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

It's time once again for the Low-Key Hillclimbs , and this will be the 20th anniversary of the first edition, when Kevin Winterfield and I brashly organized a series of 12 consecutive weekly climbs extending from October through almost Christmas. And the amazing thing is we pulled it off. I'm less brash now but I don't need to be: I have fantastic support in putting the series on and so far we've had minimal interference. It's really been a wonderful thing. I've got some decent fitness this year after having ridden SuperTour, organized by Sid and Linda Fuhrer, then raced the Mt. Tam Hill Climb and the Fremont Peak Hill Climb. For the first time in years I've actually been focusing on training instead of riding, and it's helped, starting with the fantastic dose of base I got from SuperTour. My time at Fremont Peak wasn't what I wanted, although I rode fairly well at Mt. Tam the week before. It was particularly hot at Fremont Peak so that took ...

Montebello Road and Mount Hamilton Road are the two climbs we've done pretty much every year in the Low-Key Hillclimbs. They are thus the best source of data on speed trends in the series. For men and women solo riders, I took the geometric mean of rider times for each of the climbs each time they were done. Hamilton was done twice in 1998, while Montebello was skipped that year, but every other year Montebello was week 1, Hamilton on Thanksgiving. Here's the result, with men in blue and women in pink (original, I know): There's some interesting trends. In the 1995-1996-1997 as the series got more popular the average speed dropped for both climbs. 1998 was a slight down year for turn-out, but there's no Montebello data. There were two Hamiltons that year: the first was week 1 and it went off as normal, with faster times for men and slower for women. The second one, on Thanksgiving, was even quicker, but that one was broken into two portions due to a motorcycl...

I've done 28 SF2G rides this year, commuting from home in San Francisco to work in eastern Mountain View at the Sunnyvale border. This ride typically covers around 43 miles up to 50 if I take a more scenic route. But Wednesday I went super-scenic. I finally did Hamway. Technically Hamway isn't San Francisco to Mountain View, as the real riding starts in Dublin, at the end of the BART line there. Then we rode down to Livermore, stopping first at a small mall where some riders got coffee and/or bagels. Not long after, though, three of us suffered puncture vine flats. One of the riders had a particularly slow fix. We weren't off to a good start towards my goal of getting to work by 1:30 pm, since I'd taken the morning off but not the afternoon. But we finally made it to Livermore and turned onto Mines Road, always a sobering sight. Mileage markers on Mines Road count up from 0 at this junction until they reach the Santa Clara County border at mile 20. Here the ...

Some more on Hamilton at the Low-Key Hillclimbs : it's interesting to track the average or median times of finishers over the years. Median is basically the time of the middle finisher, or the average time of the two riders spanning the middle if there's an even number. Average is just the average over all riders. I like median, as if one particularly slow rider shows up, for example finishing in 4 hours out of a group of 75, that will have a strong influence on the average time: for example it would shift the average from 90 minutes to 92 minutes. On the other hand, the median is less strongly affected by what a single rider does, at least assuming there's a sufficient number of riders that around the median finisher riders are finishing several times per minute. I plot these statistics versus year here: Curious... But first, let me explain. There's two sets of curves, red for women and blue for men. Each counts only solo riders on standard bikes: no tandems, no...

View from the summit ( Josh Hadley photo ) Continuing my review of the history of Low-Key data, the climb most ever done in the series is Mt Hamilton: every year 1995-1998, 2006-2009, including twice in 1998. That's ten times total. Remarkably, given how exposed the summit is, it's never been canceled, despite occurring late in the series on Thanksgiving (in 1998 it was also first in the series). Many of the better times are the last few years. But the men's and women's Low-Key records were each set in the 1999's. And neither has been close to being beaten since. We'll likely continue to run Hamilton as long as we continue to run the climbs, or at least as long as I or Kevin is involved. It's a tradition to climb Hamilton on Thanksgiving morning, a tradition which goes back much further than 1995, the year of the first Low-Key series. It's a great climb, one which tests the endurance none of the other climbs can (although Diablo comes close). And ...