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

Back in the day, back in the early days of recorded time (i.e. since I got a Garmin 500 and signed up for Strava), we used to ride an SF2G Skyline route which didn't descend Crystal Springs to Polhemus bus instead remained on Skyline Boulevard, crossed a bridge at the dam under the 280 Flyover, and then climbed back to Highway 92.   The memories of that nearly forgotten time must be reconstructed from the yellowing pages of the Strava archives lest they be forgotten forever. Note the rather direct route near Crystal Springs. Now compare and contrast: You can see the difference near the "Belmont" label: a left, right, right, left while the earlier route takes a relatively straight line. The alternate route involves a descent of Crystal Springs Road, a right turn onto Polhemus, a long climb there to where it turns into Ralston past the Highway 92 interchange, then passing through a parking lot to descend back to Cañada Road via a twisting bike-pedestrian path whic...

With a huge amount of travel this month, I'll get only two real rides in, and no SF2G s. So it's a good time to make an accounting of my SF2G totals. I last did so at the end of 2011 , so somehow 2012 slipped through the cracks. I have a rough goal of averaging one per week, but haven't attained that yet. It's important for me to have a goal to kick my butt out the pre-dawn door to ride the more than 70 km into work. I try to keep a running total when I upload rides, but since I usually do this at work, I'm always in a rush and relying on memory to do so occasionally fails. So I'm forced to go through my Strava record and count. Here's the plot, which starts when I signed up for Strava in 2010: 2012 started with happy memories of New Zealand riding. I had a down-time in May when I had back pain, but overall it was a solid riding year until I redirected my focus on running for the Sacramento Marathon (CIM). At the start of 2013 I was still running,...

Since the mid-naughts SF2G has served as a catalyst for cyclists to commute from San Francisco to the Peninsula. The focus has been Google's Mountain View campus, but I've never worked for Google, and I've ridden with the group to Stanford Campus, my old office on California Ave in Palo Alto, and to my present work-place south of Google at the Mountain View - Sunnyvale border. There's no leader; instead riders call rides via the Google Group , then others affirm their intent to join with a Googlesque "+1". But until now, despite the fact SF-to-Peninsula is considered a "reverse commute" (although with the flight back to cities from suburbia this is changing), there's been no comparable organization of cyclists who work in the city and live on the Peninsula (the "forward commute"). That changed today with the launch of a new group, "Pen2SF" . They also have a web site (still under development as I write this). I really ...

It's six days since my crash, and I'm still a long way from recovered, X-rays showed no fracture, but bruising and muscle damage resulted in substantial disability. Only yesterday was I able to start walking again, and only barely and painfully. Today the pain is less, but I still prefer using crutches to get around. I can't lay on my preferred right side, the side on which I crashed, and laying on my left side becomes uncomfortable due to my right leg not being sufficiently stable in that position. I tried acupuncture on Tuesday, and will return on Friday, but while that was a nice sensation when it was being done, I'm not sure it had lasting benefit. Yet I continue to improve day-by-day, so it's likely a matter of patience. I continue to apply heat and ice to afflicted areas, and use tumeric for its anti-inflammatory effects (at the suggestion of the acupuncturist, although there's questions about the absorptivity of tumeric ). The thing about the crash...

Last Friday I was riding Ramesh's first SF2G after a spectacular 40 day run where he placed a remarkable 6th in the Strava May Massive , simultaneously winning the individual ranking of the Team Commute Challenge, then with just a single day off, rode AIDS LifeCycle from San Francisco to Los Angeles. After this amazing demonstration of unfettered excess he wisely took 4 days off before calling a Friendly Skyline ride for Friday. The Skyline route has two options between CA35 and Hillcrest Blvd southbound: either the shoulder of the 280 freeway (which is exceptionally open there to cyclists) or the San Andreas Bike Trail. For obvious reasons the trail is the most popular choice, although when I'm alone, unless I need to use the toilet available halfway down the trail, I choose the freeway. It's wide and, in my view, quite safe, with the exception of the exit ramp where I like to check behind me to make sure there's no cars overtaking me. But I don't have much ...

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 ...

For the first time this year since I started my blog in 2008, total posts have dropped. Here's a plot of the rate of net posts during the year since 2008, when Cara convinced me to start the blog: I started a bit slowly this year, then rallied, catching my 2010 schedule. But then I started losing ground, finishing in a dead heat with 2009. So what happened? The answer is I started riding more. This is evident from the plot on my Strava page . Barely surviving through April, then my hours start to take off in May. Normal commute means I am in the train around 100 minutes with my laptop. SF2G means I leave home early, then have only my cell phone for my train ride home. More riding = less posting. And that is a very good thing. Here's another look at my SF2G schedule. I counted the number of Strava activities I had with SF2G in the title. Before the period of the plot I didn't have GPS so I'd need to check my old training logs. I may have been occasional...

One or maybe two times per week I ride the 42 miles from home to work with SF2G , a group of long-distance bike commuters which began with Google employees but has branched out to employees of other high-tech companies on the San Francisco Bay peninsula. Really there's no way I would be able to tolerate my commute if I had to take the train back and forth five days per week (or drive even one day per week). And the nice thing about riding is after a good ride in I feel fantastic: full of energy and alert all day. It's great; if it wasn't that riding got me into work on the latish side, around 9:30 am, I'd do it more. John Murphy's been an SF2G regular for longer than I have. This year he's had the audacity to ask three candidates for San Francisco mayor to join us at the start of the ride, typically 6:30 am in Ritual Roasters on Valencia Street. San Francisco is a city of around 800 thousand people ; surely mayoral candidates have better things to do wit...

After the data presented by VeloNews on the effect of going from 23 mm to 25 mm tires, at the same pressure, on vibration reduction (measured with accelerometers: see this post) I was inspired to get fatter tires for the MDR ride (which I described last post). Bicycle Quarterly has published several reviews and tests of the rolling resistance of randonneuring tires, and the Gran Bois tires, "hand-built" by Panaracer in Japan, have always tested well. Jan Heine, the publisher and main contributer to Bicycle Quarterly imports these tires and sells them through his web-based retail business, Compass Cycles , so can be said to have a profit interest in reviewing these tires positively. Neverthless, his reviews are well written and his tests are well documented, so I had good reason to believe him when he said they are supple, have good rolling resistance, and are comfortable. When I saw them for sale in Box Dog Bikes in San Francisco , that sealed the deal. Bicycle Quarte...

This past Wednesday I took a "long lunch" to go watch the Tour of California stage of Sierra Road. As a consequence, I had to work late and didn't get home until after 9pm and had to skip my planned SF2G rides that week to still get a project done, but it was all worth it. I even went in for a bit on Saturday. But you can't take races like the Tour of California for granted in the United States. History has shown over and over that each year may well be the last. I rode with some SF2G buddies to just before the summit of Sierra Road. There the road was blocked for some reason, even though it was still an hour and a half to an anticipated finish. So I was denied the last 100 meters. The climb was fun: I was enthusiastic at the start, dodging other riders, caught up in the crowd, until I looked back and realized I was in my 34/21, a gear well beyond my present fitness for this hill. I backed off to the 34/23 and took it easier the rest of the way, even thoug...

Bike to Work Day to me is No Excuses day.... I don't have to decide if I'm riding to work, I am riding to work, the only decision is how. Sure, I could do the Bayway yet again, but BTW day is a day to place a slightly higher emphasis on the commuting and a slightly lower emphasis on the destination of that commute. So I signed on for the SF2G Skyline ride. Skyline is hillier, longer, and takes longer than Bayway. However, once you get to Skyline Boulevard, the highest point in Daly City, there's minimal stopping. From a pure riding perspective, it's clearly superior. However, I hadn't done it since my new job moved me further south, and with a big-company as opposed to little-company atmosphere, more reluctant to get into work any later than 10 am (usually I'm in by 8am). Despite going first to the wrong BART station, I arrived at 24th Street BART in plenty of time: around 6:15 am. There were already a good number of riders there for the 6:30 am depar...

Today I rode the SF2G Bayway route on a stickering Mission. A few of us met Debbie Leight at Ritual Roasters in the Mission.... she had rolls of RouteArrow stickers in yellow, green, and blue: yellow for before the turn, green for the turn itself, and blue for post-turn. I was assigned yellow. The others weren't quite ready and since I wanted to make sure I got to work by 10 am I left. I was impressed by how well the roads were marked. I contemplated that perhaps I'd not have anything to do, since others had marked the preceding days. But Debbie had said there were unmarked sections "past Oracle", more than half-way. I put down a few arrows, though... one to cover an arrow which had been pointing the wrong way, and another along the shoulder where I thought arrows further to the left might be missed. I still had plenty. The Bay Trail near San Mateo and Foster City is always fun. Gorgeous views.... it's called the "Feral Cat Freeway" by SF...