I'm Back!

Sorry, my blog has been down for a while. And some of my old posts are gone. Call it technical difficulties… Anyway, I didn't quit riding while that was going on so I'll probably do a few posts over the next couple days to catch y'all up.

First, some thoughts about my riding in the past year. I’ve been keeping a log of my cycling over the past couple of years. It’s nothing too fancy, just an Excel spreadsheet with the date, miles, time and a brief description of my rides. I’m pretty religious about entering every ride, unless it’s a quick trip to the grocery store or a ride around the block with Adam on the trail-a-bike. I realize I’m a little late for the whole year-end recap thing, but like I said, I’m doing some catch up blogging here. So, here’s what my year of cycling looked like in summary:

I rode on at least 248 days in 2009. In total, I covered about 8,018 miles which is 2/3rds of what the average American drives in a year. I drive a lot less than the average American, so I’m guessing I racked up more bike miles than car miles last year. (Maybe I should keep track of car miles next year so I can compare.)

About 3,383 miles (42% of the total) were covered in my daily commute to and from work, or running errands on the way. I went into the office about 230 times during the year and 192 of those commutes were by bicycle. The rest were using public transportation.

I have both single speed and multi-speed bikes. I generally do my commute on the single speed, but sometimes ride that one on recreational rides too. Overall, 3,922 of my total miles (49%) were on a single speed or fixed gear bike.

Of my recreational rides, 25 were between 50 and 100 miles in length and 15 were over 100 miles. How long was my longest ride? It sort of depends on how you define “ride.” I did two 600k brevets both of which extended over more than a day, so I’m not sure whether to count each of them as one ride or more. Both were somewhere around 380 miles and I completed the first one in 28:50 and the second in 33:45. My greatest distance covered in 24 hours was a little over 300 miles covered between 6 am on June 13th and 6 am on the 14th on the first 600k brevet.

Okay, here’s the statistic that makes me feel a little bit sick: I spent over 533 hours riding a bike last year. Whoa, that’s a lot of hours. That’s 22 days on a bike. In my defense, remember that about 2/3rds of that was time spent commuting to and from work, and my commute doesn’t take much longer by bike than it does by bus. Still that leaves 180 hours last year that I could have spent curing cancer or inventing a better mousetrap or something more useful. Did I mention that one of my resolutions for the new year is to spend less time bicycling?

Are Too

I'm now two rides into my pursuit of my first R-12 award. Call it R-2. The R-12 is an award for riding at least one randonneuring event of 200km or more for 12 consecutive months. Yesterday I rode the Leschi - Auburn - Leschi 200 km permanent. I started with a group of five including Robert Higdon, Chris Gay, John Whitenack and Joe Llona. Joe was on his fixed gear bike (pushing a massive 78 gear inches).

I rode down to the start in Leschi in the dark with a fine mist falling from the sky. Not really rain, but it gets you wet, just the same. The temperature was about 45 degrees. The weather never really changed all day except that the light misting slowly turned into a light drizzle, and then just good old rain.

I met the rest of the group at the Leschi Starbucks and we hit the road a few minutes after 8:00. The ride heads south along Lake Washington to Renton and then out toward Maple Valley on the Cedar River trail. Every time I ride in this area south of Lake Washington, I think I need to get out here on my bike more. There are really some great roads and trails out there. We followed a little road from the Maple Valley highway out to Ravensdale that was as good as it gets, with fun little ups, downs, twists and turns.

From the first controle at Ravensdale, the route heads back west to Auburn. When we got to Auburn Robert and Chris decided to head home from there. I can't blame them at all. By this time the rain was coming down steadily and there was no sign that it would get any better. Chris was just getting over a cold and Robert just wasn't feeling right. So they headed for hot showers while Joe, John and I headed off into the rain toward Flaming Geyser.

The climb near Flaming Geyser park is the biggest climb of the ride. With grades up to about 8% and nearly two miles of climbing, it definitely gets your attention. I needed to get home by six, so on the climb I realized I'd have to get a move on to make it on time. I apologized to Joe and John for leaving and then kicked up the pace a bit.

For the rest of the ride I was on my own, riding through Black Diamond, Cumberland, Issaquah and then familiar territory along Lake Sammamish. The last part of the ride follows the Sammamish Valley trail and Burke Gilman trail from Marymoor Park, up to Woodinville and then down the West side of Lake Washington back to Leschi.

Just before University Village I got my only flat tire of the ride. In the dark. And the rain. I was a little over a mile away from home at that point and it would have been very easy to just walk the bike home and call it a day. But I still needed to make it to Leschi to finish the route, and then ride home from there. So, I reminded myself that it's good practice to fix a flat on a dark rainy night, and I fixed it and then rode on to the finish.

I finished the permanent in about nine and a half hours. With the ride to and from the start, it was a 142 mile day. A hot shower has never felt so nice.

Three Rivers and a Frozen Crow

I finally managed to ride a permanent this weekend. I joined Robert, Chris, John, Jeff and Alan for the "Three Rivers Cruise" out of Arlington yesterday. The Three Rivers Cruise is one of the most popular SIR permanents and it's easy to see why. The scenery is beautiful, the roads are mostly smooth with light traffic and the ride has very little climbing. It's almost too perfect for Randonneuring. Seems like it needs a rough section of road construction or maybe a steep mountain pass or two to make it feel more official. In spite of the lack of suffering and hardship, we had a great ride that even featured a sitdown meal in Concrete.

Starting the day by scraping frost off the windshield had me a little concerned about the weather. And then about a mile into the ride I nearly ran over a dead crow on the side of the road covered with frost. It was kind of beautiful in a creepy sort of way, with the white frost on the jet black feathers. But, even though it was pretty cold throughout the day, I mostly managed to keep all my bits warm enough.

Here's Chris and the rest as we're just getting started, a few miles out of Arlington. Chris selflessly got the lone flat tire of the ride shortly after I took this picture.



Hay, Robert! (get it? heh, heh.)



Heading east on hwy 530 about to cross one of the three rivers (don't ask me which one). The snow was low in the hills around us. For a while we even saw some snow along the side of the road between Darrington and Rockport. The temperatures were in the low 30s for the first three or four hours.



Robert, Chris and a nice shot of my ear as we were approaching Darrington.



The sun peaked out a few times throughout the day, though it never offered much warmth, nor did it stick around for long.



Somewhere along Hwy 530 I stopped to deal with some "mechanical issues" behind a tree. Here I am trying to catch the group again as they try to hide from me in the fog.



The road between Darrington and Rockport was a classic biking road. Smooth pavement, no cars, moss covered trees. It could only have been better if there had been shot blocks growing on the bushes.



Here's the group riding on Hwy 530 trying to pretend like they don't know me as I almost become the hood ornament on a minivan coming the other way.

Hwy 20 is closed for the season so Marblemount is literally a dead end town until the road opens again next spring. Still, they have a bike rack in front of the Shell station!



Snow in the hills.



We stopped at the Red Cedar Cafe in Concrete for a good hot sitdown lunch. Picking a place to eat wasn't difficult since some guys milling around in the streets told us that the Red Cedar was the only place in town that was open. One of the nice things about long bike rides is that it's impossible to find bad food along the way. Whatever you find is fabulous. Halfway through this meal, we started talking about what we were going to have for dinner.



I have a hunch that if this place had been open they would have told us that we weren't the kind of biker they were talking about. Not twenty feet from this sign, there was another sign on the street that said bicycles, skateboards and rollerskates were prohibited.



Here we are with full stomachs, moving a little slower now along South Skagit Highway.



Not sure what to make of this...



("I'm a lowlife. My name is asshole" is painted on the side)

Unfortunately the last little stretch is a busy section of Hwy 9 that's not terribly pleasant, but it's hard to complain since the other 90% of the ride is near perfect. We made our way back to Arlington at about 5:00pm, more or less in one piece and already talking about the next ride. Thanks for letting me ride with you guys!

Permanently Lame

I tried to ride my first permanent this past weekend but due to poor planning, and poorer execution it just wasn't to be. For the non-randonneurs (hi mom!), a permanent is basically a brevet without all the planning and hoopla. You can ride a permanent by yourself or with others. You just tell the official permanent coordinators what route you're going to do, when you're going to do it, and then they send you the brevet card and off you go. You record the ride in the brevet card and send it in to be blessed by the Pope or whoever it is who blesses such things, and you get credit just like any organized brevet. And what do you do with that "credit" that you get? Um, I'm still trying to figure that out.

Anyway, I had planned to join a few other SIR members for the Three Rivers Cruise on Saturday at 7:00am. The TRC is a 200km route from Arlington that goes through Darrington, Marblemount, Concrete, Sedro Wooley and ends back in Arlington. I've heard it's a very pretty route and fairly flat the whole way.

Well, I slept too long and didn't have my stuff together in advance, so I scrambled around in the morning trying to get my gear together, my water bottles and tires filled, etc. I headed out the door about 15 minutes late and then half way to Arlington realized that I had forgotten the directions to the ride start and some other key pieces of equipment. So after some cursing, I turned around and headed for home.

But, with nice weather and permission from the family to go for a long ride, I figured I couldn't completely waste the opportunity. After a cup of coffee at home I headed out for one of my favorite routes. It's a route I've done several times and it never gets old. I rode up the Burke Gilman trail to Woodinville, then up back roads to Snohomish. A little north of Snohomish I picked up Dubuque Rd which connects with Old Pipeline Rd and took me all the way to Sultan. From Sultan there's another nice little country road called Ben Howard Rd that gets me back to Monroe. Then it's familiar roads to Woodinville and home on the BG trail.

Here's a little stretch of the Burke Gilman trail:



The whole ride is just over a hundred miles and spends very little time on busy roads.



The weather was cool and beautiful, the trees were turning all those great Pottery Barn colors and lamas were friendly.



It just doesn't get any better than that. I also found some interesting road side debris. Somewhere along Dubuque Rd there was a big pile of vinyl coated canvas in primary colors that I'm pretty sure was a deflated bouncy house. Adam would have been thrilled if I could have figured out a way to carry that home.

Somewhere Bollenbough Hill Rd...

Let There Be Light

And the Randonneur said, “Let there be light.”
And there was lightAnd the light flowed forth from a light emitting diode.
And the light’s energy flowed from the SON*.
And the Randonneur saw the light, that it was good…

*Schmidt Original Nabendynamo

I’m finally entering the 21st century. Well, at least with regard to bike lights. I’ve been riding brevets with two Cateye HL-EL530 lights as headlights. I actually think these lights aren’t bad as far as cheap battery powered headlights go. They were able to get me through an SR series plus a 600k brevet that involved two full nights of riding over mountain passes. That’s something. But I have to admit that descending mountain passes in the middle of the night with those lights was one of the scarier things I’ve ever done. I was way out-riding my headlights at times and was lucky to have survived unscathed.

I decided that since it looks like I’m going to keep doing this Randonneuring thing--and I want to live to see my kids graduate from high school--I need to get a serious “lighting system” for my bike. And among Randonneurs, a serious lighting system generally begins with a Schmidt dynamo front hub. The brightest bike lights these days are battery powered, but the good battery powered lights don’t have the run time to survive a full night of riding without carrying heavy and expensive spare batteries or somehow recharging along the way. A dynamo hub powering an LED headlight comes pretty close to the light output of the battery systems and has the advantage of always being available, as long as you can keep the bike moving. Essentially your lights are powered by Fig Newtons and Gatorade instead of batteries.

So, I’m having a new front wheel built with a SON 28 hub by Peter White. Peter is the exclusive US distributor for Schmidt and his web site is the source of information on dynamo lighting systems not to mention a lot of other oddball niche bike gear. For a headlight, I ordered the Busch & Müller Lumotec IQ Cyo. I struggled a bit with this decision. The Schmidt Edelux and Supernova E3 are both very highly regarded but cost about twice as much as the B&M. After talking to Penny at Peter White Cycles and poring over every review I could find of these headlights, I decided the B&M light sounds like at least 95% of the light for 50% of the price. I also ordered a B&M taillight that can be mounted on the rear fender and wired into the dynamo.

Now I get to wait. Peter is going on vacation, so it’ll be a month or so before I get my wheel and lights. Stay tuned… once it arrives and I get everything installed, I’ll let you know how it all works.