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

I just got a 46 tooth Stronglight CT² chainring from XXCycles . Very nice looking ring, teflon and ceramic coated for improved wear and, it is argued, lower friction. I did make a mistake of not researching the mass, however: 92.9 grams versus 78.2 grams for a lower-end, uncoated 50 tooth Stronglight ring I'd previously purchased at Bike Nüt . Had I gone there for this one (I'd been busy and getting to the shop was impractical) I'd have likely caught the problem. But while I'd hoped the smaller chainring would save mass, I didn't get the ring for mass alone (assuming one gram per tooth within a ring model, a decent approximation), and decided to use in in yesterday's Low-Key Hillclimb anyway. Why? Because the climb yesterday had an exceptionally non-uniform grade: there was going to be a lot of shifting, both front and back. Typical compact (110 mm BCD) cranksets come with a 34-tooth inner and a 50-tooth outer chainring. In fact, the much-touted...

More on my recent trip to Italy, which focussed on the Lake Como region. I was staying in San Siro north of Menaggio. My favorite ride of the trip, and my first after getting my work cables and housings repaired (allowing me to shift), was the one where I took a ferry to Bellagio then immediately climbed to the legendary Madonna del Ghisallo . After checking out the church and the museum, then enjoying a leisurely lunch in the cafe , I continued upward to San Primo . But my ride wasn't done, not even close. I had a longer looped planned, modeled after stage 7 of the 2010 Giro Donna , the stage race for professional women in Italy modeled loosely after the Giro d'Italia. Stage 7 of the Giro Donne Okay - full disclosure. I didn't know much about stage 7 of the Giro Donne (although I followed Mara Abbott and Team USA's successful fight for victory in that race) other than what I learned by that Amanda Miller had the QOM up Ghisallo, and the overall KOM up t...

I recently received as a generous gift the Golden Age of Handbuilt Bicycles by Jan Heine with photography by Jean-Pierre Praderes. Jan is the editor of Bicycle Quarterly , to which I've recently subscribed, and Jean-Pierre clearly has a real talent for photography. The two combine to put together an incredible book. This book only reinforces the impression I'd already gotten from Jan's writing in Bicycle Quarterly : that randonneur bikes, rather than being the over-weight, poorly handling, sluggish beasts I'd always assumed, are actually fairly competitive machines which are actually far better suited to the sort of riding that most avid cyclists do than the typical racing bike sold in the vast majority of high-end shops in the United States or, for that matter, anywhere else I've seen high-end shops. And the bikes described in this book are nothing short of high-end. The Technical Trials which became popular in France in from the 1930's until World...

Two weeks of the Low-Key Hillclimbs are in the bag, and it's a big relief. Things are rolling, the new scoring code is working, and I'm really happy with my web site redesign. Brian Lucido finishes at the top of Old La Honda Road Especially nice, in addition to the absolutely fantastic volunteer support we've gotten this year, is the new RSVP system . I call it RSVP instead of pre-reg, since I view Low-Key as more of a party among cyclists than as a race, but the result is the same: we get a nice list of riders and data instead of transcribing from written forms, we have an idea of how many riders are going to show, and we make sure we don't exceed capacity by too much. There was a bit of an issue this week when Windy Hill rangers were not at all pleased Low-Keyers were impeding access to parking in the dirt lot where we staged. I should have applied for a permit, I was told. Honestly, to apply for a permit, denying other groups the right to use the preserve...

One issue with the Low-Key Hillclimbs this year is we've gone to an on-line "RSVP" system where riders fill in a form indicating their plan to be at the climb. In this way, we can make sure the number attending doesn't exceed the capacity of the roads to support our "traffic". We can also better plan for how much food we need to purchase, and there's less opportunity for errors in recording names and numbers in a rushed registration area. It also saves a lot of time entering rider info: the riders do that for us so we simply export the Google spreadsheet where the data are stored. All good. But on the downside riders register by name, rather than by number, as was our previous model. Sure, we could have riders simply enter their number, but it is too easy to make a mistake with a number. People tend to be fairly well practiced at typing their names, on the other hand. But names aren't always typed exactly the same. For example, Steve may ...

After designing the "consistency ranking" (described in the last post) to avoid unfairly favoring riders who've done only two climbs, and have a better chance to "get lucky" with having those scores fall close together, I decided to run a little Monte Carlo test. A Monte Carlo test is one in which random numbers are generated, then an algorithm tested on those numbers, to see how the results are influenced by random variation in the data. In this instance, I assumed the logarithm of each rider's score each week was selected at random from a unit-normal probability distribution centered at zero. I then generated scores for a hundred thousand riders for each number of weeks ridden from two through nine. The "true" standard deviation of each rider's score in this case is exactly one, but since I add two standard errors of my estimate to the estimate of the standard deviation, typical scores come out larger than one. But before I plot resu...

I wanted to do a ranking for consistency: whose scores are the most similar week-to-week. Until this year this wasn't really possible. In the women, since the numbers would typically be relatively small and since scores were proportional to the median time of all women, if a faster group showed up everyone's score would tend to be lower, and if a slower group showed everyone's score tended to be higher. As a result you could ride exactly the same each week and still get a more variable score than someone riding less consistently. And in the hybrid-electric category since turn-out was typically one, Bill Bushnell would lock down exactly 100 points each week: perfectly consistent! But with the change this year to using gender-corrected times and a median taken from the combined rider population (Excluding tandems), the median itself should be more consistent, and a consistency ranking becomes more meaningful. So I had to come up with a formula. The obvious thing ...