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

I had my misgivings about the Ohlone 50k on Sunday, for which I'd registered. I wasn't sure how I was going to get there. I'd tried going down the entry list for other runners who live in San Francisco, checking for them on Strava to see if they lived close, and none did. So I tried to send messages to those I could find on facebook to see if we could coordinate somehow a ride out. But I got only one response, in the negative. He was staying in Pleasanton the night before, relatively close to the "finish" in Del Valle where we were to meet for a shuttle ride to the start of the point-to-point run. Maybe I should try to get a hotel as well, I thought. Then I could ride to the finish on my bike. Or, more fun, I could try camping out in Del Valle. But that involved carrying a tent and sleeping bag and making reservations which probably weren't available still. It all became irrelvant when I checked the event website to see that the run had in fact been ...

Yesterday was the Wine Country Century, or more completely, the Wine Country 35 mile, 100 km, 100 mile, and 200 km rides. I was excited to go because Cara had wanted to do the metric century, and even though I thought with a bit of preparation she could do the 100 miler, I was glad she was ready to do events again, after a series of injuries. The official start time window for the 200 km course ended at 7:30 am, and at 7:20 am I saw Jeffrey at the start. "You're starting late!" he said. "No -- it shouldn't take much more than 8 hours to finish," I responded, my feelings slightly hurt. But I immediately realized I had no basis to make this claim. I'd hardly been riding at all. My "training" for the event consisted primarily of an easy ride with Cara the weekend before. and part of the SF2G First Friday Friendly Frolic on Friday, the day before the ride. That FFFF had been encouraging, though, as I managed to tie my PR up Cortland Road in...

Last year I did the Inside Trail Racing Woodside Ramble 50 km and it was for me a very successful race. That race was broken down into 6 segments: up Huddart Park, along Skyline Ridge, down into Wunderlich, back out of Wunderlich, back along Skyline Ridge, and down Huddart Park (with its infamous mini-climb just when you think you're close to the finish). That's two primarily-climbs, two primarily-descents, and two rolling sections. I'd trained hard for the ride, ramping up my distance as I should have done for my previous long races, both marathons, none of which went as well as I'd wanted. The key for me is to get solid blocks of consecutive long days, for example 10 miles or more four days in a row, to really build endurance for the longer distances. And for trail races it's important to train hilly trails, not just flat runs. This year my running suffered from the distraction of the San Francisco Randonneurs brevet series, first the 200 km at the end of J...

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...

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 ...

After months of carefully tracking my training metrics to ramp my volume up to where I thought it needed to be for the Woodside Ramble 50 km race, my first race over marathon distance, my training had been diverted off-course by 12 days of fatigue after a relatively innocuous tooth extraction. This had left me just a week and a half until the race. So after an test run on a Wednesday, I did a solid 3 days on Thu-Fri-Sat, the last of these a 31.5 km run through the Marin Headlands. This was a very important test for me, as it included 1300 meters of descending (and, less importantly, climbing), and my legs survived running all of it. This was 90% of the descending I'd need to do in the 50k, where I'd have the additional advantage of fresher legs. But that was it: my last chance for training. Instead of a controlled taper in the last two weeks, I had one week to get my legs into something resembling race shape. I did a series of short runs until Friday, when feeling fat an...