Magic Spot Flowing

I wish I’d had a camera this morning that I could actually access while riding (not just my cell phone stuffed away in a bag). I went out for a ride before work, leaving the house at 6:30 and getting back just before 8. It was a beautiful morning, and a rather marvelous ride. I returned home feeling tired but invigorated and very awake. Usually at 8 I’m just stumbling out of bed and into the kitchen.

Highlights: sunrise and the gradual creep of the sun upward, the wisp of fog still lying on the hills, the three deer grazing in a meadow in Portola Valley. (I looked up from my bike and said aloud “Oh! Deer!” and then laughed at my inadvertent pun.) Realizing that my leg warmers didn’t fall down and it’s probably because I have muscles now.

Lowlights: Sun in my eyes/mirror, people violating traffic laws, that damn third climb on Sand Hill past Whiskey Hill. There’s some particular grade percentage where I hit my climbing limit, and that hill, the steepest part of Edgewood, and Arastradero right past the 280 underpass going north are it.

Still, I managed to push myself decently. Stats:
DST: 17.8 mi
AVS: 14.2 mph
MXS: Don’t know because my cyclocomputer got fooled by a detector, I would guess around 26-27 mph.
Ride time: 1:15 (total time 1:25)

Traffic wasn’t nonexistent, but it was light, especially on Portola where I saw about as many cyclists as cars, and not many of either. The worst spots were Alpine at 280 and Sand Hill between Santa Cruz and El Camino, but mostly even those were fine. 6:30 seems to be a good compromise between “ridiculously early” and “late enough to run into bad traffic issues”.

I haven’t been doing a lot of cooking lately, for various reasons, but one of the reasons is that in the summer when the farmer’s market is overflowing, looking at cookbooks rarely yields recipes that make maximum advantage of the ingredients I have, and I haven’t been feeling independently inspired or desirous of going shopping for random things I don’t have.

Today, though, I was looking at the eggplant in my fridge and thinking “I remember that Spanish cooking blog where they rolled up eggplant into little tubes of something. Maybe that would be good, but I want to make something more substantial…”

Anyway, I ended up consulting Veganomicon to see if they had anything like that. They did, but it is much too complicated for a weeknight. But that woke up my imagination and I started thinking about how to using a couple things in my fridge to make something similar, but easier: baked thin slices of eggplant with tomato sauce and tofu ricotta. Which handily gets rid of the extra canned tomatoes and the tofu that badly needed to be used.

I don’t know how it’ll turn out yet because it’s still in the oven, but it was nice to be reminded that cookbooks are useful for inspiration, even if you end up making something quite different to take maximum advantage of what you have.

My lunch today was similar, just something I threw together after looking at the fridge: arugula, tomato, and cucumber salad with cilantro. Grapes for dessert. And a Dapple Dandy pluot for snack while I wait for the eggplant. Yum. Some things don’t need any help being good.

I’ve had a few people at various points request reminders and a link pointer on Waves to Wine donations. As the time begins to approach (and my training ramps up, as you can see by the blog posts) I would really appreciate your support, and more importantly, so would the people the money will benefit, those living with Multiple Sclerosis.

Donate:
Personal Page – Donate Here

There’s also a permanent link to my personal page in the upper right corner of the blog.

To quote Justin, who said it so well, “Charity rides sometimes seem a little cheesy because there is no obvious connection between the illness and bicycle riding, but they are amazingly effective.”

DST: ~34 mi (same)
AVS: 13.7 (+0.2!)
MXS: ~31 mph (-1)
Ride time: 2:29 (same)
Total time: 2:50 (+5 from last week)

I did a similar route this week to last, but in reverse and without the neighborhood options, and using Mountain Home instead of Whiskey Hill (it’s shadier and hilly in a less stupid way). The training calendar said 38 this week, but I’m going to be riding more tomorrow than it says (17 instead of 11 miles) so I didn’t add any distance to this ride. I also didn’t ride yesterday, which I think was a good decision, because I felt better today even though my legs were (ugh) still sore.

However, it seems to be true that the best thing for sore muscles is more of what made them sore. This was an encouraging ride because it’s the first sign I’ve really had that training isn’t just exhausting me but is actually working. Despite not having fresh legs (tired out from both overall riding and from the climbing on Alameda), and despite the heat, I was able to climb Edgewood a bit better than I did some weeks ago when I went with friends. (It was much hotter this morning than last week, and was sunny for the whole ride.) My climbing is still crap, but I think I actually rested one fewer time than I have previously on the way up, and I didn’t stop at the top or on the other side (at Cañada) but kept going. At one point I was feeling awful and I did look at my bracelet for the inspiration to keep going. It was nice to have that.

My hands and feet didn’t show any notable issues until closer to 30 miles this time, and my ankle was fine with the shoe straps closed tighter, though I did get a mild pain in my left knee around 30 miles (it’s gone now) and my right calf felt tense. I figured out the calf thing after a while — it’s something I do when I’m coasting where I don’t relax it fully, so that’s a good thing to work on. I got a second wind around 20 miles or so, which was a blessing, and I was able to push decently on some of the hills later on, even climbing Arastradero (which is easier going this direction in both cases).

In general I don’t know whether it makes much difference in the difficulty of the ride to reverse it. The Edgewood climb is hard (my mental joke is it comes in four sections: hard, sorta flat, awful, and plain evil), but so is the Arastradero climb. The rest of the ride is mostly rolling hills, and I don’t think the direction makes much difference, though Portola seems harder and Arastradero is definitely more fun — that’s where I hit my max speed, and I’m not sure if the speed limit inside the preserve is 25 or 35, but if it’s 25 I was actually going fast enough I could have been ticketed, which would be hilarious in a horrible way if it happened.

I feel pretty dead on my feet after this ride, but the fact that I made it through pretty well despite starting out tired is encouraging. On the other hand, the route for W2W is now posted and it is 8000 feet of climbing the first day and 5000 the second. That’s just insanity. Insanity, I say. I haven’t even contemplated Old La Honda or Page Mill yet (I’m still aiming for climbing Edgewood without stopping, for goodness’ sake), but given the final route, I’d say they pretty much have to be in my future. Yikes.

Salon’s even picked up the Xtracycle story.

I’ve gotta get one of these soon.

There’s a story that I want to tell, too, which has nothing to do with cycling, but does have to do with a lesser-known vehicular interest of mine: identifying and comparing car models. For someone who doesn’t drive, I pay an inordinate amount of attention to car models. One day I said to someone, while we were in his car driving down Willow Road, “Why do you think Scion has four car models, three of which are xA, xB, and xD, and the fourth of which is tC? Why not xC?”

The person who was driving said to me something like “I think you ask a lot of questions to which there are no really good answers.” We had a discussion for a while about my tendency to ask why about things for which there may be no satisfying answer to the why. He didn’t say as much, but basically he seemed to think it was silly, a waste of mental energy.

Time passed, and I didn’t find out the answer. But eventually one day I thought, I could actually look this up and find out if there are any theories. It turns out that the answer is pretty simple. Wikipedia says:

The name tC does not fit in with its stablemates the xA, xB, and xD, because the name xC has already been taken by Volvo for its XC60, XC70 and XC90 models. According to Scion, tC stands for “Touring Coupe.”

I think they made up the Touring Coupe backronym after they found out about the Volvo XC’s, but that’s pure speculation.

The moral of the story isn’t that all my why questions have (satisfying) answers, but it is that by failing to ask, and disengaging your brain from all these (sometimes exhausting) questions, you may miss interesting little tidbits like this, and the brain-reward that they bring: that feeling of something dropping into place, the world making just a tad more sense than it did before.

Besides, someday I’m going to win a Trivial Pursuit game with this little factoid.

This is the second full week and third week of training for me. It didn’t start out so well. Sunday I was supposed to do a shortish 10 mile ride, but I miscalculated and did 15 mi. I felt fine afterward, though very tired, so I thought it was probably okay, but I woke up in the middle of the night with my legs feeling sore and heavy (a sign of having overdone things).

Monday and Tuesday I went very easy on the riding (I completed the suggested distances but at an AVS about 10mph), went to bed early, ate a lot and fairly healthfully (and drank a lot of water), and started feeling a lot better. Today was supposed to be a brisk ride, but I’m going with “compared to Monday and Tuesday, a slow normal is pretty darn brisk” (AVS 12.5 so far). My legs are still feeling overtired but not in the bad, heavy kind of way so far.

Pondering what happened, I realized that last week I consistently was over target for many of the distances because of my commute patterns. I also haven’t been eating or hydrating as well as I should or sleeping as much, and I’ve had a lot going on socially. The combination of those things, along with the five extra miles from Sunday, looks fairly lethal when you line it all up like that, and indeed it felt pretty lethal, both physically and mentally. Doubts about my fitness for this whole endeavor had started to crop up, but when I realized what was going on, I noticed that a lot of it was poor choices that I can change.

One thing I noticed is that I’ve been pushing myself on speed/effort, which isn’t desirable. Speed is very much negotiable; completion is less so. I’ve committed to do the ride, not to do it at a certain pace, and I need to remember that. Plus, riding slower during the commute has the nice side benefit that I feel more relaxed and safer because I have more reaction time and I’m going at a speed that doesn’t surprise drivers as much. It really doesn’t take much more time either, though the difference is not imperceptible.

And in fun tidbits, here is my route on Saturday:
34-mile training ride

What I actually did in Toronto:

The ROM. You can see one of the most interesting things about it from the website — the building was recently renovated and a “Crystal” added on to the front. It wasn’t as crystalline as I expected from the name, but it’s an interesting addition. The interface between the new and old buildings was what fascinated me the most. Inside, the shape of the galleries in the Crystal is conducive to exploring and more open than the traditional materials.

I was really impressed with the ROM in general. The presentation of the materials was very thoughtful, like the exhibit about the changing styles from the Middle Ages to the present. I know about the eras (Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, etc.) but their presentation of them illustrated the transitions and transformations very well.

I spent most of my first day in the museum, taking a break to eat lunch at Fresh on Bloor (admission for the museum allows multiple entrance and exit). The lunch was excellent and huge. I had a chickpea wrap and their signature sweet potato fries with miso gravy. The gravy was a bit intense, but everything else was great, and I saved half and ate it for dinner because there was so much. This was my favorite place I ate while I was in Toronto.

The link says “nontraditional vegetarian food”, but I actually saw it as kind of “traditional modern” in that it was a lot like what I would get in good vegetarian restaurants around here. But maybe that’s non-traditional for Canada!

That night I went to a Fringe comedy show called “Between Commutes”, which was a sketch show about the hassles of commuting. I was expecting a bit more of it to be about public transit, but some of the sketches were very funny, and I enjoyed it quite a bit.

The next day, after picking up the loaner bike and having coffee with the owner, who is wonderfully nice and generous, most of my day was taken up by a visit to Toronto Island. The island is car-free, so I took the bike on the ferry (the ferry was quite crowded with bikes) and rode around, looked at the lake, and relaxed in the park. It was nice to be away from cars, and everything seemed to run at a slower pace as everybody relaxed in the afternoon sun. I took a walk on a beach, and stopped briefly to swing on a swingset. I’m not sure I was supposed to be on the swingset, but no one stopped me, and I enjoyed the feeling of flying that I recalled from childhood.

On the way back, I ate at Urban Herbivore in the Kensington Market area. I had a sesame tempeh sandwich and a fresh juice (red juice — beets, apples, carrots, lemons, and ginger — which tasted wonderfully gingery but with good body from the vegetables). I wasn’t originally going to have any juice because it was expensive, but the server spontaneously refunded me my sandwich cost because he was slow to get it to me. It didn’t seem slow to me — I was writing in my journal and had only just started wondering when my sandwich might arrive when it did — but I appreciated their effort to hold themselves to a high standard, and felt that buying a juice when I wouldn’t have otherwise was a good way to return the kindness. The sandwich wasn’t the best, with the tempeh overly dry and salty, but the bread was excellent and the sandwich well-made overall, so I enjoyed myself. It was an interesting neighborhood to watch while I ate — it reminded me a little bit of the Mission.

Sunday I had a notion to go to a farmer’s market, so I decided to visit the Distillery District (history), but I got a slow start and the market was mostly gone when I got there. But I did see the old buildings and art galleries and studios full of quite fascinating art. My favorites were two artists working in encaustic, Joya Paul and Tanya Kirouac (Tanya’s site at tanyakirouac.com seems to be down). Both had some lovely flower/nature paintings. I also liked Thompson Landry gallery and Nathalie Maranda‘s paintings in that gallery.

That evening, I had a drink with the fun and inimitable Emily, whom I had missed while in Toronto five years ago. It was fun, and we talked animatedly about food, our jobs, and travel.

My last day, besides Urbane Cyclist, I went to Bakka Phoenix Books and LinuxCaffe. Both are Toronto landmarks, with Bakka Phoenix being the incubator of several Canadian SF talents including Cory Doctorow. LinuxCaffe, in their own words, “is a cozy corner caffe offering dark organic coffees, simply delicious food and pleasant surprises. It is also the home of Toronto’s Open Source software communities, hosting user group meetings, workshops and distributing free software.” It’s basically a friendly cafe with an open culture, lots of geeks, and a bunch of old software books. Very nice place, though it was quiet on Tuesday lunchtime in the summer.

That was my last stop before returning the bike and a brief visit to Union Station; then it was back to Pearson in time for a spectacular cloudburst, a delayed plane, and a fantastic sunset on takeoff.

My experiences with transit and cycling in Toronto were almost uniformly overwhelmingly positive. If only it wasn’t so cold there, I’d totally want to live there.

When I first arrived, I got a GO bus and then the TTC subway into downtown Toronto. This had two complications. One, GO and TTC are different systems, so I had to pay for both. But the total was only about CDN$8, so it was still astoundingly cheap for an airport-to-downtown option. Two, the GO bus that I got on went to a station on the other side of the U-shaped line (Yonge/University/Spadina) than the part of the U I wanted to be on, but that was simply fixed by briefly transferring to the Bloor-Danforth line to cut off the bottom of the U. (On the way back I did what I should have done in the first place: take the Bloor-Danforth line to Kipling and the 192 Airport Rocket to Pearson, which costs only CDN$2.75 and is a TTC-only journey. The Airport Rocket has 10-minute frequency during the afternoons — pretty great.)

The TTC is kind of expensive on a per-journey basis, CDN$2.75 per journey, but if you’re taking a long journey it’s quite reasonable, and you can buy at a discount if you get a lot of tokens at once. Transfers between lines are allowed, though you have to remember to pick one up if you get on the subway, and they’re rather finicky about where you can use them — you can’t use them at the station where you got them, and you can’t use them at a station that isn’t a direct transfer between one line and another (though it wasn’t evident to me how closely this was enforced). The one time I forgot to pick one up at my origin, I remembered to get it at my first subway transfer, so that was okay.

It’s relatively quick and pleasant, although crowded (it sometimes required a lot of “excuse me, I need to get out”s). The subway has a minimum frequency of 4-5 minutes between trains, so you’re never waiting long, and I had good experiences with my attempts to find buses and streetcars and get help from their drivers. They could use better signs at stops about routes and timing, but many stops do have the necessary information.

I did quite a lot of walking as well, and found that a nice way to get around, even going into downtown, though it did take longer than the subway. But most of my time not spent on TTC transit was spent cycling around. It was an adventure for me because I was equipped only with a minimal map of the downtown area, and didn’t have a Toronto bike map (allegedly you can pick them up at various places but I didn’t try very hard and didn’t see anything obvious) so I was mostly going on faith and some helpful directions from the owner of my borrowed bike, Crazy Biker Chick. The downtown streets are narrow and often have marginal pavement quality. There are some bike lanes, but not a lot, and some designated routes, but from what I could tell people rode their bikes almost everywhere anyway. Streetcar tracks were frequent and nerve-wracking, and in several cases I put my box-turn practice to good use in order to avoid bad left turns over streetcar tracks.

The most impressive thing was that there were bike racks absolutely everywhere, every 10-30 feet on pretty much every downtown street. Mostly they were just a post with a circle through it that could hold two bikes, about as simple as you can get but very functional. I saw tons of utility/city/hybrid-type bikes, and very few road bikes, while I was there, showing that people are choosing practical options for their environment. I enjoyed riding a very upright bike (a Raleigh Twenty that looks much like the picture at the link — evidently a classic and much-loved folding bike). Most were equipped with a rack or basket of some kind.

I found that the majority of cars were quite polite. A few people passed too close, but by and large I felt that my head was safer unhelmeted in Toronto (I didn’t bring my helmet or any other protective gear) than helmeted here. There were a few cases in which construction and other adverse circumstances made me uncomfortable enough to temporarily decamp to the sidewalk. Shock horror! I think time in Toronto has largely cured me of my default sidewalk anger (one of my 101 goals!), though I still am annoyed by people who ride recklessly on the sidewalk or ride on it where conditions are not very good (too narrow — the sidewalks in downtown Toronto are very wide). I particularly enjoyed my ride on Toronto Island. I took the ferry to Ward’s Island, and rode around and back, enjoying myself in the park and taking pictures, and on my last day there, I was able to see many more things in one day than I could have managed without a bike, so it was not only fun but extremely useful.

One of the things I did on my last day was visit Urbane Cyclist, a wonderful bike shop focused on commuting cycles at 180 John Street, just north of Queen, in downtown. The shop was full of fascinating things. There were urban, folding, and recumbent, and cargo bicycles — including a bakfiets!!! Unlike most shops, rows of shiny new identical high-end road bikes were not the featured item. Instead, the rest of the shop was filled with racks, panniers, mirrors, gloves, jackets, and other useful items. There was a parts section in the back. I picked up a set of road bike bar-end mirrors and a copy of Momentum as well. What a great shop.

Hang on for part 2, about what I actually did between all my subway and bike rides…

DST: 33.7 (target 34)
AVS: 13.5 (eh)
MXS: 32.4 (don’t know – on Cañada somewhere I think)
Ride time: 2:29
Total time: 2:45

My route today is really too long to describe because I did some squirrelly things to add distance and interest, but the main streets were:
Santa Cruz (via Menlo neighborhoods) > Junipero Serra/Foothill, Arastradero > Alpine > Portola > Whiskey Hill > Cañada > Edgewood > Alameda > Atherton neighborhoods > Valparaiso > Middlefield > Willow.
Update: Ride route

Highlights: watching the fog slowly lift off the hills, view from Edgwood and Cañada, not repeating my near-hyperventilation when climbing the annoying hill on Alameda, a kid waving to me on Alameda, not feeling like utter crap right now, no one doing anything notably stupid on the road.

Lowlights: practically hyperventilating on the way up Arastradero, having to stop for both stoplights on Edgewood.

The ride was hard, but nice. It’s the longest I’ve ever ridden without a substantial break (meal-length) between portions of a ride (previous was ~31), and definitely the longest ride I’ve ever done after riding seriously for six of the previous seven days. I could really feel that my energy level at start was not what it normally is for recreational riding.

Now off to the rest of my crazy day…

I’m trying not to post all my W2W stuff on here — I have a separate training diary that I keep on the back of my door. But today’s ride was kind of interesting. It was the first ride of the “brisk” rides. The training program indicates rides as “Easy”, “Pace”, or “Brisk”. These aren’t really speeds per se, but amounts of effort, with pace being “ride at the pace that you plan to ride at in order to complete the target ride”, and easy and brisk being one or two notches on either side. There’s only one of each non-pace ride each week. (Monday – easy, Wednesday – brisk, plus Thursday – off — though I plan to be flexible on whether I take Thursday or Friday off).

So because I started training on a week that was going to be split up by my trip to Toronto, I didn’t properly do a brisk ride last week, and this was the first time.

I ended up doing a warmup, effortful riding, some work-rest intervals (conveniently delineated by Mountain View’s major streets), some short intervals, more effortful riding, and then a quick cool-down. I think that works out pretty well, better than just pushing myself a little bit for the whole time.

Right as I was getting home, I noticed that I was getting a kind of second wind. I was still tired, but suddenly my body was like “Oh, this is fun. Let’s keep doing this (but not anything harder).” I’m still tired (and my legs are quite tired) but it was nice to notice I could have gone on. That’s what endurance is all about in my mind. Same with the ride several weeks ago that was 38.3 miles total and began with Edgewood — after Edgewood I was tired, but I kept going!

Another thing I noticed is that my right ankle hurts a bit, I think from moving around too much in the shoe, and I really do think I should get my shoes refitted to see if they’re the right size.

In general though, I’m doing well. I’m tireder and hungrier than usual (I’ve been inhaling noodles like nobody’s business), and I find that I sometimes “don’t feel like riding all the way home”, but that’s not new — it’s just that when I feel that way I have to ride anyway instead of copping out by taking the train like I usually would, and then I don’t mind it once I am riding, so it’s all right.

I’m really looking forward to my “off-bike” day tomorrow. And starting to wonder if I’ve gotten myself into too much for Saturday — it’s going to be solid on-the-go from riding (34 miles) to BBQ to coffee to dinner to musical! I’m hoping it’s more awesome than it is exhausting, because it seems likely it’s going to be both.