I went to the Albany Criterium today. Saw the last half of the 35+ Cat 4/5, it was kind of scary looking. I’m not so sure I want to try it now, but I think I should at least go to the coaching day and see what it’s like. It all seems very aggressive. Lot’s of guys in the 4/5 from here http://www.taleoracing.com/ but didn’t see any of them in the 3′s or womens.
Add comment July 18th, 2010
Great ride, even if it ended in Andrews Garmin meeting an untimely demise. The rollers around Paradise drive are super fun, we had attack and counter attack until Roger and I broke away and cross the line first to the Tiburon cafe for lunch.
Add comment May 30th, 2010
I did the Grizzly Peak Cyclist Century on May 2nd. It was hard work, I ate badly, felt sick, had a major energy bonk just before lunch then rallied post lunch and finally enjoyed the day. Not the fastest century ever done but completion is the main goal anyway. Thanks to Dan for moral support throughout the day.
Check out the route and distances extra on the excellent Strava.com
You’d think that Pinehurst would be an easier climb first thing in the morning, it’s not.
This is me at the end of the day, I’m reasonably sure I’m attempting to smile in this photo.
I know this is out of focus, but it’s kind of how I was seeing things by 3pm when we returned.
Here’s the rest.
Add comment May 30th, 2010
Mt Tam on 31st October. What a great day. This ride rivals Tunitas Creek, although Tunitas probably has the edge due to “epicness”.
Add comment November 6th, 2009
If you just want photo’s, skip to the gallery at the end, otherwise read on!
Once again my amazing powers of observation came to the fore on Friday afternoon (if you’re a boss/coworker/client, I promise that in work matters I’m completely on top of things) when I realized that I’d decided to do the advanced route on Saturday. The advanced route that I read earlier had 5,000 ft of climbing… So once I realized the route had 7,000 ft of climbing I decided there wasn’t that much difference in it and I really wanted to do it. Some simple math says that 7,000 is 40% more than 5,000 but denial is a much stronger force than math.
The Start
What a great start to the day, perfect temperature, no wind and an almost cloudless sky. After one missed turn in Woodside (that road really does look like a market parking lot) we came to the start of Page Mill Rd. The ride up to there was great, very nice but I couldn’t stop thinking about the first 10 mile climb of the day. Once we got there I graciously allowed Rich and Roger to get ahead and make sure the road was clear. The first bit was fine, something similar to Tunnel Rd maybe. Before long though it steepened, a lot. It was also around then that I realized it really was a long way. I was also realizing that while my nice new carbon bike was light and fast, it was a compact crank with a 25 tooth rear cog and I was fast running out of fitness. In fact there where a couple of time I elected to take a small break in order to allow my heart rate to drop slightly, that and to make sure Rich and Roger had enough time to clear the road ahead. Eventually I got to the top.
The Summit
I started on the decent only to come around a corner and see:
More Up
Oh well keep pedaling, if I’d thought about it I would have noted I was unlikely to do 10 miles in 35 minutes while climbing at 8mph. At least I was out of the fog:
East Bay Fog
Bruce came past at one point to wish me a good morning and to cheer me on over the actual summit. He took my que that he really should tell me it was the summit regardless of whether it was true or not. A really nice decent into the forest was my reward for all that up. I really like descents, especially when they look like this:
Weeeeeeeeeeee!
I can only assume that Rich and Roger were having so much fun themselves that they didn’t have time to clear out the leaves that had been washed onto the road from the storm early in the week. The section into Pescadero was really spectacular, certainly some of the nicest riding I’ve done. Once again I’d managed to get myself into a solo ride section, but figured the leaders would stop at some point. They did stop, at the San Gregorio General Store, an oddly unwelcoming to cycling establishment. The live music was nice though and the three of us left town together.
Coming up was Tunitas Creek Rd. For those of you who don’t follow competitive road cycling (why not!) the Tour of California came through here last year. I therefore imagined myself looking somewhat like this:
Bet Lance doesn’t even own a compact
They averaged something like 18mph. Instead it looked like this:
See you at the top guys
And soon things started to look like this:
Weeeeeeeeeeee!
In the interests of keeping my heart within my ribcage I was once again “forced” to stop and let things settle down a bit. The upside was that I couldn’t possible think of a better place to stop and rest. The redwoods in there are really spectacular. They also keep the road fairly slick make standing to pedal a bit treacherous at times. At some point prior to that I’d passed the pink “5 miles left” line on the road. I was surprised that there wasn’t a 4 mile marker as Andrew had mentioned it in his excellent “Anatomy of a Climb” article. Of course this was because I hadn’t reached it yet, and when I did there were very few happy thoughts being directed towards the person responsible for drawing them. Eventually I got to the easier grade and after a close encounter with a deer (the second in two weeks) I made it to the top to find a waiting Rich and Roger. Thank you so much for waiting! After redirecting a lost motorist (who’s GPS had led her up Tunitas Creek Rd from Highway 1 on the way to Santa Cruz!) we made yet another great decent down to Woodside, followed by a short 7 mile headwind section to finish the day. Maybe it sounds like I’m complaining about all the climbing. I’m not, it was definitely challenging but I would certainly put this ride on my top 10 favorites of all time. It’s just so amazingly nice to be in all those Redwoods, the roads are great and there’s almost no traffic. I’ll certainly be back to tackle it again soon, with my newly installed 27 tooth rear sprocket. When I got home I was meet by this by my back stairs:
Taking a picture to make sure I wasn’t seeing things seemed like a good idea.
2 comments October 19th, 2009
So we rode around Marin and looked at some nice bikes and then had lunch in Mill Valley.
Add comment October 12th, 2009
Okay I lied, some words. Here’s some pictures from yesterdays Yellowjackets ride in San Francisco.
2 comments September 20th, 2009
It’s odd the things that make me feel like I’m living in the future. As a kid (if I no longer am) I don’t think I thought about living in space, or having flying cars or streaming HD videos to my TV. Which is odd given my predilection for sci-fi books. I do remember the first time I played a video game (the original Space Invaders) at a fish and chip shop (when they cost 20c a turn, or about half my pocket money) it was something pretty special. The latest video game graphics still amaze me, even if I never really became a gamer, but what really makes me feel like future me is the convergent device. You know the things that cram everything into one, sometimes, easy to use package. Mobile phones are a bit of a counter point to this as they seem to take two steps forward 4 steps back (I mean yay I can stream live video but the battery last 20 minutes). My current favorite future thing is my Garmin Forerunner 305 GPS. Look at this thing:
Firstly it’s the size of a watch. Okay a very big watch, but that’s fine I have big wrists. Secondly it contains an entire GPS, heart rate monitor, etc. In the size of a watch! The GPS means that it’s talking, well listening, to satellites. In space! Thirdly I can work out how to use it without getting terribly confused. Fourthly the battery lasts a reasonable amount of time and charges off USB, I think everything should charge via GPS. Fifthly, it’s the size of a watch! Sixthly it plays nice with my computer and the software I like to use with it. Actually I find the software ,SportsTracks, a bit confusing sometimes. But then I’ve written reporting interfaces far worse so it’s not really worth complaining. So this magical “watch” can be used for running, which I used to do more of, and riding, which I now do a lot of, and just walking around if you feel like it. All this for $220, that’s around about 22 morning coffees + lunches. You should all go buy one now.
“But wait!” I hear you ask. I hear you because I’m in tune with you gentle reader. “What can I actually do with ‘Future Watch’?” Glad you asked because you know I like to insert pictures in here to make it look like I can write. Well firstly you can do stuff like this:
Maps!
When Capt Cook sailed to New Zealand he drew a “map”. While it was considered to be amazingly detailed at the time, there’s obviously things wrong with it. Like Stewart Island is connected to the mainland and Fijordland doesn’t exist. See calculating longitude was really hard and people spent a lot of time trying to work it out. If you ask me, and why wouldn’t you, they should have skipped all the exploring and gone straight to designing sattelites. What Cook, and lots of other early explorers, needed was a GPS watch. All that guesswork gone, I bet Cook would have felt like he was living in the future. But what else can it do! Behold one of my favorite things in the world, a graph (or chart if you’re from the USA):
Graph!
Here’s a simple and easy to read chart showing speed, heart rate, cadence and elevation vs distance…. okay, okay hang on.
More sensible graph!
This show speed, in blue, and heart rate, (in red) against distance. You can see the when I suddenly go faster I’m probably going downhill and my hear rate drops. There also seems to be a downward trend in both speed and heart rate as I get further into the ride. I think this means I got lazy, but hey it was a long way. Seriously though these charts are really useful if you know how to read them, they can give a really good indication of your fitness. Seeing that I have no idea on how to read them I just make it up. There’s more I could go on with, you can load in track data ahead of time, use the pre-programmed interval workouts, etc. There’s not much to do with moving that it doesn’t do.
If you’re still reading this and haven’t gone straight out and bought one of these then I don’t know what else to say. Garmin is not, currently, paying me to write this stuff (although I’m open to test units) so I really mean it when I say the future is here and it’s a watch. Mind you I wouldn’t say no to a flying car too.
1 comment September 17th, 2009
I am not a morning person. If this statement is true, and it undeniably is, then I’m really not a 4:15am person. You can therefore imagine my bleary eyed confusion when I was woken by thunder and around 4:15am on Saturday morning. My internal monologue went something like this:
“Wow, thunder….. and lightening…. and rain.”
<snooze>
“Isn’t that unusual for this time of year?”
<snooze>
“I wonder what riding 120 miles in the rain is like?”
<snooze>
“Wait! What? Rain! Today! Get out of here.”
<snooze>
“Oh I can’t hear rain. I wonder when my alarm is going off. Oh look it’s 5:48am and I’m getting up at 5:15am…. Wait! What?”
See I told I’m not a morning person, at any other time of day it would have no more than a minute for all of that to run through my mind. For those not in the know, Saturday was he Oakland Yellowjackets annual Monterey ride and I was planing on riding 120 miles (193.12128 kilometers for the down unders) from Pacifica to Monterey. The good news was that it wasn’t technically raining at that point, there was so much fog that the air was completely saturated, but not technically rain falling from the sky. The bad news was that I was now half an hour behind schedule because I’d set my alarm for 5:15pm instead of am, maybe I’m not a night person either? I fixed this time deficit by not eating breakfast and walking out the door. Not being a morning person I’d packed the car the night before and put my water bottles in the refrigerator. This meant that I’d stuck a piece of tape on the back door holding it shut with the text “Water Bottles!” written on it. For some reason I remembered then water bottles and forgot the tape, the loud tearing noise as I opened the door certainly helped get me into the next level of awakedness but caused me to drop a bottle. My downstairs neighbor may also now be aware that I’m not a morning person.
Once in the car and on my way things started to settle down somewhat and I could finally be excited. My previous longest ride was 80 miles around Petaluma, so I was really looking forward to a new milestone as well as having some trepidation that I could even ride that far. After all I’d only decided on Monday that I wanted to do the ride on Saturday. I pulled into the Pacifica parking lot, checked in, topped of my tires and parked the car, and after checking that I had everything maybe 10 or 15 times headed to check-in. I manged to breakfast on some muffin and a banana and pedaled around the lot a couple of times. Mary and Al called us over for a quick run through of how things would work.
Foggy Pacifica start.
Due to the amazing work of other people in the club the route was marked with fluro yellow route markers on the road meaning that reaching for the paper route sheet wasn’t quite as necessary as usual. Once the briefing was over we headed off at 7am as promised (the one time a year the Yellow Jackets leave on time). After following the first few markers we ended up at the bottom of Devils Slide, it was about this point that I realized that maybe the people I was riding with were a little stronger than me. They quickly disappeared off into the fog leaving me to spin my granny gear up the climb. After a close encounter with some hay I was a the top. I decided that maybe I was wrong about the people ahead being stronger, and that if I put in a bit of effort now I’d catch them on the short decent. This was a naive and wrong assumption, I saw then again for a second in Pescadero and then not again until Monterey. Later I was talking to Bruce who got to Monterey quite some time before anyone else. It turns out he does this sort of thing quite a bit, actually he’s ridden 550 miles in 43 hours. Wow!
At some point before Pescadero Kevin, and then Barry, caught up to me. Without knowing it Kevin taught me a valuable trick to doing 120 miles, coast down the hills. Seems obvious and I’m guessing most people know this but it took me a hill or two to work it out. Pedaling down the hill only gets you a few more miles an hour and just uses that extra bit of energy you’ll be thankful for later. In the midst of the rolling hills Pescadero appeared. It was nice to jump off the bike in Pescadero, fill the bottles and grab some snacks. As I started riding up the next roller the lack of breakfast started to catch up with me and I decided I need to eat a Clif bar and munch on some Shot Bloks. The shot bloks are so much nicer than gels, it’s like eating jello cubes and that’s never a bad thing!
Sunny Pescadero
The fog was slowly lifting and it was great to be able to see bits of ocean and pumpkin fields rolling by. I’ve never ridden past a pumpkin field before and it took me a second to work out what the flashes of orange along the rows of the field were. Pumpkins in Australia tend to be green or gray which I guess is why this was a new thing. Santa Cruz couldn’t come soon enough for me at this point, the calories I’d eaten hadn’t really started to kick in and I was really looking forward to getting off the bike and having lunch. Lunch therefore looked a lot like this:
Lunch!
Lunch was perfect, turkey sandwich with BBQ sauce, pasta and some brownie where exactly what I needed and I started feeling better right away. The riding after lunch took us through Santa Cruz and surrounds. All was going well until the route markers lead me into a closed off street having some sort of festival. Someone pointed at a detour and I managed to find my way through to the other side. Barry and I rode along for a while before he stopped to check out something, and after a couple of minutes solo I saw the yellow jackets of the Yellow Jackets bunch up ahead. We ended up in a loose bunch until the next rest stop. Unfortunately about 5 minutes before that rest stop a small dog decided to run after me. I decided a good reaction to this would be to ride into the thigh deep ditch beside the road. In hindsight this probably wasn’t a good tactical move, and I was in far more danger of injury from the ditch rather than the dog. Unfortunately nobody was around to witness this because it must have look hilarious to see a 200 pound man drive into a ditch while being chased by a 10 pound dog! The upside of this maneuver was a) I wasn’t hurt and my bike was okay but for some slightly bent bars and b) the dog was so confused by my actions that it went to a nearby field and watched me sort myself out. The final rest stop was apparently a shell of it former fruit stand glory, there’s literally only a shell of a fruit stand left. Anyway we had the truck with water to top up bottles and after couple of orange quarters I had the energy to make it to the end. Still confused by my ditch incident I didn’t take a photo of the fruit stand so here’s some people surfing in Santa Cruz.
Surf’s up!
Kevin, Barry, Ronald (maybe?) and I then battled the strawberry field headwinds, even giving a draft to a passed touring cyclist. A few more rolling hills later and we were approaching the end. I realized I was going to make it and I felt good! After negotiating a Triathlon finish line that appeared in Pacific Grove (Barry tried for a 3 hour 32 minute finish but ducked out at the last second) we powered up the last hill like Lance and the Schleck up Mont Ventoux. Actually it might not have been quite like that but anyway we got to the park and descended on the lunch leftovers and some awesome cupcakes. Yum!
Finish!
We checked in, showered and ate more. I felt no guilt in eating, my computer seemed to think I’d burnt 8,000 calories! (Please don’t tell me it’s wrong! 
Al lets us know how “unlucky” he is.
Some stories were swapped around the fireplace and then I was off to sleep. I kept dreaming about riding, which seemed like an extra effort I didn’t need. After breakfast and a stroll to the beach the next morning we jumped into the bus and vans and headed back to Pacifica and reality.
Asilomar surfer
A huge thank you to Al, Mary and everyone in the Yellow Jackets who helped organize this great ride. Special thanks to the SAG drivers who followed us around all day, you were awesome. Also thanks to everyone for trying to decipher my Australian accent and for all being such a great welcoming bunch of people. I had a great time, sign me up for next year and see you Saturday!
1 comment September 15th, 2009
Firstly I went riding, I refuse to bore you with the details so don’t ask. We rode up Palomares.
Doesn’t look steep does it?
Then I got home and Corwin rang to say he was heading to Waddell so I went there.
Doesn’t look sharky does it?
Some mellow kiteboarding ensued. The fog bank was being particularly impressive.
It looks out of focus, but fog is out of focus.
I liked the ominous look of this.
Thanks foreshortening you helped a lot.
That is all, go about the rest of your weekend content in the knowledge that a) I can ride at the front of a pack of cyclist “Like a tank!” (a good thing I thing) b) I “certainly have the legs for it” as noted by tank man and c) I have “aerodynamic shoulders for leading” (meaning they’re so wide everyone can hide behind them). See aren’t you glad you didn’t ask?
1 comment September 6th, 2009
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