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

Here's the fastest times from Montebello: Men: rank week name time 1 1997(1) Tracy_Colwell 25:40 2 2009(1) Chris_Phipps 26:03 3 2007(1) Chris_Phipps 26:05 4 1997(1) Michael_Denardi 26:18 5 2006(1) Tracy_Colwell 26:42 6 1997(1) Craig_Schommer 26:58 7 2007(1) Tim_Clark 27:02 8 2008(1) Clark_Foy 27:03 9 1996(1) Henrik_Johansson 27:04 10 2009(1) Justin_Lucke 27:27 11 2008(1) Tim_Clark 27:34 12 1996(1) Steve_Leman 27:37 13 1997(1) Michael_Podgorski 27:38 14 2006(1) Scott_Frake 27:47 15 2008(1) Scott_Frake 27:52 16 2007(1) Scott_Frake 27:54 17 2008(1) Greg_McQuaid 27:54 18 2009(1) Dominic_Pezzoni 27:57 19 2009(1) Eric_Balfus 27:59 20 2007(1) Thomas_Novikoff 28:17 Women: rank week name time 1 1995(1) Laura_Stern 31:42 2 1997(1) Allison_Buxton 33:20 3 1997(...

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 ...

Since thanks to Ron Brunner and Dean Larson, I now have the complete set of Low-Key Hillclimb results (the '90's pages were lost when Giorgio Cosentino, the webmaster at the time, had his account expire, and I wasn't backing up his stuff, and I lost the older stuff when my UNIX account from grad school got flushed). Anyway, a bit of work saved then doing backups resulted in a lot more work today reconstructing results. After typing in data from scans of Dean's printouts, getting some of the HTML from the Wayback machine (and all of 1995 ), regenerating 1996 - 1997 HTML from the data I'd typed in, and mining data from the existing HTML, I now have a nice set of times for every week the series was run. The exception was 1998 where I barely had anything to work with, so generated all fresh HTML using my current scripts, modifying the scoring algorithm to match that year's. The series started in 1995 with the top rider getting 100 points, everyone else a sco...

Caltrain is tasked to be public transportation, not commuter rail. However, weekend service, especially "counter-commute" (SF->SJ AM, return PM) is so marginal to be almost useless. This weekend really reinforced that point. My coach was running a weekend training camp: rides daily at 8:30 am. I couldn't make it. Not Sunday, not Saturday, not even Friday which isn't an official holiday. Not even close. I thought things were bad when service was restored in June 2004 following a two-year down-time due to track work to allow for "Baby Bullet" service, which required passing zones. After a period of debate in which four different scheduling options were considered, the worst of the four, full local service on each hourly train, was chosen. Every time it was suggested various stations would be omitted from the service of some or all of the trains, people from those stations would complain. People from places like Atherton, where the local station i...

It's often suggested that tandems are slower climbing than single bikes. Yet it's rare that one gets to see solid data supporting this. One nice thing about the Low-Key Hillclimbs is they generate a lot of interesting data. One nice thing about this year is we have Brian and Janet. They each did a climb solo, and did another climb as a tandem pair. Brian further ran another climb, but that's another matter. While each climb is different, as long as a climb is continuous and doesn't provide much opportunity for drafting, the ratio of a rider's speed to the median male speed, using single bikes only (I specifically refer to male speed as the number of males tend to be a lot more than the number of females, so there's less random variation in the median male speed), tends to be fairly constant one climb to the next. So I'll use the ratio of climbing speed to median male climbing speed as a measure of general climbing speed. So here's a comparison: Br...

Last time on this subject I came up with the following relation for determining the orientation of the spindle-based accelerometers relative to the desired coordinate axes: tan Δ φ = < a 2 > / < a 1 >  , < a r > > 0, where " <> " refers to a time average. But the time average isn't as straightforward as might initially be thought. Consider the case where the rider pedals a bit then the bike sits for several minutes. The accelerometers are accumulating data associated with the pull of gravity in a particular direction for an extended period of time. This isn't what's wanted. For the average of the transverse component of acceleration to go to zero (the component associated with the pedal around the circumference of its circle), we want to average over the angles of the circle, not really over time. A time average is a convenience, since accelerometers sample the acceleration at specific intervals in time. But if the pedals are...