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

The San Francisco Randonneurs main brevet series consists of 3 monthly rides: the 200 km at the end of January, the 300 km at the end of February, and the 400 km at the end of March. Each of the rides begins at the San Francisco side of the Golden Gate Bridge and extends northward into Marin. Each course effectively extends the preceding one further north, the primary exception being that the 200 km route includes an exceptionally scenic loop onto Point Reyes which the other two miss. But there's still substantial course overlap. Since I did the 200km and 300km brevets and finished both many hours before the time cuts and without serious physical problems it would make sense I'd go on to do the 400km. I'd never ridden that far in a day before and this would have been a chance to extend my previous limits, always a satisfying accomplishment. But the 200k and 300k didn't go as I'd hoped. In each, I became substantially fatigued half-way through, demoting my ridi...

The San Francisco Russian River 300 km brevet was on 28 Feb. It's taken me awhile to do the report, which is, I freely admit, on the long side. I just read another blog post on this same ride which was 6 or 7 sentences long, depending on how you count. For a great report (with photos) of the worker's ride two weeks earlier, see Platty Jo's blog . In any case, here's what I wrote. I wavered going into the 300 km brevet. The theory is the progression of brevet distances is supposed to prepare you for the each one in turn, but ramping from 200 km to 300 km to 400 km to 600 km represents increases of 50%, 33%, and 50%, well in excess of any training plan I've seen. This sort of progression is good for behavioral adaptation more than physical, of boosting your confidence and teaching lessons in pacing, nutrition, hydration, and preparation. For physical adaptations more than this is needed. For example, after a week of recovery from the 200 km, you've got tw...

This ride happened at the end of February so it's taken me quite awhile to post the ride report. I tend to go a bit overboard on ride reports... apologies on that. The first brevet on the schedule was the Pierce Point 200 km . This was a replacement for the Lighthouse 200 km, for which SFR was unable to get a permit this year. I hadn't realized they got permits for brevets, assuming the it was just fair use of the roads and was essentially below the radar for that sort of thing. But they do: parks tend to require them (the right of cyclists to be on the roads for whatever reason carries more strength on local roads), and Pt Reyes National Seashore, being national parkland, would be a hassle. The reason for denial had something to do with a tourist bus not wanting to encounter cyclists on the road. Damn cyclists: getting in the way of "real" nature lovers. But I wasn't disappointed. I'd gone hiking at Pierce Point with Cara, and knew it was spectacula...

This year I decided to dip my toes in the brevet pool. Back now further in time than seems real, in the late 1990's I began a Hill Country Randonneurs brevet series hosted by Russell Hahn and John Fusselman out of Austin Texas. I didn't ride these bacause of embracing any sort of randonneuring culture. It was more an interest in the ultra culture, a culture I'd experienced with Nick Gerlach's excellent Texas Hell Week, which I first attended in 1997 when I was at Stanford, then later on a more limited basis when I lived in Austin from late 1997 to 2000. In California, we had our double centuries: fully supported 200 mile events where all you had to do was carry two water bottles and enough food for at most 40 miles. Davis Double, for example, had 11 rest stops, more than one every 20 miles. That could easily be ridden skipping every other rest stop with just two bottles and a bar or two in the pocket. They're about the riding, little else. It's an intoxi...