Ok, now I am sick of this fat Marco thing. I decided I am going to lose weight, and you invisible readers are going to help me.
This is how it works: every day that I (a) ride in to work or ride for MORE than an hour, and (b) I work out either at the gym or otherwise for more than 30 minutes, I can put $50 towards a vacation fund. As soon as I reach 20% body fat (no matter how much water I drink to get there 🙂 I can redeem the money.
Continue readingI wanted to do the Grand Alpine loop, but the coastal stretch was banked in by the fog, and I decided to cut it short. Too bad, because I really wanted to try the famous Tunitas Creek ascent.
The Grand Alpine loop has some of the best biking in the Bay Area: you start on Foothill and El Monte, go up Moody Road until it hits Page Mill, go up Page Mill (it’s a nasty 2400ft). From there, down on Alpine until you hit Pescadero, left on Pescadero until you hit the town proper. Right on Stage road, past La Honda road in San Gregorio. Then you hit Highway 1, which you follow briefly until you hit Tunitas Creek. You ride another 2000ft up, until you hit King’s Mountain Road. Downhill again, until you arrive to Woodside (rest here and watch bikers). Then it’s back to the start on Foothill.
Continue readingFirst ride in a while – some weird form of laziness has kept me captive. So I decided to do a short run – just the Alpine look.
It was curiously slow moving for a holiday. Looks like 4th of July is a big thing around here, something that doesn’t invite biking. Or maybe the good ones were gone on a road trip.
Well, the home page says it: I got myself two new skinsuits! One is from the Republic of Anaerobia, a small outfit up in the North Bay; the other one is an eBay find. Both of them will reach me in the next few days – thank goodness eCommerce works!
Why skinsuits? Well, for one, they make you look even more ridiculous than the conservative duo of black shorts and jersey (which is really a lot to say!). Then their colors are usually much brighter than anyone else’s, so that you can be sure that everybody is going to look at you in bewilderment (decreasing chances of being overlooked or run over).
Continue readingI seized the opportunity and did a quick (50min) ride at sunset. Actually, it was six to seven, so that it is still very warm and bright outside.
It is amazing how peaceful a Sunday evening can be. People are gone, the masses of summer bikers are home already, and it is with some amazement that I actually found a rider from Phoenix getting home. He must have been exhausted, because I saw him on the downslope in front of Stanford, three minutes before heading back, and still I caught up with him.
Continue readingFk, fk, f**k!
I was so ready for it! I had slowly crept down Foothill, chosen Arastradero over Page Mill, done Portola to avoid the stupid hill before OLH, stopped for ten minutes (sharp!), drank my soda and ate an energy bar.
I shot up, I even spun a round just to get into it with a little speed advantage. I had computed that an average ascent of 60ft per minute would get me there, with the initial part being slightly easier and hence slower (ascent-wise).
Continue readingSo that’s how it went…
I rode the usual Alpine uphill, having given a little too much on Foothill to swerve around the morning traffic. Stopped at the bottom of the hill, after having passed four guys from Phoenix Tech. After they started (and another one, and another one), I jumped on and tried to go as fast as I could.
Man, I made it up 880ft (ascent), and then somehow the steam went out of me. Weird. It wasn’t even pain, or fatigue, or anything else – just no desire to continue. The nagging: “Why am I doing this again?” that stands behind all failed athletes. I turned around, hopefully far enough for the Phoenix people (that I had passed a while down) not to know that I had, indeed, been defeated. On the way down, just to make my life more interesting, this moron passes a group of bikers on the far left of the road, on a perfect collision course with me.
Continue readingTrying to ride home yesterday after a long pause (due to nothing but laziness and good excuses!) I found myself with a flat and no tools. How stupid is that?
That’s how I found out that I average 18 mph on the way home on the bike, and just 3.6 mph walking… 🙂
I finally got to implement combined graphs in Perl. In the end, it was real simple, and it was mostly fighting with GD::Graph that held me up.
The new graphs have a few implementation changes that I found really important:
1. The scale of x and y coordinates is constant, so that you can compare two graphs directly. Right now, if you do a mostly flat ride, it looks like a mountain climb no matter what. If you ride twice as far, you end up with sharp mountains. Combined, a long flat ride looks like a short mountain pass. Needed to fix that, will increase motivation… 🙂
2. Data points are not as interesting as averages as far as speed is concerned. Changed that, too – speed is now averaged, and speed points are added on top.
3. I combined several workouts to generate a single graph. The old problem of the lazy biker that stops to look at the mountains (and catch breath) and then moves on, realizing that his/her Polar stopped and requires a new workout (bitch bitch)
4. I finally got rid of the speed spikes. I know that it seems absolutely possible to you, but I do think that riding on a flat at 65 mph is a bit unrealistic. So the code now throws out those values automatically and replaces them with the average of the adjoining data points (or undefs them, whichever I implemented 🙂
Saturday, and for some mysterious reason no desire to ride. Maybe it’s the broken espresso machine, maybe it was the ton of chocolate I ate yesterday, freshly spurred by a visit to Albertson’s.
Still, I made it all the way to Canada. Turned around at the intersection where they usually stop traffic on Sundays, because it was turning greyish after that.
I was out at the same time as the Alto Velo B ride. What a nightmare those guys are: pass you downhill, then start rushing around you, just in time to slow down on the next uphill, where I have to pass them again. Can’t anyone tell them how you pass when you are in a big group?
