Magic Spot Flowing

Back when I was planning my mileage for training, I decided that for some of the weekday rides with higher mileage, I would try doing my commute on Foothill rather than Bryant. It increases the hilliness and the mileage substantially. I went for that option this morning and was pleasantly surprised by it. After you pass Stanford, it’s really no more crowded than Bryant, and except for a few tricky intersections, not much more challenging either, except for spending more time on Mary (where the right lane is exactly that annoying width that means you need to take the lane if there are parked cars, and cars are exactly infrequent enough that people are annoyed by you taking the lane).

Stats:
AVS: 15.3 mph (!)
DST: 16.3 mi (a bit more than I thought)
MXS: 27.3 (downslope after Page Mill)
Ride time: 1:03
Total time: 1:20 (real AVS 12.2)

I did get a few typical annoyances: getting buzzed a few times — by both cyclists and motorists, people trying to turn right at stupid times, etc. There was a particular pair of cyclists on JS/Foothill that annoyed me greatly. One of them buzzed me, and then they failed to actually go much faster than I did until nearly Arastradero, because they were stopped by lights. And after the intersection of Page Mill where the bike lane narrows, they were still riding two abreast where there was really no room, resulting in a truck honking loudly and sustainedly right next to me. I don’t think the honking was appropriate, but neither is riding two abreast for no reason except your own pleasure on a road with a 45-mph speed limit in the travel lanes.

I do wish that more drivers knew that passing cyclists isn’t their God-given right though. I feel like the lives of most cyclists in the state or nation would improve greatly if every driver’s ed course and driving test asked two basic questions and required them to be answered correctly: do cyclists have a right to ride on the road (yes), and what should you do when you find a cyclist in your lane (slow down, be patient, and pass when safe, leaving a margin for error).

There’s a stretch of Foothill where I think the road must be uphill, but it looks really flat. But every time I’m on that stretch I’m going 13-14mph thinking “Why does this feel so hard?” And then once I pass it I start going 20mph, so I think it’s an invisible uphill/downhill thing.

The weirdest intersection is the one for Foothill/Fremont/Miramonte/Loyola. I had forgotten how awful it is to navigate (you can see from the map why, because there are all those roads coming together and you have to exit, turn left, turn right, and turn left in order to turn left), and waited there a long time, but people were courteous and I got through without incident.

I always find the South Bay a bit mind-bending because I imagine Mary and Mathilda as E-W but they actually are very much N-S, so I kept thinking, “Wait, I got off on Fremont and I’m going east because Foothill is N-S, so how am I going to turn onto Mary and still end up going east?” forgetting that Mary is only logically E-W (in that it’s perpendicular to the train tracks/Central, which go “south” to San Jose) and is actually N-S.

I’m feeling pretty good this morning, and thinking I might do this commute again in the future, and not just for training — it’s more fun than Bryant and Middlefield.

Much unlike the Tour de Menlo, today’s Tour de San Mateo was a ride thrown around as a concept by another member of SVBC a while back: just a small tour of the interesting bits of San Mateo. I was instantly in, since I used to live in San Mateo and am quite fond of it.

The ride was a relaxed meader through neighborhoods, parks, trails, and bridges. It was a thoughtfully-designed route and very enjoyable. The best parts were the neighborhoods in the southwest where I hadn’t been, which were classic, pretty San Mateo neighborhoods of the kind that I loved walking through when I lived there, and touring what I call “Secret San Mateo” because you can only get there from either Fashion Island or a freeway exit that exists in only one direction (Kehoe Ave on US-101 N). It was nice to see that they’ve been repaving some of the worst streets since I lived there, though there’s plenty left to do.

The lowlight was, sadly, the Monte Diablo bike/ped bridge. There are no pavement cutouts to access it (not just bad for us — what about wheelchairs?!) and it’s incredibly narrow and twisty on the approaches. I don’t know if you’re supposed to walk your bike or what, but it was also full of glass and clearly being used as a camping spot by homeless people, meaning I’d never take it during questionable times of day even if I could get over the totally stupid design. This is really a pity because it’s by far the simplest route over the freeway in the northern area of the city. I don’t know how they managed to screw this up so badly (the bridge was only just completed earlier this year).

I took the North-South Route up and back, since I was supposed to be doing my long mileage day today. Old County has just turned into a washboard since the last time I was on it (for the N-S Route Ride about a year and a half ago). It’s in desperate need of a paving job. San Carlos, Belmont — I will contribute if you need to pass the collection plate to get this darn road fixed up.

Exhaustion caught up to me at the end and I terminated as I reached home, around 37 miles, shaky after hitting a bad bump on Middlefield and just totally worn out despite an average speed of only 11 mph. I just woke up from a nap forced on me by sheer exhaustion, so I’m still a bit wibbly. This is one of those “can’t complete mileage because too exhausted” days, which I haven’t had in a while.

So if I haven’t called/emailed you lately, it’s not because I don’t like you, it’s just because I’m running very low on reserves.

I entered the route for Tour de Menlo 2008 into my Bikely routes, but I haven’t published it as public because I’m not sure whether that’s polite. The route creators presumably put some work into creating the route (and they did a good job), and maybe don’t want other rides to borrow it wholesale.

Update: A few days later, it occurs to me that the ride route is given as a PDF on their site. That being the case, I think publishing it really can’t do any harm. It’s now linked above.

On the other hand, I would like to be able to show it, because it’s an interesting route to look at and for other people to use individually, and I did a good amount of hard work just now creating the cue sheet correctly (which in Bikely means notating all the turns with the direction and street name) — which the Tour did not do.

The total climb for that ride is about 3600 ft, so it’s roughly analogous to W2W Day 2, being only 7 miles shorter and having the same listed amount of climbing. That’s actually about the amount of climbing I estimated it had, because it felt like doing my hard 34-mile ride (1800 ft climbing) and then doing it again, which it pretty much is. I may do this route again (with a couple of modifications because I think some of their decisions were weird, and also I might rather reverse it and try to climb Montebello first, and then the rest of it — though I don’t know how that might work with the rest of the route) as a training ride, maybe on the last Saturday before W2W.

Only three weeks til the ride! My goodness. I’m glad though, since I’m getting close to being ready to take a break from having cycling be the #3 thing in my life after work and functioning.

This morning I went up to Berkeley to ride with my friends/team members up there, J & C (you guys let me know if you want full names or initials on the blog). We had planned to do a 38-mile route up Grizzly Peak that I found on Bikely (Downtown Berkeley - Grizzly Peak - Skyline - Pinehurst). The full route has 5000ish feet of climbing, so I figured if we could do that, we could do W2W (which it turns out likely has closer to 5500 and 3200 ft of climbing rather than the 8000/5000 listed on the topo map due to topo overestimation). So it would be a useful test, and an interesting challenge.

But in the end, we took a wrong turn on Skyline (possibly due to the cue sheet being left, with my book, back at their apartment) and did a 24-mile ride up Grizzly Peak and Skyline and down Tunnel, then out to the Marina for a quick lunch/snack (1700 ft climbing, instead of the 5000ish given for the full route) and back to their apartment.

The 1700 ft of climbing was mostly in the first 6 miles, with the next four being variably up and down, then down for the last part. Spruce was somewhat brutal and I was dripping sweat and had stopped to rest twice (briefly, just so my heart wouldn’t beat out of my chest) by the time we got to Grizzly Peak Blvd. But the rest of the climbing was relatively gentle, though I stopped to rest once more later on. The lower gears on my touring bike helped, though toting a rack pack probably didn’t. Descending was a challenge, but my brakes stood up to it, and I felt that on the long downhill I was practicing good technique in when I decelerated and when I coasted, so that was very useful.

We all remarked afterward that we didn’t feel too terrible and thought both that we could have gone on (though none of us wanted to climb back up in order to do so…so…who knows!) and that despite being cut short, it was a good prep ride because so much climbing is compacted into so little mileage. It turned out well in many ways, giving me time to meet someone for coffee afterward and J time to get to the airport. I also saw Berkeley Bowl for the first time (finally, you are all saying). What a great place, wow! I wish I lived near there. It’s like every grocery store I’ve ever been to, plus a farmer’s market, rolled into one, all on steroids. We saw Mt. Tam cheese there, which I’ve been led to believe is amazing. C and I joked about how expensive it was and said that it would be a treat for after Waves to Wine, rather than for today.

The picnic table we found at the Marina was just sheltered enough to be pleasant without being hot. To get there, we inadvertently missed the turn onto Addison down to the bike/ped bridge, and illegally crossed on University instead. People were surprisingly patient given the total silliness of our presence on that overpass. It must happen reasonably often since the sign that warns you away is small and placed just after you get on. (City of Berkeley, please note.) On the way back we enjoyed the peace on the bike/ped bridge.

I noticed that most drivers up on the hill, in contrast, were not at all patient and would pass too close and at awkward times. Another cyclist we saw reported he had a guy come up behind him rapidly and skim by so close he touched him (and on the downhill too). Augh! I wonder why the distinction in behavior.

My total mileage for today was around 28 miles (counting all the incidental mileage I did), so I’m just going to re-divide the weekend mileage and do around 50 tomorrow so it should equal out, more or less. Despite the intensity of the climbing, I am feeling restless and eager to do more tomorrow. I think I have reached the point of needing a certain amount of intense physical exercise to feel good — which at this point in training I think is a very good place to be!

I’ve had kind of a crazy week — maybe kind of a crazy month, really — and two things this week were particularly fantastic:

Dry-farmed Early Girl tomatoes from Ella Bella Farm

These tomatoes are expensive compared to most of the heirlooms and organic tomatoes at the Menlo Park Farmer’s Market — they cost I think $3 or $3.50 a pound. But they are SO WORTH IT. OMG. They are fantastic and amazing and so flavorful and with great structure and they are great alone or in tomato-basil-mozzarella sandwiches and they pep up anything they are in, making a salad into a fun hunt-the-tomatoes experience.

XKCD Store’s customer service

A while back I ordered the Regular Expressions shirt from the XKCD store and I got it when I got back from Portland, but I hadn’t worn it until this week (everyone at work loves it, incidentally). When I did I found a small hole in the shirt. I wrote to the XKCD store person saying, hey, I found this hole, I don’t think I made it but I can’t be sure, and they said, basically, “No worries! We’ll send you a new shirt right away! Feel free to keep the old one!” How awesome is that? Love.

Wall-E should probably make this list too, because it is really sweet and funny and I liked it a lot, but foodie geek that I am, the other two things actually make me happier. Tomatoes and XKCD FTW.

As I have recorded here before, I am a poor climber. Even in the lowest gear of my triple-crank road bike, I find nearby hills like Edgewood and Arastradero challenging to climb, and have to use my leg strength (such as it is), rather than cadence, to ascend the hill.

I have been trying not to use this space to discuss my annoyance with other people, but I would hereby like to register annoyance with every cyclist who thinks it’s cute to tell me that I should 1) use a higher cadence because it’s bad to go anaerobic, or 2) go climb La Honda/Kings Mountain/whatever road they think I should be able to climb.

I am pretty bad at climbing. I cannot shoot up Edgewood at 12mph like the guys who passed us on the Tour de Menlo, about whom my riding partner eloquently expressed our collective thoughts: “Do they even know this is uphill?”

Please, all you people who can do that: for the love of Pete, just shut up, and don’t tell me what I should climb and how I should climb it.

I’m feeling strangely awake even though exhausted, so, a report on today’s ride:

Stats: 68 mi (daily total — the ride was 66 and Menlo-Atherton HS is about 1 mi from my house).
AVS: 13.1mph
MXS: 34.1mph (Crystal Springs Rd, also the first time I have violated a set speed limit because one section has a 25 mph limit)
Ride time: 5:12
Total time: The total time engaged in riding activities was from around 8am to 3:45 pm, or 6:45. Some of that was going to the ride and registering and that sort of thing, some was lunch, some was the rest stops and minibreaks we took.

This ride was really, really tough. I didn’t expect anything else, knowing that the climbing included both Edgewood and Stevens Canyon (plus Montebello up to the lunch stop) as well as a variety of other smaller hills, and that the total distance was 20 more miles than I had ever ridden in one day before. But it was still tougher than I had really imagined.

You can see the route on the site, but they don’t seem to offer a route profile. The climbs included Edgewood, Polhemus, rolling hills on Canada and Portola, Arastradero, Purissima, Elena, Summerhill (short), Stevens Canyon, and Montebello.

I was quite annoyed to discover that the lunch stop was not until nearly mile 50 by my computer (we missed one turn and backtracked — the route was not terribly well marked, with missing route arrows and sometimes a confusion with route arrows from previous rides). Aside from the annoying lunch stop placement and the lack of signage, the route was well-designed, with a nice combination of looping and backtracking, and a reasonable amount of time to recover from most of the hills. It helped that between me and my riding partner we were familiar with most of the roads that we covered, with the exception of Stevens Canyon which I had only been up in a car before.

The climb up Monte Bello to lunch was only 1/2 mile, but it was terribly steep, well exceeding the critical threshold for me. I had to walk substantial portions of the climb in the end, but I got up under my own power. On the way down, my riding partner and I got a ride down to the intersection with Stevens Canyon. Both of us felt nervous about such a steep, curvy descent on wobbly legs, and also felt that failing to descend that very short segment did not in any way compromise our sense of completion of the ride, in a way that failing to ascend it would have.

Lunch was better than I’ve had at other rides, but nothing particularly special — sandwiches, fruit, cookies, etc., even though they advertise as an attraction of the ride that the food is good. So that was a bit of a disappointment as well. The winery place is nifty, though I didn’t have much chance to look around, being more focused on giving myself food, water, and rest. They had a real restroom there (not a portapotty), which was awesome.

One of the best moments was up on Elena (a route through Los Altos Hills) with a stunning and unexpected view of the whole enchilada, right over to the bay and the East Bay hills. It may be a brutal hill to climb but at least it brings rewards. Today was also my first time on 92, Skyline, and Crystal Springs, and I enjoyed those quite a bit. Cañada is always nice, of course.

In general, the ride was really pleasant in the earlier part of the day, up to about the end of Elena. Then it started to get hot and tiring. It was pretty boiling by the time we got to Stevens Canyon, and the ride back was just a long slog back up Foothill.

It was a LOT of climbing. A lot. I don’t think it’s even as much as Waves to Wine either. I just can’t comprehend what W2W is going to be like. But at least I can see that distance-wise I can do it (though I’m still wondering about the second day — I have no reserves left today and will not be on bike tomorrow). I was only seven miles from hitting 75 today — a distance that would have been almost incomprehensible to me a few short weeks ago when a weekend of a 34-mile ride and a 15-mile ride (with plenty of climbing, but still less than this) tired me out to the point of deep exhaustion that affected me negatively for the next three days.

I had a lot of funky feelings in my feet and seat, but avoided chafing with copious reapplication of chamois cream, and overall am feeling sore in a lot of muscles I knew I had and some I didn’t, but I’m definitely still functioning and am, quite frankly, extremely proud of myself.

I’ll have more say later when I don’t have to go catch a train, but my overall feeling right now is: I am still alive and I finished. And I am unbelievably tired of climbing hills.

I thought I might be imagining it, but I don’t think so anymore: Language Log is getting less focused and less good than it used to be.

Bill Poser today wrote an entry about how runners hear the start gun at different times because of the speed of sound in air. The ‘hook’ used to relate this to linguistics is that if people studied acoustic phonetics, they would know this was a problem.

Yes…but if they studied physics, or even general science, they would know this too. I am not impressed with this as a linguistics hook. Sorry, but Language Log is supposed to be about linguistics, not about the fairness of Olympic track racing. Read down the list of recent entries, and then browse through a segment of LL Classic and see what you think about their relative interestingness.

I don’t know if this is an affliction common to blogs, but I’ve seen it happen to several. BoingBoing, which was once what its tagline claims (a directory of wonderful things) has become highly political. I still find it interesting to check out, but the slant on the politics is also high (unclear incidents of civil liberty violations are made to sound highly inflammatory), and that makes it even less interesting than just politics (which after all is also interesting, though perhaps not always wonderful).

Both BB and LL also added comments fairly recently. The comments sections are generally better than average, but they rarely add much to the original entry. I preferred both blogs when you had to email the original poster to comment, even though your words were subject to their whims. (My comments were mentioned or published a couple of times on both BB and LL, which was neat, but that’s neither here nor there.) This has contributed to my current feelings about their decline — which is funny because I can always just skip the comments if I don’t want to read them.

Stats:
DST: 46.6 mi
AVS: 13.9
MXS: 37.4 (omg)
Ride Time: 3:20
Total time: 3:50

Route: 34-mile route with Foothill to El Monte and Cañada to 92 extensions.

I was pretty beat after getting back from Portland and didn’t start the ride until 1pm. This turned out to be a good reminder of why I ride in the mornings most of the time: the wind was pretty brutal, especially on Cañada between Edgewood and 92. At least I got the benefit of it being at my back on the way home.

It wasn’t a bad ride overall — a bit slow, just a struggle to keep going some of the time. I really started feeling the distance after a while, just a feeling like “Why am I not home yet?” I didn’t get to take a day off this week because of the way my Portland trip was set up, and my Portland routes were much hillier than my usual weekly rides, so I also started out a bit drained in that regard.

I had a lot of soreness in my legs and glutes, as well as feeling more weirdness/soreness than expected in my hands and feet, and stretched for a while at the top of Cañada while enjoying the view. The fog was starting to creep in over the hills up there, which was neat. The view of Mt. Diablo from Edgewood was surprising and cool, and realizing I was going 37.4mph (on a straightish section) was absolutely terrifying and yet awesome. Am I becoming a speed freak? :-) I hit 30 again on a descent on Alameda and had a hard time stopping at a stop sign. Perhaps I should use my brakes a bit more wisely.

I also saw a wedding or some other fancy party in progress in Atherton — with valet parking. You know you’re stupidly rich when you have valet parking at your house.

The lowlights were pretty much the usual: struggling up hills. I stopped twice to get more water (there’s a water fountain on Arastradero at Purissima, and one behind the store in Woodside) and ate most of the peanut butter-honey gunk I had brought at Woodside and then at Cañada. This is a brilliant concoction suggested by a friend of mine, and was a lifesaver today when I didn’t have anything else in the house due to being away.

I also got a bit of saddle chafing again. I think it may be time to replace that saddle with a Butterfly. Mike’s Bikes is having a sale this week, so maybe I’ll do the new helmet and new shorts and jerseys and stuff now too. I thought I was going to get new stuff from Terry, but I ordered it and the two pairs of bottoms both have seams up the inner thigh (wtf? why would you do that?) and the jersey just has too many seams, period. So I guess that’s not going to work.

En fin, I also had some knee pain while I was in Portland. I think it was because the bike I was riding didn’t fit me quite right and had too much cleat float, and on top of that I had the saddle a little low to start with, and then I was climbing steep hills (including up to the Rose Garden) and all that. I thought it would go away, but I’m still getting what I hope are just after-effects. It seems to happen at kind of random times, not necessarily when I’m climbing hard.

This is definitely a week for carefully monitoring my physical condition and taking good care of myself, and hopefully I’ll be back in good shape for the Tour de Menlo next Saturday. I haven’t decided how I’m going to ride today — I don’t want to end up more chafed.