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

It's Wednesday and I was thinking of joining the SF2G "dirty Mount San Bruno" ride via the Saddle Loop trail. It's a gorgeous ride. Riding in the dirt is a lot of fun on a road bike, and on a clear day, the early morning the view from the trail is excellent. But I just didn't feel ready. I'm still tired from Saturday. As exhilarating as finishing a double is, they do take their toll. It begins the week before, with the need to taper in to be adequately fresh for the long, hard ride. Then the week after, recovery is absolutely key. I remember long ago riding the Davis Double. It made me feel invincible, as if I could do anything. The next day I joined the Alto Velo "A-ride". People couldn't believe it: i was on the A-ride, smiling and ready to go, having ridden 200 miles the day before! I didn't do the while thing, just the first climb of the ride up Old La Honda, then cut it short and rode home. Unfortunately, even this small dos...

As I was riding the Mt Tam Double, I thought I'd do a very short ride report, as I had little to say. Whoops. The first quarter Life felt surreal as I stepped into the taxi at 3:40 am, setting out for what I knew would be a day of hardship and fatigue. Why was I doing this? Why does anyone do this? It's the quest for the grim isolation of pushing up against physical limits, of suppressing rational self's vocal opposition, remaining distance creeping downward incomprehensively slowly, then alightly more rapidly, accelerating, and finally collapsing into the singularity of the finish. But I enjoyed the 22 mile ride out to San Rafael. Traffic was extremely light as we zipped along, first riding the "green wave" of synchronized signals in San Francisco, then a congestion-free 101. I had him drop me off right off the freeway two miles from the start. There I got out my bike out to effortlessly spin the remaining distance, verifying everything was working. ...

Unlike in past years when the added complexity created confusion, errors, and added load on early-rising volunteers, this year there was a single start for the Mt Tam Double, at 5 am. Riders leaving later were still given credit for the 5 am start. I took the official results , stripped out DNS and DNFs, and sorted by finishing time. Here they are: # Bib last first Start Finish 1 229 Palmeri David 5:00 16:35 2 72 Rehorn Pat 5:00 16:43 3 264 Gould Jeffrey 5:00 16:45 4 184 ramos reve 5:00 16:53 5 292 Pollock Graham 5:00 16:53 6 62 Merrill Peter 5:00 17:15 7 268 Sanders Carl 5:00 17:15 8 266 Connelly Daniel 5:00 17:21 9 16 Lynch Joseph 5:00 17:28 10 179 Thompson Stewart 5:00 17:38 11 230 OConnell Christopher 5:00 17:44 12 213 Ochoa Ramon 5:00 17:46 13 18 Doughton Chuck 5:00 17:47 14 11 Kaneko...

In 2010 I did the Mt Tam Double Century , borrowing friend John 's NiteRider Newt light for the pre-dawn start. My first time doing the double, I'd gone without lights, thinking I could rely on the pace car for guidance. That was a big mistake. The pace car was driven at a constant speed, which on the steeper slopes of Lucas Valley Road, the first climb, put me deeply into the red. With John's light, I was able to ride my own pace on the climb, and it contributed to the ride turning into one of my strongest doubles ever. Afterwards, I decided I wanted one for myself, and I was happy Cara got me one as a birthday gift. But instead of the Newt with its frame-mounted battery and sloppy cables connecting these to the handlebar-mounted LEDs, I went with the newer MiNewt, which has rechargable batteries and LEDs in an encapsulated package. The light was important for my commute from my then-new job in Mountain View on a heavily trafficked road. I got the brighter 250 lumi...

As I write this, on my train to work, it is 8:09 am. That means 24 hours from now I will hopefully be over 3 hours into the Mt Tam Double Century. The Mt Tam Double is one of the best-organized cycling events I've done, and I've done it twice. The last time was 2010, when coming off a strong Terrible Two, I rode well, finishing 12th. The only downer was a Garmin Edge 500 hiccup (corrected with subsequent firmwares) causing the loss of my ride data. This year my preparation isn't so good. In May I hurt my back, leading to discomfort which had me out of training for a month. Were I a pro cyclist, I would have found a way around the pain, but I'm not, and so I instead gave my body and mind a solid block of rest. But it cost me on fitness. Instead of riding Terrible Two or Climb to Kaiser or perhaps the Alta Alpina Challenge, I was doing short commute rides to and from Caltrain. After the back problems subsided, I built up a solid base of miles, many of them comm...

Another quick one today. I shifted the distribution of results in the Mt Tam Double by assuming the slowest 35% of riders who would have completed the ride were either deterred by the time limit or failed to make the time limit. In reality, only 35 riders DNF'ed, some of them for mechanical reasons or for crashes, so the time limit wasn't necessarily an issue with all of them. But if I do make that assumption, that without a limit more slower riders would have participated, each at the long end of the Gaussian tail, then the rankings line up nicely with the Mt Hamilton Hillclimb. So the argument about the relative speed versus power of the double century versus the hillclimb does not necessarily apply: there's a viable alternate explanation for the difference in distributions.

I've been a bit busy, but I got curious about the statistical spread of the times in the recent Mount Tam Double compared to other events. The Mount Tam double isn't a race, more a ride where the goal is to finish. But it has a deadline so riders at least must make an effort to hurry to some extent. Anyway, without further delay, here's a quick plot: The result? The times are tighter in the Mt Tam Double than they are either for the 2008 Dolphin Running Club Embarcadero 10 km running race or for the 2009 Mount Hamilton Low-Key Hillclimb . A simple explanation is in both the hillclimb and in the running race speed is somewhat proportional to power. On the other hand, the double century includes time descending and riding on the flats, at times with considerable wind, in which a proportionate difference in power results in a considerably lesser difference in speed. So the result's not a surprise. Of course the cut-off time has an effect, as well. You ...

I did some quick analysis on the relationship between the net time and the start time in the 2010 Mt Tam Double results . Unfortunately the start times of DNF's weren't provided, so all I can work with are numbers for ride finishers. Riders were started potentially every 5 minutes. One rider, Harish Narayanaswamy, started at 6:15, 15 minutes after the official cut-off (but he still finished with daylight to spare); all others started within the official 4 am to 6 am start window. So I binned the riders by start time then did a weighted linear regression of the average net times. The result is plotted here: Not surprisingly, faster riders tended to start later. Or perhaps riders who started later tended to be faster due to less riding in pre-dawn darkness, although I suspect more of the former. Obviously it takes a special motivation to get out there for a 4 am start, foregoing the advantage of the 5 am mass-start, and a nice source of such motivation is fear of ridin...

results are posted for the Mt Tam Double, and consistent with the "not a race" philosophy of the event, net time, let alone a ranking by net time, is not provided. But of course I wanted to know in the end how I ended up: I'd been told eighth when I'd checked in, but with riders starting at various times, that had been impossible to determine. So the numbers were there: a bit of Perl hacking and I reformatted them into ranking by net time. Three guys who finished before me had started sufficiently earlier that their net time was greater. Bruno and Max Mehech, each starting at 4 am dark-and-early, may well have cost themselves several places with their early start: losing the benefit of a faster pack leaving at 5 am, of the control of traffic signals out to Lucas Valley Road, and of an hour extra daylight. Randy Moschetti started at 4:15 and also finished before me but with more net time. On the other hand, Peter Burnett and Steven Smead each decided to forego...

Mount Tamalpais Without a hint yet of the coming dawn, the lead police car led the main pack out of the Vallecito Elementary School parking lot, and we were off. The pack was considerably smaller than the 300 rider limit, but given the 10:30 pm finish deadline and the desire to minimize time spent on Marshal-Petaluma road after sunset, a large number of riders had already left. This is a sanctioned option, with riders allowed to check out at any time from 4 am to 6 am, but those starting at 5 am have the advantage police control through the traffic signals early on, not to mention the draft advantage of the pack. Soon enough we were on Lucas Valley Road, the first climb of the day. In 2005 I'd done this ride without a light, figuring I'd simply utilize the illumination of proximate riders. But that had been an uncomfortable experiment, one which led me to go out too hard on the opening climb as I put too much value staying with the lead group and the lights of the pace ve...