Inna-gadda-da-something

A tale of many hills, and some trail mix, and a ride well equipped with medical staff posing as riders. Or something like that.

Saturday was an impromptu 'Low Hills' ride. Which means not too much total altitude, lots o' pain. It also had some unplanned excitement. I will elaborate.

The ride featured a number of short but steep hills, of which the first was Altamont. Altamont has both steepness and climbing right before it, which adds to the challenge. It was also a lot prettier last year, when it was lined with huge eucalyptus trees. They seem to have cut them all done. Safety, I guess, but it does look so sad now. Also, unlike last week, I lost my bike computer a total of zero times. This is a decided improvement.

Anyhow, at the top of Altamont, one of the riders, Adrienne, was feeling pretty bad, and it turned that we had both a retired cardiologist and a cardiology nurse on the ride. The whole group accumulated at the top of Altamont while discussion went on. A borrowed heart rate monitor showed that her heart rate was very high - 220 for a brief time! The group stayed at the top of the hill for some time trying to figure out what to do, and after it was clear that her heartrate wasn't going right back to normal it was decided that she needed to go get checked out at a hospital. Mark, another rider, volunteered to go back to get his car and drive her to the hospital. Meanwhile she felt better enough to stand up and give out some Clif Shot Blocks.
Finally Mark arrived and they went off to the hospital, or so we thought, and the group continued.

The group en-masse quietly skipped the optional climb up Golden Oak (aw) opting to leave that pain for another day, I guess, and shortly after we regrouped at Alpine and Portola, a truck pulled up, and out came Mark with his bike. Apparently Adrienne was going to drive herself to the hospital, which seems a little unusual, but whatever.

After that we climbed Westridge from the Portola side (not nearly as bad as from Alpine, I can say) and I actually (dare I say this?) felt - strong. Which is kinda nice. The pics I took show a bunch of riders in front of me, but I stood up after that and spun past them. Just to see if I could. 'Twas nice. Westridge got the group strung out enough that by the time I went down Portola, I had no real certainty that I was actually with them anymore. No one in front, no one behind. By sheer luck and guesswork (not enough route sheets, so I didn't know the route) I made my way to the Woodside General Store, and there found the regroup point.

Later we were going up Canada, and noticed a motorcycle cop appear across the road and flash his lights to pull over a cyclist going the other way. Apparently the periodic stop of cyclist running across the top of the T with Jefferson was going on. I stayed with the small subgroup who turned off to climb Godetia, and at the top a very nice :) young lady who was driving by stopped to warn us about the cop below who was stopping cyclists. Proof that not all the Woodside motorists are hostile.

Anyhow, rest of the ride was pretty uneventful, and the Lakeside climb was rewarded with a nice view.

Oh, and on my way to the ride start In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida was playing (no idea when I've heard that last) so it was going through my head the whole time.

Pics:

Mmm. Soup.

So, two rides, one post. Anyhow.

So I got in about 100+ miles last weekend, which is not bad. My legs were telling me about it for days. The main ride I wanted to do was on Sunday, but an impromputu ride was called for Saturday, and I hadn't ridden for weeks, so I figured I'd do that as well.
However, the night before that Nick asked me if I wanted to take him riding, so of course I did that preferentially. So Saturday morning, bright and early and cold, I headed out with him, intending to try taking him up Mt. Eden for the first time. Unfortunately, one of us (guess who) wasn't wearing anything covering their ears (note: cold) and he actually gave himself a headache from the cold going downhill. :( So we turned around before we even got to Stevens Canyon. Next time, I guess.

It was still early enough to go on Saturday's ride to Los Gatos, so I did so upon returning home, leaving my poor son sitting upon the couch.



That ride was good fun, and I felt just fine for having not been on the road for a couple of weeks. The one problem was that five minutes before I had to leave my bike leaned up against something in the garage that freakishly snapped off the center of the mount for my Garmin Edge, so that it wouldn't lock into place.
I figured it would last for one ride.
Wrong.
Fifteen minutes in I heard an odd noise and looked down to see that my computer was gone!
Fortunately, some nice person riding a bit behind me saw where it had gotten to, off in a pile of leaves by the side of the road, or I would never have found it again. 'Twould have been a costly ride.
Stuffed it in my pocket for the rest of the ride, needless to say.
Saw some nice new (for me) roads going back through Saratoga, but no pics at all from that ride, alas.

So I made sure to get a replacement mount that day and put it on, using a cable tie tool to make it nice and tight. Perhaps a bit too tight, see...



Next day, the ride to Pescadero for lunch at Duarte's. And what do I find at the start? I can't get the computer to snap into the new mount. Hadn't tried that part, it seems. I didn't want to force it and break another one, so I improvised and put Mr. Edge into my handlebar map holder. Frustrating, though. Especially as people kept giving me helpful suggestions on it, and I was trying to ignore the whole matter, as there wasn't anything I could do right there.

Clearly I wasn't meant to use a computer last weekend.
So, a pretty good ride, all in all. I was going strong for most of the way to Pescadero. I was sure I was going to make a new personal best up Old La Honda, but ended up tying my previous one, at 31:30. At least that's a minute faster than the last time. I am convinced that eventually I will lose enough weight to get some respectable times.

I did all right going up Haskins, also, and then oddly I lost the group after the descent on the other side. Didn't catch them until I pulled into Pescadero. However, at least I had many animals to view on my way in. There were horses, sheep, cows, llamas...

So, the main event. I was totally famished at this point, so I don't know that the food was really delicious, but I can say that I successfully obtained the famous artichoke soup and green chile soup combo, with some nice fresh baked bread to dip in it. Yum. And, as I was the only one to not have any beer, I felt quite justified in having a bit of apricot pie to go with it. After all, why ride if you can't replenish some of those calories with tasty treats?

After lunch I'm sure I was lagging, for some reason I was just not keeping up enormously well on the little hills on Stage, and probably part of that was anticipating Tunitas Creek to come.
On the down side, when I got to the end of the rough part on that the other riders had probably been waiting there almost ten minutes. On the bright side, the last time I was going so slow that my Edge kept autopausing because it thought that I was stopped. At least this time I was going about double that speed, and with a heartrate about 20 bpm less, as well.

So I suspect that I could actually have physically gone up a bit faster than I did. As it was, once again once I got past the steep part I was able to go pretty quickly, because it feels almost like it's flat by comparison with what precedes it. The odd thing about the rough part of Tunitas is that I think I actually went faster there than on the earlier part of the climb. Anticipating it was worse than actually doing it, at least this time.

On our descent down Kings Mountain, Kathy, in our group, took a spill. Fortunately no injuries. I was about fifteen feet behind her and it was extremely alarming to see her bike suddenly slide over on a turn and hit the ground. She basically looked like she bounced off the road and then leaped off her bike and went running down the hill. This is probably responsible for the lack of injury. I've never seen anything quite like that.

By the time we got back, it was dark, so I got a certain amount of chastisement, but it was a fun day.

And there, I've blogged just in time for the next ride.

Pics here.

Nick in a suit

Nick in a suit
Originally uploaded by BetaMoose.

OK, this picture was amusing enough I had to blog it. Nick had a mock trial at school and needed a suit, so I loaned him one of my ancient and long disused ones. Since, after all, he was biking in it. Huh. I could start wearing suits as cycling gear.

Also, Nick holds up this post from someone at my alma mater as an example of why he dislikes a certain best-selling book so much.

The Trail and beyond

deSo despite my legs being worn from 65 miles or so on Saturday, on Sunday Eric and I went for a ride. Since the previous week we had considered but decided against going to the end of the Los Gatos Creek Trail and exploring, I thought we could try it this week.
At this point I need to interject that while I really like my Garmin Edge, the software they bundle with it is utterly worthless. It's not that it's broken, per se, it's just so limited that you quickly learn to avoid doing anything with it. For example, I tried to use it for my previous post to figure out how many miles I was into the ride when I saw the accident. But no, to do that I'd have to zoom the ride profile, and while Training Center has a zoom button, for some inexplicable reason it only zooms one axis, leaving the horizontal axis always at full scale.
I fondly remember the badly translated from German software that came with my Ciclosport CM436. It had garbled menu names, and the word 'Schnauf!' appearing seemingly at random, but you could zoom any which way into your ride.
Fortunately, there's services like MotionBased, and free software like SportTracks, which make the device useful.
Where was I? Oh, right.
So I scribbled some notes on what turns to make after we got off the trail, as my attempts to create a course for my GPS device failed around 1:30 in the morning before the ride, and took them along.
I figured it would be a flat ride, going along a trail, after all, so of course I was wrong. After some initial climbs on Peach Hill, Canon, and Villa Montalvo (I waved at the site of my accident last January when coming down from Canon, but very very carefully...) we had the bright idea of trying to avoid riding along Saratoga Los Gatos road, and having less traffic to deal with.
This involved repeated side trips along roads that really really looked like they'd take you south, and climbed, and climbed...and dead-ended.
Eventually we stopped turning on them. The first road we bypassed in fact turned out to go into Los Gatos. And for that matter, the very first intersection we passed after Villa Montalvo was the route we were looking for, that went all the way to Los Gatos without going along the main road, only it was a labeled 'Not A Through Street'. Note that none of the dead ends we encountered were labeled as such.
I really should have known.

Be that as it may, we then went on to the trail, took it to the San Jose end, and miraculously my little page of scribbled turns got us into known territory. I guess it's when you think you know where you are that you get lost.
Photos here

So this blog is going to be different from what I expected. I figured on a few comments about the weather, maybe an interesting sight or two. Maybe even a tough climb (gasp)! Regardless, it had more excitement than some.

Anyhow, so this was the Western Wheelers annual Candy Classic ride, so called because it stops at a tasty bakery in Burlingame. About 24 miles in to the ride, as I was climbing up the small hill to the Bunker Hill offramp I heard a noise that sounded like what you hear when a truck goes by with no cargo and the load bed bangs around.

I glanced to my right just in time to see a vehicle with a rather smashed in hood rolling over and stopping on its right side, on the embankment in the middle of 280.

I yelled ahead to the people in front of me, but they'd already seen it happen. When I got to the interchange a minute or so later, we milled about for a bit not knowing what to do. People fumbling for cellphones, etc.

In less time than it takes to tell about it, we suddenly noticed that Mike (default name for Western Wheelers members, I'm starting to realize) was down the embankment and darting through the now mostly stopped traffic to get to the truck. It was smoking slightly, and there was understandable concern that it might do something bad, like, say, explode.

Fortunately, there were no explosions, and as we watched anxiously Mike helped get the driver out of his pickup. It seemed like there was another cyclist also helping, but where he came from (or went to, for that matter) I don't know, so maybe I imagined that.
Edit: Well, I just uploaded the pics, and I guess there was another cyclist. Mystery Rescue Cyclist.

After what seemed like a long time, some cars finally stopped and other people got out, so that we could safely leave the scene. Apparently the driver was an older gentleman who'd fallen asleep at the wheel and crashed right into the pillar holding up the overpass. Amazing that he'd survived. Sounded like he was in pretty good shape, just cuts and bruises.

Anyhow, that was the most excitement for the day. We continued on, climbed through Hillsborough, saw the Spreckels mansion, and after lunch at the Steelhead brewery, headed back via the trail along the bay.

Only other minor anecdote I have is that shortly after his rescue activity, someone called ahead that Mike was behind fixing a flat. It must have been a bad one, because it took like fifteen minutes, and while we were waiting, I was chatting with a group which included Mike's wife Priscilla, who commented, "I wonder who we're waiting for?" "Um, Mike, that is, *your* Mike..." "Ohh...."

Further edit: I notice one or two pictures that require explanation. The picture at Arastradero I took simply because right then a car zoomed into the preserve parking lot, with the Macarena blaring through closed windows. So I took a shot of the group with the Macarenamobile behind.

Pics here.