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

These past four months I've gotten to see three of my favorite book series I've every read get made into video. As a kid, two of my favorites were Tolkein and Conan Doyle, in particular the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, and the Sherlock Holmes series. I don't need to describe why these both are absolutely brilliant. As an adult, I got hooked my Michael Connelly's series, the most famous Harry Bosch detective novels. These books have a gritty darkness, along with a veracity which is attractive. There's always plot switches at the end, and it's fun trying to anticipate these. I wouldn't put the books on the level of the others, but they're definitely worth reading. All three of these authors were made into video recently. The first I saw was The Hobbit, the Desolation of Smaug . I'd see the first Peter Jackson Hobbit film when that was released in 2011. Peter Jackson apologists argue that this should not be judged based on fidelity with Tolkein,...

I've been hobbling around, discouraged that friends are doing all sorts of cycling adventures while I'm essentially confined to home. Progress has been steady but slow. Motions I previously couldn't do I can do now on a very limited basis. Some stuff which was painful is no longer so. Yet the pragmatic reality is I am still essentially immobile. Travel plans for 10 days from now are imperiled. But I'm only 8 days out from the crash, so I still have a lot of opportunity for progress before then. I was surprised yesterday when I got a copy of Peloton Magazine in the mail. I'd thought my subscription had expired. I subscribed initially because I was impressed by Heidi Swift's articles , specifically of the Reve Tour, in which she and other women rode all of the stages of the Tour de France last year. Her writing is really good. They also have Jared Gruber's photography. Jared brings a fresh look to cycling photography, even if he has a bit of a weakn...

Lance I just finished the Kindle preview chapters of Racing Weight by Matt Fitzgerald and I already have some critiques. The book also has a website . I'm sure more comments come later if I buy the book. Note this is the first edition of the book, published 2009. The second edition, published in December 2012, appears to be not yet available on Kindle. First, an obvious. He uses as an example of the advantage of weight loss on performance the now infamous case of Lance Armstrong. Lance lost weight from cancer and went from getting passed in time trials to dominating them. We now know there's a lot more to that than losing his "linebacker's build" from cancer. Of course the full story came out after the book was published in 2009 but this was after David Walsh's book, so there was certainly plenty of evidence out there that Armstrong had "confounding factors", and I'd expect he could have used a more scientifically sound example. The ...

Previously I compared the Strava Android app on my HTC Incredible phone to the Garmin Forerunner 610 on a run I did along the Steven's Creek Trail. I thought the phone might have been slightly better, but it was close. This time I set off for a city ride without my phone, but I had the Garmin Edge 500 mounted with a strap to my right wrist, and I had the Garmin Forerunner 610 mounted to my left wrist with its integrated strap. I had both set to 1-second sampling. This wasn't a pure run, as I was also Christmas shopping (books for my nieces). So I stopped in several book stores along the way, as well as a two cellular phone shops (thinking of switching from Verizon to T-Mobile), one bike shop (the black-on-black Specialized SL4 with 2012 Red is very slick), and a chocolate shop (disappointed Girardelli's "sea salt" "Intense Dark" doesn't seem so dark at all from the fat:carbohydrate ratio). Anyway, all of these stops meant loss of signal. Here...

At the Low-Key Hillclimbs awards party this year, I received an extremely generous gift from some friends this Christmas: a Garmin Forerunner 610 . They had observed I'd been running with my Edge 500 coupled with a Garmin wrist strap, a functional if somewhat klunky solution to on-the-run GPS. In the rain at CIM it wasn't easy for me to see the Edge 500 screen: water droplets and low ambient light made for poor viewing conditions. So I decided early on to run blind: go on perceived exertion. This made sense to me in any case since, lacking any training data in the wet and windy conditions, I didn't know what my target pace should be anyway. So after getting a 5 km split, I allowed the Edge to flop upside down on my forearm where it was located (I had a gel under my compression sleeve which occupied the normal watch position). I left it there to collect data silently for post-run analysis (it was issuing beeps every 5 km, but during the constant rain of the run I didn...

In 2010 I did the Mt Tam Double Century , borrowing friend John 's NiteRider Newt light for the pre-dawn start. My first time doing the double, I'd gone without lights, thinking I could rely on the pace car for guidance. That was a big mistake. The pace car was driven at a constant speed, which on the steeper slopes of Lucas Valley Road, the first climb, put me deeply into the red. With John's light, I was able to ride my own pace on the climb, and it contributed to the ride turning into one of my strongest doubles ever. Afterwards, I decided I wanted one for myself, and I was happy Cara got me one as a birthday gift. But instead of the Newt with its frame-mounted battery and sloppy cables connecting these to the handlebar-mounted LEDs, I went with the newer MiNewt, which has rechargable batteries and LEDs in an encapsulated package. The light was important for my commute from my then-new job in Mountain View on a heavily trafficked road. I got the brighter 250 lumi...