Wind Sprints

After the climb up Golden Gardens Drive starts getting easier, it's time to move on to the climb up Queen Anne Hill. Starting at the intersection of 3rd Ave W and W Bertona St., head south up 3rd to Howe. Turn right on Howe, stopping at the high point where the alley crosses Howe. Then catch your breath and do it again. Very slightly over 1 mile, with about 390' of climb. This builds power, and covers performance over a size of climbing pitch one often finds, as well as the length of time one typically spends at the front of a paceline.

The grade is around 7%, and doesn't vary much, except where it flattens out at the end.

I ride as hard as I can, for between 2 and 4 reps. Two is all you really need, so that's all I ever commit to when I start, so I don't hold anything back. If I feel great after 2 I might do one or two more, but I doubt there's much benefit from more than 4 reps.

Two years ago, I started out doing it in 8 minutes in the spring, working down under 7 minutes by late summer. This year, I'm starting out at 6:47. So I'm off to an early start, because I have to be. PBP is only 125 days away. I need to start shifting away from strength and power towards endurance training, but the rando riders finishing ahead of me are stronger than me in the hills. I think I have the materials to accomplish PBP, but there's no point taking any chances.

Another way of looking at seasonal weight

The vertical axis is weight in kg. Horizontal axis is days since New Year. Each line represents weight as measured for one year, beginning January 1 of that year.

The data are incomplete, so the apparent weight gain starting in July is mostly an artifact of not having much late summer data.

This shows that in many years, I put on around 5 kg (~10 lb) over the holidays, then work it off in the spring. In 2010, I started working that weight off unusually late, in April, and I paid for it. This year, I had more physical activity earlier in the year than usual, and I made an effort to watch what I ate. The results show above. My scale's crude estimate of BFI is 13%.

More road debris.

Some sort of metal plates in the bike lane on Nickerson. Not super sharp, but probably sharp enough to get through a sidewall if you hit it right.

A Prayer to Hypoxia

In mountain and slope I seek you
To feel you pervade my body
To make you an offering
Of everything I have

Take the breath from my lips
Take the salt from my pores
Take the fire from my hearth
Take the fuel from my stores

Take all I bring you
They are yours already
I never owned them
I gathered them for you

I will meditate
Each journeyed moment
I will turn the crank
Spin my spoked prayer wheel

Race weight

If your bike weighs less than 10 kg, you probably can't spend your way to a bike that is enough lighter to make much difference. Aerodynamic drag is usually a bigger factor than the mass you are moving anyway. But on a hilly course, weight can make the difference between staying with the pack or getting dropped. Sure, it's not the peloton of Le Tour, but getting dropped still means you'll have to either catch up or find somebody else to paceline with on the next flat bit.

So weight matters. If you can't take it out of the vehicle, then it has to come out of the engine. So far, since the new year, I've dropped my weight by about half my bike weight while adding strength. That was my goal. I have a lot of hills to climb this year.

SIR 200K

SIR 200K in 8h 54min. That's about 1h 45min behind Jan Heine, the fastest finisher, and in the top 20%. I like to finish in the top 10% of ultra-endurance events, but I woke up at 1:00AM feeling kind of nasty, so I'm not dissatisfied.

Become What You Are

"Become What You Are" I learned these words from listening to Juliana Hatfield, not from reading Nietzsche. I think critically about how I ride a bike, because that's the only way to improve. I gather Nietzsche deemed critical thought unhelpful. Well screw him.

Regardless, at 46, I'm a little young to grow out my beard grey and ride a steel horse with a bed roll and a frying pan.

But I've become a randonneur. Somehow this has happened. That's not the only kind of biker I am, but I am this thing now.

I have no idea what Nietzsche meant, but I think I understand what Hatfield was on to.

I rebuild the fast bike

I'm in the middle of my first major surgery on the fast bike.

In the past, I've put on new wheels, replaced the front fork when it got trashed, and put on aero bars. But none of those things really touched the purpose of the bike. Now, I'm taking a Trek Madone, the bike most associated with Lance, and building it up for the least likely thing that it's plausibly suitable for: randonneuring.

That's right: a plastic rando bike. Randonneurs ride steel. (Except the few who spend for titanium.) Randonneurs are required to have fenders, and my Madone doesn't even have the braze-ons to mount conventional fenders. Randonneurs need to carry supplies and spare clothing, sometimes lots of it, and there is basically no way to put a luggage rack on this bike.

So bad idea? Maybe. But I know this bike well. I like the way it fits, and it likes me back. It's been a good ride for 8,000 miles, and I frankly don't think I have time between now and August to build up a new bike from scratch and get it dialed in the way I'd need it. Sure, I rode 100 miles on this bike the morning after I bought it, with a "fit" that was literally by eyeball. But 100 miles isn't very far by rando standards. When you are going to be on a bike all day and all night, you need to be comfortable, and you need to ride and react with the bike as one unit. I'm just not ready to start another relationship like that.

What I've done so far:
- 42cm (2cm narrower) bars (should have done that a long time ago)
- 2cm shorter stem
- aero bars off since the French don't allow them
- Luggage (!) fore and aft
- 26mm tires run at a mere 80psi, replacing 23mm tires at 120psi
- rear fender
- an LED headlight close to what a motorcycle has.
It's a little like an F1 car with a ski rack.

I haven't taped the new bars yet, still tweaking the brake lever position. I need to redo the rear fender and add a front one. I need to redo how the lights are mounted. It's the same bike now, but also very different.

Chilly Hilly

Did the course only once. Chuck Ayers gave me a sharp look when I told him I did it twice last year. Maybe that factored into my thinking. But a bigger factor was that this year, I did CH on a single speed. With 34/16 gearing into 700C x 32, it's a bit stiff up the hills. After 33 miles of that, I was --What's the word? Tired.

Oh, and it was cold this year. Didn't get rained on like later riders, but did get hail and a little snow. A little windy too, as in fight-to-keep-your-bike-up windy.

A nice day, all around.

An embarrassment of debris riches

What are these things? They look like springs. They're steel (magnetic), their ends are sharp, and they were strewn in the bike path on Dexter. I picked up all I could find, but I'm sure I missed some.

I'm pretty sure they're the remains of tire chains. People in Seattle get only sporadic practice in snow and ice, but sometimes it's very slippery and Seattle is a hilly town. So people put on tire chains, but because they don't get practice, they buy lousy tire chains and put them on wrong. The result? Shredded tire chains make a wreck of the paint on a quarter panel, before spilling their guts on the roadway. Since the City takes a mild interest at best in street cleaning, late winter Seattle streets are a debris field of tire chain guts. Cars run over them until they end up where? In the bike lane.

So I and every Seattle biker gets to dodge bits of what look like purpose-built malice because why? Two reasons:
- Lousy tire chains that ought not be legal to sell.
- A city that cleans the streets approximately never, despite the fact that it would make the city money to clean.

Grrrr.

More debris, fielded

More debris. In this case, a nasty piece of galvanized flashing or some such. Lots of sharp edges. I rode around it in the bike path for two days, so on the third day, I stopped and picked it up.

Debris Field

In winter, Seattle roads are a debris field. The cause is a combination of winter conditions, stupidity, and the City's antipathy towards street cleaning.

As usual, I try to single-handedly make things better, with mixed results.

So I have a personal rule: the third time I see the same piece of hazardous shite in the roadway, I have to stop and pick it up. (Unless it's a broken bottle, in which case I sweep it out of the path of bikes and pedestrians, and hope for the best. I'm just not willing to pack beer-soaked glass in to work.)

Today's find: some weird metal bracket that seems purpose-built to cause flat tires and pedestrian injury. Nasty

More road spikes

26th Ave E at E. Galer St., Seattle. These two spikes are right where the road bends. Around the corner, south of this intersection on 26th, there is another spike. In the short time I stopped to snap this picture, three bicycles came by. How do these things get left by the city in the road? I think I have an eye for them, but most bicyclists and pedestrians probably don't even see them until they hit one.

Update: They're still there.

My letter to Nicole Brodeur on road diets

Dear Ms. Brodeur:

I read your column regarding the road diet for Northeast 125th Street. Not being familiar with this street, I decided to go out and see it myself. something I hope you get a chance to do.

On my visit, I noted several interesting things. First was how pleasant the neighborhood was, with mature trees lining the street. I can see why folks up there see potential for interesting retail to spread west from Lake City Way.

My impression of the road is that, despite a little rough pavement, it's entirely bikeable as it stands, although to be fair it's probably more challenging during times of heavy traffic. I didn't see any bikes besides me, but on a Sunday afternoon, there weren't all that many cars either. Lots of people waiting for buses though. Not a lot of good places for bus riders to get to or from the required side of the street.

As for the monster 8% grade hill, meh. I assume this is west-bound from roughly 25th to 17th. I rode up it in 2 minutes without breaking a sweat. Literally, 2 minutes. I timed it. I ride my bike quite a bit, but I'm well into my 40s and don't have the strength I did as a kid. Surely, there are some casual bike riders that would have had to work harder or go slower, but a lot of those casual riders ride city bikes or mountain bikes with very low gears (I was on a road bike), so they can comfortably go quite slow. I reckon there are riders that would be intimidated by that hill, but I can't imagine there are very many riders who are not able to comfortably ride up it if they tried.

Why don't more bikers ride 125th? As for me, I ride in this area quite a bit, and I've never ridden 125th because, well, I didn't know it was there. Now that I've ridden it, I'll probably ride there now and again. It's actually better than the other ways I've been getting from Lake City Way to 15th. One thing this controversy might to is get more bikers to try 125th, and when they do, they'll probably like it. Lots of bikers ride Lake City Way, and southbound there are two hills far more formidable than the hill on 125th. Taking 125th replaces the steeper and more dangerous of the two Lake City Way hills with a shorter, easier hill having better sight lines.

So what does SDOT need to do for bikers on 125th? Nothing.

But the road diet isn't for bikers anyway. It's for pedestrians, and those bus riders I saw. 125th today is like Stoneway when I used to cross it walking my son to school. It was scary to cross, especially in the winter. After too many close calls, I ended up carrying three bike flashers with me so that cars would see us in the crosswalk. Sometimes that didn't feel like enough. It's worlds better now.

Businesses were worried about the road diet on Stoneway affecting them too, and it has. For the better. Slower driving speeds make people more likely to notice interesting businesses, and more willing to park. (Ever tried parallel parking on Aurora?) So I hope the road diet is as good for business on 125th as it seems to have been on Stoneway. I can't see anything special about 125th that would keep a road diet from helping business there.

When the road diet goes in, there will be space for bike lanes, and I suppose the city might as well put them in, at least westbound, although eastbound is probably better off with a little bit wider lane and sharrows. A bike lane or sharrows would both signal to bikers that they should give 125th a try. Had I seen such an invitation in the past, I would have taken it, and discovered a pleasant little neighborhood I'm now pleased I know about.

Regards,

- Erik

Nickerson Street Road Diet

Drove the dieted Nickerson today. (Planned on riding it, but had another errand to run....) Maximum speed: 36 mph, probably a 10 mph improvement. Average range of auto speeds: less than 10 mph. So far, looks like the diet is working.

There are bike lanes, but this clearly is not bike-centric infrastructure. Bike lanes disappear when the space is needed for turn lanes or for room for cars to wait at the 5-way snarl at the approach to the Fremont Bridge. I think that's the right call, though. The road diet as implemented should have negligible impact on car capacity (of which there is excess anyway) while increasing bike capacity and giving a clearer signal to all road users that bikes belong on Nickerson.

As for pedestrian safety, the actual reason for the road diet? Traffic speeds are closer to the legal limit, with ample traffic capacity. The street now complies with national standards for crosswalks, and the street feels less like a waste land and more like a neighborhood. Everybody wins, even if they aren't ready to admit it.

Everybody, that is, except a few people who think that driving 50mph through a college campus is somewhere in the Bill of Rights.