I was looking more closely at the W2W route profile and noticed that the peak elevation is only 600 ft. The first major climb of the route covers 600 ft in about 2.5 miles, which is only a bit more than half the grade of Old La Honda. Assuming the map is even slightly accurate […]
Category Archives: Cycling
Entering week 9
I took a small detour from my normal route this morning to avoid construction and happened on a park in Palo Alto I didn’t know existed. My world felt a bit wider and brighter after that. I’m getting to the point in training where I’m feeling pretty ambivalent about riding my bike so much. There […]
Saturday ride #8: Coastal ride
Due to exhaustion I am lacking in my usual verbosity. Therefore, mostly you get statistics, nouns, and adjectives. DST: 50.5 mi (my computer reported 55 but that is not correct, and I don’t know why — I’m thinking a detector in Palo Alto) AVS: 11.8 (…oy) MXS: ~32 (84 descent) Ride time: 4:36 Total elevation […]
“Looming”/chase instinct as a cause of fear among cyclists?
I was riding to downtown Sunnyvale today and got passed by a couple cars while sharing a lane. Absolutely nothing notable about it from a traffic standpoint, except that for several of them I was checking my rearview mirror as they came up and I found that I had an instinctive fear as they approached, […]
Wednesday brisk ride: Foothill commute
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 […]
Tour de San Mateo
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 […]
Climbing and the ethics of posting ride routes
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: […]
Ride report: Berkeley! Grizzly Peak!
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 – […]
Do they even know it’s uphill?
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 […]
Saturday ride #6: Tour de Menlo (full ride report)
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 […]