Long Ride

I am getting ready for an all day ride with my coworkers. We’ve got plenty people seriously into biking, and once in a while we all get together to start a longer ride. It’s usually a lot of fun, with people that are not engineers like me and hence automatically seem to get more fun in life.

Speaking of fun: it wasn’t fun to ride home on Thursday. A very strong wind was facing me almost all the way, and it felt as if it would have been faster if I just had pushed the bike. Instead of riding on a mountain, next time I’ll try a wind tunnel!

Bike Tours

Looks like a bunch of guys at work decided to fly out to France to follow the Tour. Now they are frantically trying to get in shape for the Mont Ventoux etappe, and I am afraid to say, I would have loved to be amongst them. Well, I still get the benefit of people at work biking more in expectation of things to come. We used to have a really nice biking ‘team’, but two of the main actors left last year and the dynamic disappeared.

Commuting in the heat

Well, the first weekend of summer was a bit of a disappointment, but the first day after it ended was surely hot! I was very tempted to throw my corporate clothing and disappear for a long ride to the beach and enjoy the lower seventies out there.

Commuting on my bike is really a wonderful way to start and end the day. i wish more people did that, especially some of my coworkers that need to have more fun in life! 🙂

Up La Honda - Or Not?

Well, not… Strangely lame today, despite the gorgeous weather. I got all the way to Woodside, decided to go straight ahead to La Honda (instead of on Kings Mountain, which had been my first choice of the day), waited there for ten minutes and then… Gave up.

I made it back to Portola and up Alpine, but somehow I felt like a total loser. Is a three day weekend just too much for my legs? Do I just weigh too much? Or do I just worry way too much and should just shut up and be happy that I live in this wonderful place with hills around the corner and flats the other way around?

Dreary Day - Good Ride

Unexpectedly the weather turned dark and cold. Since it is Labor Day weekend, that’s not exactly what everyone was hoping for, and consequently the roads were empty.

Amazing how a few clouds can sour the whole biking thing. I rode off and got a decent workout, an hour and a half around little Alpine, but somehow I was not really into it. People were friendly, though; there is something magic about bikers that are not in a hurry.

Reading HRM Files

Finally got the HRM filter to run!

Well, it was pretty much just busy work, and I am sure I still missed a million things… But I finally got the software to read the HRM files I generate!

I integrated the calls into the usual workout.c file – now it checks the first two bytes – if they aren’t what it would expect for a srd file, it checks if it can find the string Version=106; if so, it reads the file as Windows HRM. Works like a charm, is transparent and immediately works for all three utilities (srdcat, srdhead and srdplot). Just wait until I have the workouts online!

Massive Fun Ride

I felt really ill last night. And of course I was bummed, thinking I wouldn’t be able to ride today. ;(

Then, this morning, waking up, there was this weird buzz in my legs, they just couldn’t wait to spin. I waited till nine, swung onto Ti (after pumping up the rear tire – somehow I must have done a really poor patch job last week) and started riding.
There was a bit of immune reaction I could feel. My knees were ‘grindy’, as if something was swollen and I had a little hard time kicking up the hill. But by the time I reached Page Mill, everything was fine. By then, I had greeted four major teams on the opposite side (LGBRC, Alto Velo, no-name mix and Phoenix Tech.) and was determined to go up Canada, since Skyline was foggy.

Fellow Commuters

Now that we reached the summer, people are starting to flock to work on their bikes again. That is wonderful, since I am not required to be the only fool that tries to avoid cars. And there is an element of shared fun when I am trying to draft on the windy corridor to 101, or to chase someone that is much better than me.

There is something strong about the way bikers can interact with each other without exchanging one word. A hand signal tells me that my front man needs a rest, and I’ll pass and allow him to draft. A quick smile tell me a chase is in order, both need some fun and a real workout on the way home.

Accident Prone

Yesterday, a minivan. One of those brand new, huge elephants of transportation. Grant Road, in front of the hospital. Pulls up beside me, then accelerates, finally swoops right in front of me into the driveway to the facility. I slammed on my breaks and barely stopped in time to curse the driver, who couldn’t possibly have missed me.

Whenever I see a police car stopping a biker, as I frequently do on Foothill over the weekends, that’s my only thought. The danger we face is not our behavior, it’s other people’s inattention. Of course, bike lanes that suddenly fizzle out, or even worse are made right turn lanes at intersections, do not help.

Polar Software Clarification

This is for Pieter, who asked if the Polar software will be for Linux or Windows… Well, in theory it should work just fine for either, but since I don’t actually have Windows at home, it will probably run much better on Linux. I use the Polar software to download my record at work using a Windows computer, but I find the functionality really awkward and prefer the graphs generated with GD much better.