essentially dead, and my Caltrain commute is crippling to my weekdays, leaving S...

The " Diablo Time Trial " on Sunday was a new event, organized to raise money for the Children's Hospital and Research Center in Oakland. I viewed it not only as a good event on its own, but additionally excellent training for the NCNCA championships on 21 June, which covers the first 10 km of the course, from North Gate to near the junction. The promotion had some interesting aspects. At sign-up, we wereinstructed that "elites" were those who could beat 50 min.... unstated was the intent was that was for the Diablo Challenge course, from South Gate, which has 200 fewer vertical feet. From North Gate only 3riders on Strava have beaten 50, and none in the times Low-KeyHillclimbs have ridden the route. My targets were 56-58-60 minutes,which put me deep in the "novice" category. So that's how I registed. After achieving a long-time goal of running a 50 km trail race (my first ultra-marathon) in April, meeting my performance targets, my ramp-up ...

The Mount Diablo "Time Trial" was today. I felt I rode well, but recorded only my second best time on the relevant Strava segment. North Gate to Summit , which is erroneously named since it actually begins after a bump which follows the North Gate. But since the race today staged on the hot side of the gate, segments which begin at the gate itself included staging time. My previous best was a training ride in September 2011 . I wanted to know why I was slower. Was it due to the tactical portion of the race, with reduced VAMs isolated to a particular portion of the course, or was it due to being generally overall slower? Of course I'm 2.5 years older now, and I've not been training on the bike more than a few weeks, and I'm recovering from a cold which isn't quite gone yet, and the weather was substantially cooler than it was that September day, and I'm presently 1 kg over my "race weight". Lots of possible issues. But I wanted to look a...

Sunday is the first of three organized hillclimbs on Mount Diablo in the coming two months. The second of these races is the Tour of California stage 3 , which ends with a climb up to the Summit via South Gate Road. But two days before there's a public event, The Diablo Time Trial (not actually a time trial) climbing North Gate Road to the junction before finishing the climb on the ATOC course up Summit Road. The third race is the NorCal-Nevada climbing champship race pn 21 June . I pre-rode it last Sunday and generated a profile from my Garmin Edge 500 data. Net distance = 17.55 km, gross climbing = 1070 meters, gross descending = 10 meters, average grade = 6.05%. But obviously there's a lot more to the climb than that. The rating is 2.42 Old-La-Honda equivalents, less than the altitude ratio of 2.72 due to the lesser average grade (Old La Honda is 7.2%). Here's the profile, in imperial units since it was prepared for Low-Key Hillclimbs (replacing the profile I...

The Tour of California went from south-to-north this year for the first time this year, ending with a series of three critical-stages in the San Francisco Bay area. This made for the most significant racing in the region since the unfortunately defunct San Francisco Grand Prix. Friday was the time trial in San Jose, a combination of a course used there previously, climbing Willow Springs Road, and ending with the "Metcalf Mauler" : Metcalf Road. Low-Key did Metcalf in 2010 after years of it just missing the final cut due to its relative lack of total climbing. But what it lacks in endurance, it makes up for in intensity. I watched the time trial in short spurts from my cubical, as I had a pressing deadline I had to meet, and it was impressive watching Tejay spin up the climb in his time trial bike to win the stage and consolidate his GC lead. I haven't seen the split times for Metcalf, but there were Strava times . The best of the times posted to Strava was Mancebo...

Last post I talked about the denominator issue I had with the Diablo hillclimb time trial. There I converted my present weight to my weight when I set my Old La Honda PR late last year and concluded that my time, which would have put me 3rd in my category, was pretty good, and that therefore my numerator was fine: my power was basically on target. But that level of analysis really doesn't stand muster. I have the data available to estimate my power: I just need to run the numbers. I could use Strava's estimated power but that's based on an undocumented model. It's easy enough to download data from Strava myself and run my own calculations. So here I go: Diablo starts at relatively low altitude and the time trial climbs a net of only 520 vertical meters so the air is fairly thick: I assumed 1.15 kg/m³. I know my mass at ride time (59 kg), my bike's mass (approx 5.1 kg), and the mass of stuff on my body (1.5 kg estimated). My tires are Vittoria Chronos pumped...

As I was standing at the finish of the Mount Diablo Time Trial , I suddenly remembered that I'd left a pack of Gu in my pocket. Gu was sponsoring the race and there had been a box of peanut butter Gu's at registration. I'd taken one and put it in my back pocket, intending to leave it with the backpack I had stashed at the start line. But I'd forgotten... would have been better to push it under the leg of my bib shorts where I'd be less likely to overlook it. All of this seems like a lot of fuss over a little Gu, but Gu packs are 30 grams each. That's around 0.5 seconds extra climbing time for the course , which consists of the first half of the climb to Diablo summit from the north ( formula for estimating this sort of thing ). Sure, usually 0.5 seconds doesn't matter, but sometimes it does. As it turns out, I ended up 5th in my age group, 1.9 seconds out of 4th, 5.0 seconds out of 3rd. So 0.5 seconds alone didn't make a difference. But people s...

Today, encouraged by the temperatures in the 70F's being reported for the Diablo summit , in striking contrast to the bone-chilling fog of San Francisco, I put on a jacket and rode to BART. I heard the announcement for the Pittsburgh-Bay Point train I wanted as I reached the top of the stairs, so I ran down the stairs in my cycling shoes and, after a few contact fouls with people leisurely walking the opposite way, got onto the train only 5 seconds before the door shut. Ironically BART to Pleasant Hill takes about the same time as it would take me to ride out to the Golden Gate Bridge. Then the suburban-timed traffic lights from there to the base of the climb are no more delay than the riding the pedestrian path across the Golden Gate Bridge. Despite this for a long time East Bay rides were all too rare for me. Instead I bundled up against San Francisco and Marin's summer chill and rode north. But I've been riding Diablo more recently, trying to work on my extended...

Ron Brunner photo of parking lot at Diablo summit I just saw this on the official Mount Diablo Parks page : What is a Road and Trail Plan? A Road and Trail Plan is a recommended management plan for the roads and trails within Mount Diablo State Park. At this time Mount Diablo State Park is developing a Road and Trail Plan for the park. The staff at Mount Diablo State Park is very excited to be able to a part of this process. This plan will be used as a long term guiding document and takes into consideration all of the elements of the park's values, goals and mission. Key components in the Road and Trail plan are: Maximize visitor uses and experiences. Reduce potential safety conflicts. Minimize natural and cultural resource impacts. Coordinate with local and regional planning efforts. Provide access to surrounding public lands. Public input An essential part of the Road and Trail Plan is creating an opportunity for the public to provide meaningful input. The park...

After my trail running adventures this spring, yesterday was my first bike race of the year. And after my race, I was tired, very tired. First, I hadn't gotten enough sleep the night before. I went to bed later than I'd planned, engrossed by Dashiell Hammett's excellent Thin Man . Still not too bad: my 5:30 am alarm would still be good for almost seven hours. But I awoke 90 minutes earlier from a dream in which I'd missed my start time due to clumsily trying to inflate my tires (is there a Freudian connection to this? I've never read Freud). Then I couldn't get back to sleep because I realized shifting problems I'd experienced on Friday had been due to an incompatibility between the Recon aluminum cassette and the Wipperman Connex Chain. The Wipperman is almost 30 grams heavier than a SRAM 1090 or a KMC X10. 30 extra grams? That wouldn't do at all. So I got up, drank some tea, and replaced the chain with an old SRAM that was laying around. ...

Results are shown here from the north side (starting at or near the gate) and the south side (starting near Athenian School). The north side has more climbing. We climbed the south side in 1995, 1996, 1997, and 2007. The north side was part of the Low-Key schedule in 2006 and 2009. This may be it for Low-Key at Diablo, since we didn't get positive feedback from the Chief Ranger this year, since I was told some car drivers may have been inconvenienced by the riders, the former clearly the priority of the State Park system. Seriously, Diablo would be a much nicer, more tranquil, cleaner place if cars were banned. Call me radical. Mount Diablo (N) Men rank year(wk) name time %median 1 2009(7) Justin Lucke 51:12 132.031 2 2009(7) Kevin Metcalf 51:21 131.646 3 2006(3) Petro Hizalev 51:37 132.015 4 2006(3) Menso de Jong 52:00 131.042 5 2009(7) Ammon Skidmore 52:27 128.88...