your daily bicycle log

ddb rode with me yesterday and BONKED HARD

LOL

no biking for me this weekend - i dj'ed a party and took drugs instead

today, same ride as last week: hard 87 miles, vascillating between endurance to tempo to threshold depending on terrain... also a lot of regrouping due to crummy weather on the first half of the ride.

I definitely learned my lesson from last week and ingested one banana, 2 bars, 1 clifblox, 1 hammer gel, and one large mocha, 3 bottles of sports drink and 1 bottle of h2o over the course of the 5+ hours.

we had a lot of rain yesterday which flooded out part of the bayshore that connects Sausalito to Mill Valley, so we got creative and opted to take the shoulder of California Highway 101:
http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4003/4394386486_678c7be2c8.jpg

def. not the safest way to travel but worked in a pinch.

avg speed was slower than last week: 16.9 mph but the conditions were pretty bad for the first half and we did a little more climbing than last week (5100 feet).

once we got about halfway the weather really turned nice and we got a good paceline going again which helped cut the gusty winds:
http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4072/4394386628_f93d3e9647.jpg

dude in front is a monster from northern germany who chose to wear shorts, short sleeve jersey and windbreaker for the ride (42-51F + rain/wind). i'm second from the right. dudes in 2nd and 3rd are 125-135lb cat 3/4 racers who bound up steep grades w/o breaking a sweat (dude taking pic falls into this category as well).

I def feel super drained. back of left knee feels sore, possible cramp or just weird pain, hard to say. taking it easy tomorrow on an easy recovery ride.

Alleycat fixed-gear/single-speed race round the parks of Glasgow yesterday afternoon.

We had 43 riders turn out. I placed 11th. A wonderful finish at the high point of the Glasgow Necropolis.

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2800/4393587908_896543444b.jpg

Isn't it snowing in Scotland?

solo ride this morn: home > one (1) lap of the boulie > back home. 30.6 km, 1.19.35, avg 23.1 km/h @ 69 rpm & 159 bpm. max 50.5 km/h, 193 bpm, 199 (!) rpm.

34 miles 91 minutes on tt bike testing positions and dialing it in. theres a tt about 1.4 hours away next sat, but i dont think im willing to spend that time and effort.

there really arent too many tts on the co sched. beyond the 7 race series (one of which will prob be a snow-out), i think 3-4.

What kind of format do time trials take in the USA?

In Britain they're a bit weird, a legacy from decades ago. Basically, some time early in the 20th century cycle racing was banned from the roads and was only allowed on tracks. They came up with time trials as a way of getting past this ban: if the riders were let off at one-minute intervals, rather than in one massed bunch, then they could claim not to be in a race. Obviously the police weren't quite that stupid, so the time trial organisers went to the further trouble of scheduling every race at the crack of dawn, of making the riders dress from head to toe in black, and of identifying each course solely by a secret code. Even now, long after all this became unneccessary, some of this persists - lots of races start at 6am or 7am and the course descriptions are still basically a code and an extremely minimalist account.

The vast majority of time trials are over fixed distances (10 miles, 25 miles, 50 miles, 100 miles) or fixed times (12 hours, and 24 hours for the complete nutters). Because of this, a lot of riders are obsessed with getting a fast '10' or '25', rather than with getting a fast time for a particular course or beating other people over a particular course, so that they can get a new personal best. This means lots of riders flock to fastest time trial courses, which are nearly always very flat and straight dual carriageways with lots of fast-moving traffic and sliproads and a big roundabout where you turn at the halfway point (there is a rule that the time trial has to finish within a mile of the start, I think).

Does America have the same obsession with times for a particular distance and riding on unsafe roads? Or are time trials over more challenging routes with odd distances?

yeah i've read that uk has some sort bizarro racing history and a cultural tt fetish. in the us, there seems to be emphasis on 40k for district titles, but im not aware of other distances. i mean, you see centuries, but they never seem to be promoted under any of the standard racing federations.

you just have a permitted course with cones on the side of the road, some marshall's at the turns or turnabout, you line up at your start time, some schmoe holds you, and beep beep beep go! the series im doing is on open roads inside a pay-admission state park. traffic is light, but ive actually had a couple altercations in there. you've not lived until youve leaned into the passenger window of some mercedes bitch who blared the horn at you for like 30 seconds and yelled "YOU. ARE. IN. A. FUCKING. PARK! CHILL!"

tbh, most racers i knew considered emphasis on tts a pretty damn dorky way to race a bike. you might enter states every year, but otherwise they were just one part of a stage race, and in the lower cats you dont do too many of those.

yeah, I'm no racer or involved with it bt I've always gotten the impression that TTs stateside weren't valued v highly at all.

Back in my tri days lots of dudes were way more interested in TT than road racing... maybe just because the bikes were the same and they could save on gear? Tri dudes are weird though, even weirder than roadies... they like to solo and are obsessed with wattage.

Today: 45 miles/3 hours SLOWWWW recovery ride. Weather was insanely nice, I was in shorts and short sleeves. got a mocha and a brownie, also got my tanlines back </dork>

ALSO: today marks my one year anniversary of being a roadie! thanx for entertaining my pointlessly stupid questions.

Isn't it snowing in Scotland?
― Home Taping Is Killing Muzak (Nasty, Brutish & Short), Sunday, 28 February 2010 11:37 (11 hours ago)

Just raining in Glasgow, the brief snow passed a few days ago.

ah, tanlines *shakes fist at heavens as the snow resumes outside*

40km should be 1 hour for the elites, right? My neighbour did the Windsor tri last year and of 2000 riders he was the only one to complete the 40km bike leg in under an hour (he came 76th overall).

What is a mocha?

coffee with chocolate in it, innit

i think i would be a bad tt'er - not especially good at pacing myself. might have a play around with the heart rate zone alarm stuff on the computer to see if i can get more even efforts over a ride.

cat 1-2 is usually elite-ish in my mind, they should go sub 54 or go home.

i'm thinking of doing an hour soon to gauge my solo effort skillzzz. i think my best effort is 22.5 miles (last year).

however, being tied to this geography, i'd like to stake out the rare stretches of relatively flat ground. there is a paved lap around the polo fields in Golden Gate Park that would make a monumentally boring ride but could do the trick.

ok, after looking at that internal hub xc bike on the other thread it reminded me of a question i've always had w/r/t TT bikes:

do you really need two chainrings on a TT bike?

why not do away with the weight of small chainring and front derailleur?

i think some tt specialists swear by fixed as on the track, right? single ring makes some sense. bonus, you wont drop your chain. otoh, the weight penalty on a flatish course is really minimal. see cyclinganalytics.com if you ever have insomnia. for example, i have an antique first gen specialized tri spoke front that weighs 1200g. srsly. and the disk i have is heavy too, like 1450g. i think i figured out a long time ago that the extra weight penalty vs a modern set of the same weighing 1700g total (2.1 POUNDS less) was less than 5 secs on a flat-rolling 40k. in a triathlon, thats like, dropping your gu in the transition and having to pick it up, right?

oh shit. fitting new headset, had to trim fork again. thought it was taking a bit long, realised i was actually sawing through the star nut as well ;_;

i mean i can fit another one of course but was hoping to avoid the hassle. i don't have any of the tools, gotta borrow them every time.

40 miles this morning (I don't usually work on Wednesdays) in preparation for a sportive this weekend.

just got caught in a hailstorm! quite invigorating in a way, could do without everything getting wet tho.

rode 130 mi commuting this week. this am im going to try to catch my first big boy group ride. this should sort out my relative fitness for me.

sort it out

finally got a builder to look at my bike. headed over shortly

feel like I'm taking my dog to the vet, prognosis unknown

Totally smoked a roadie on a hefty uphill while doing a rolling 35 mile country loop on my fixed complete with laden courier bag; always makes me feel good.

thats awesome and devastating but why u ride w laden courier bag?

I think I scored major points with skinny jeans hipster bike store dude as I managed to up sell the indecisive customer who was preventing me from buying a new chain from a 600 buck road bike up to a cross check. I think everyone wins on that deal.

Americans always trust a British accent

Talking of degreasing, he sold me some speed bike degreaser. I think I killed a couple of penguins, a polar bear and dissolved a cranial lobe, however it also turned black into shiny in seconds.

http://media.rei.com/media/717907.jpg

just degreased my chain, too, but with ECO FRIENDLY, ORGANIC (and potable, even) EL DUKE

curse you, trying to buy some el duke has led me to seeing things like this

Laden = lock, water, repair gubbins, pump, other bits & bobs for meeting my sister on the way back home...

second fucking rain ride in a row, jesus christ.

MANY BABYWIPES HAVE DIED THIS EVENING TO CLEAN THESE BIKES

yesterday: climbing
today: more climbing

legs: burning

Did the Puncheur Sportive today: 69 hilly miles in 4 hours 22 mins (including stops). There was a fair bit of black ice about - I saw five people crash and we had to dismount a walk for a bit. The finish was up Ditchling Beacon - horrible, horrible, horrible. I managed to keep riding all the way up and overtook everyone I saw on the climb, but I felt awful.

Having biked up ditchling beacon at a leisurely pace you have my sympathies

Total Elevation Gain week of 3/1 - 3/7/10 (2 short rides, 2 long rides):

19,722ft/6,011m

is that using an altimeter type thing, or ? no matter how you slice it thats a shitload, congrats.

somewhere i posted the hunter climbing calculation rules once. like, less than 200ft vert in one go? doesn't count. less than 4%? dont bring that.

that's from the Garmin data.

longest climb was 3.3 miles at 7.4% (1300ft) which suckkkkkkkkkked.

oh stop ;)

http://www.paloaltobicycles.com/ringmap/gradient.jpg

A lovely evening ride was ruined just now by being accosted by a large gang of feral East End Glasgow teenagers who saw fit to pelt me about the head with various random objects to the point of bleeding.

It's not too bad after a nice hot shower and sit down, but still... bastards.

argh

what?! some fucking dystopic nightmare shit.