Still swimming yes, but photos at the Y pool.... yeah, not so much.

Now mountain biking, yeah, that's photogenic.

Obligatory shot passing one of Tamarancho's famous signs.

Starting to like that place quite a bit.

What has 5 toes and is black and blue?

My left foot.

No workouts this week. The foot was so bad I didn't even want to be pushing off a wall with it at the pool. Worked on some home projects instead. Got some circular saw skills going!

Thoughts of broken bones faded this morning so it was on with the scheduled weekly ride.

Saratoga Gap. Like so:

The ride is an out and back with a big loop at the far end. We did the loop clockwise and felt like that was the right choice, but you could do it counterclockwise if you are willing to hike a bike about 2 tenths of a mile where the trail climbs over 20% grade. It was a real brake-burner in the downhill direction.

If you are old enough to remember Carvel ice cream cakes you might think like me that the loop is shaped like Fudgie the Whale

You think?

Nice place to ride for a couple of hours on a fine December day. Not too hard, but not unrelentingly easy either. And the price of failure in the tricky bits is pretty low, so it just encourages you to have a go and see if you can get around that rocky switchback or climb up that root staircase.

Annadel again.

Cooler weather makes for more fun here.

Still a workout though. Once again Annadel is where I record an new highest heart rate on a bicycle. 193 this time. Again climbing Two Quarry.

[Click to see original size image]

And yeah, it looks like the new elastic strap for the heart rate monitor needs a bit more tension to deal with the shaking forces in the rock gardens here.

Moving time: 3hr46mi
Total time: 4hr17mi
Distance 25.4 miles
4200 feet of climb. That's gonna leave a mark.

Last time we were here: Annadel two months ago.

This time:

[Click to see much bigger original image]

I got separated from the rest of the group and did a bonus out and back on the lower part of Marsh Trail. Nothing like an extra 3 miles with 500 feet descending and then climbing.

Possibly related to the above detour, we finished the ride in the dark and had to walk a couple of rock gardens on the appropriately named Cobblestone Trail. But that's just what we in the business call leaving more for next time.

Kick drills --threat or menace?

Kicking is hard.

Especially front flutter. I swear if I didn't push off the wall at the start I'd never make it. By about 40 meters in it feels like I've stopped and have begun going backwards. At least, if I keep my head up to breathe. If I lie flat in the water, face submerged, then I start moving just in time to need to breathe again.

This may be a long slow process.

It was interesting to note though how easy normal crawl seems to feel in comparison now. I can do 100s with breathing every 4th stroke (and 50s with every 6th), which is new, and may be pretty useful since it isolates technique. It is also faster than going all-out but breathing every other stroke.

October: breathe right month
November: kick month
December: find a coach month? Might be a bit early.

Return to JMP. Also; trial and error.

Did some loops of Joaquin Miller. Intended to do all descents on Cinderella and climb back up as many different ways as possible. Each time down I'd click a clicker and see if the suspension felt better or worse.

The rebound damping on the Rockshox Revelation seemed pretty fast at a middle of the dial setting so it got cranked up to where it felt like the clicker was actually doing something, 19 of 22 (3 from turtle). That was good but felt a bit slow to reconnect the wheel to the ground over bumps. Took out one click and it felt very good after that.

The amount of time it takes me to get down that trail has plummeted in just a few months. It ain't gonna get much faster though since I think the 15mph limit in the park is a good idea given how popular the trails are with hikers, etc.

It may be time to try Chapparal. Or even to try climbing up Cinderella, which I don't think I've attempted before. My climbing over technical stuff needs lots of work. $2 hill just baffles me so far. Most of the big HR spikes in this graph are trying to go up it.

Oh, and this little dude was hitching a ride with me at the end.

Water Dog again

[Enclicken to embiggen.]

Last time we tried to ride everything in the park at least once. Moving time was 2:02. Total time was 2:40. Mileage was 12.

This time we tried to ride the good stuff with a good flow. Moving time was 2:04 out of 3:00. Mileage was 11. It was a bit damp after yesterday's rain. We finally got to the bit of Chapparal we missed on the first ride and it was a steep climb.

Finally rode the very bottom steep bit of Berry. Stopped above it and had to talk to myself for a good minute or two to just get back on the bike and let it roll to the point of no return. Felt like I was being electrocuted just standing there thinking about it. The rational mind knew it was not impossible but sometimes that doesn't count for much.

Oh, yeah, and this time I was at least game to try riding over the roof of the Rambler but pedaled too hard and spun the rear tire and nearly fell off the bridge. Something to work on for next time...

Dirt: we found it.

The size is a lie!

Bought some new tires for the mountain bike. Current ones are WTB Wolverine 2.2. They are good for the fire roads around here, and were very good for the not-very-technical and part pavement bike leg of the Tinley's offroad triathlon, for example. But they were making me wonder if I'd be having more fun on the rocky, rooty single track if something more grippy were on the rims.

Enter a Maxxis Minion DHF for the front and a Maxxis High Roller for the rear. Due to my limited internet skills these were ordered in 2.35" and 2.1" sizes respectively. Concerns about pushing the bigger front tire disappeared once I saw it mounted.

See for yourself.

The WTB clais to be 2.2 and is 2.15. Good effort.

Main cross section of the tire is the same width.

Maxxis has different ideas about sizing. Taking the calipers straight off the 2.2 tire and holding them over the allegedly 2.35 tire shows plenty of gap.

Maxxis math says 2.35 < 2.2.

Actual size of the "2.35" is 2.0.

The weird thing is, they actually sell a 2.0. This ain't it though.

And the 2.1 HR is small as well.

Actual size 1.9".

Conspiracy theory man says maybe this is a kludge to compete on weight. Our 2.35 is lighter than the other guys because it is undersized. Dunno. This set of tires is almost a half pound lighter than the last set. Very interested to ride 'em.

Windy

As windy as it was during today's road ride, the wind got even stronger after the sun went down. So much so that it seemed like a good idea to look up how to estimate wind speed based on observable effects. The online forecast for the area was pretty useless. 10-20mph they said. Sustained, maybe, but the gusts are pretty frequent and strong. Dust blowing off the ground into your face: check. Snug fitting ball cap trying to blow away: check. Small limbs falling off trees that are in near constant motion (branches, not just leaves): check. Boards popping out of fences: check. Dog's floppy ears standing up if he faces the wind: check.

Matching some of those to this chart puts us into Gale and Strong Gale territory.

[Source is NOAA]

Perhaps that bit of geeking out was a bit excessive. But it does relate to this blog if we go back to this afternoon's ride. Normally the wind around here blows eastward, coming off the Pacific. There's a big hill (10% for over half a mile) where you can hit 45 on a typical day straight into that ocean breeze. On a calm day add a few mph. Today the wind was behind you coming down the hill and if I didn't have motorcycle racing in my background I'd have been dragging the brakes for sure. But 54mph was a bit more than I expected. If you were willing to bomb that hill in the dark right now you could probably hit 60. You go ahead, I'll stay here and drink Belgian ale and watch Stargate SG-1 reruns.

[Click here if you don't have bionic eyes.]

Data:

[Blogspot shrinks the image to fit it in standard blog width. You click it to make it full screen.]

Still working on the swim/bike/run, it just looks like it is all mountain biking all the time now.

Rematch with China Camp today.

Did some stuff I didn't feel up to the first time. A lot of the stuff that looked crazy to me before looked pretty tame today, but some of the new stuff was either gnarly or skinny and the tension level was still a bit higher than it needs to be. This was pretty much the full, good stuff loop.

18.4 miles
2800 feet of climb
2hr54min moving time, 4hr02min total time. Stopped time seems a bit high. Made me wonder if the app calls anything below x mph "stopped" but after looking at the data, not so much. But if anyone needs the lat/long of the porta-potties, let me know.

The track:

[Click for full size image]

The data:

[You can tell the elastic in the heart rate strap has had it. Flat bits in the graph mean no new data for a while because the monitor isn't held against the skin.]

[Click for full size image]

Waterdog, Belmont CA

Today's ride was at Waterdog Park in Belmont.

Park map looks like hya:

[Click for bigger image]

The track from the ride looks like ya:

[Click for bigger image]

Note that the track covers almost everything in the park proper. Just one segment of Chapparal got left out where we turned off to other connecting trails. [The lake loop trail looked like it was underwater. We passed on that too.]

It's an interesting trail system tucked into a tight space, closely surrounded by neighborhoods. Not unlike Joaquin Miller in Oakland, some of the perimeter trails run right along lines of backyard fences. You may smell more than one barbecue as you ride.

Lots of fall line stuff. Not too many ledges or high risk features. Lots of short hard climbs. A very up and down place with hard pack topped with loose crumble. Really made me wish I had remote lockout for the suspension.

A couple trails have good long hairpin practice zones. Like this one (Finch) we did up and down.

[Click for bigger image]

Today's ride was 12.3 miles, which required repeating some sections.
2100 ft of climb.
2hr02min moving time
2hr40min total time
Average heart rate for me was 144. Probably because we exited on a fire road with a long easy decline.

And yeah, don't believe Google Maps when it tells you where the park entrance is.

Skyline trail in Napa ain't bad.

Today's track looks a little something like this.

[Click for bigger image]

Moving speed was a bit slow but you want to save a little something on the easy bits here as the tricky bits require short bursts of power.

One tricky bit was so tricky, that even when I dismounted and tried to walk through, I slipped and fell and did a nice shin-grind across the top of a knife edged rock. Like so:

[Click for bigger image]

Words may have come out of my mouth at that moment to express the sensation, but they probably don't bear repeating here.

Elevation chart with workout data hyar:

[Click for bigger image]

Short story: 2 hrs moving time, 30 minutes stopped. 1800 ft elevation. Average heart rate for me was 144 which is a bit low (let's do another loop!) but peak was 184 and there is no shortage of peak effort spots in this park.

This guy drove us all there. He don't need no suspension, or clipless pedals.

[If you want a bigger image, what do you think you should do?]

Breathing right.

As opposed to breathing correctly. And as opposed to breathing left.

One thing that stood in the way of my swimming sans snorkel for a long time was an apparent inability to get my mouth out of the water long enough for a breath. It took a while to figure out that this problem only happened to the right, which unfortunately was the side I always tried at first.

Once the switch was made to the left side, the progress came. Now I'm sort of plateaued speed wise, so it seems like a good time to work on addressing technique issues.

This was strangely difficult to get around to. Getting in the pool and not having a distance/speed expectation to live up to is not the normal MO. After warming up for 200m it was time to see if I could breathe right at all. Rotation to that side is a bit unreliable, and my form was terrible, but there was finally enough base of experience to keep moving. Swam 800m breathing only to the right.

Success. Needs a lot more work over the winter, but having done something once is a big confidence builder, and a little confidence goes a long way.

Scott Tinley's Adventures offroad sprint triathlon

Today, I was leet (my competition number is as you can see 1337), and I knew it would be a good day.

[Click to see a bigger image]

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leet]

This is how good of a day it was:

Men 40-44 Results

Sort by bike. Amazing. 2nd in group. 12th overall. This has not been my experience in triathlon so far.
Sort by run. Even more amazing. 3rd in group. People were definitely passing me on the run but I guess none of them were in my AG.
Sort by swim and have a nice laugh.

At least this time I got in the water 5 minutes before the start and was acclimated when it mattered. The really alarming thing was how the 66 degree water felt warm compared to standing around in the cold morning air.

Said swim seemed a bit long and I made it longer by sighting badly a couple of times. First I swam way off course between the turnaround buoys. Then I swam to the wrong side of the pier next to the boat ramp and had to make a couple of 90 degree turns to go around it. In my defense I was swimming in a straight line towards the exit arch visible behind it! Probably swam an extra 50-75 meters.

See the course for yourself:

[Click to see a bigger image]

[Straight out to the orange buoy near center-image, then over to the other buoy on the right way out there, then back to the arch. Hey, the sun was in my eyes.]

Then with about two steps to go before the leaving the water behind, I slipped on algae and fell and did a snow angel in 10 inches of water before getting up and jogging slowly into transition. All together that's enough reason to think I could easily do better if I do this event again. On that note, the hill-climb + road sprint + offroad sprint trio seems sort of appealing as a concept for 2012. I'd certainly get some sighting practice.

Overall results if you want 'em.
Overall Results

Have to be a jerk and say that I beat Scott Tinley!

There's no GPS for the swim leg, because I was a dummy and forgot to push the start button on it as the race started. So it went with me on the swim in my cap for no real reason, except to slow me down a bit more in first transition. It was a pretty slow on overall but this is all in fun right?

Bike track:

[Click to see a bigger image]

Data tells the story:

[Click to see a bigger image]

On the first loop there was a lot of traffic and the single track was narrow. If you got to the side of it you were in soft sandy soil and tall grass. I think I passed 3 guys when they toppled over on climbs and I had to swerve around them. There was always someone to chase on the first lap, and it was hard to carry speed down the hills. Once we hit the fire road my roadie training showed itself and I was motoring past people who would have been really tough to pass on the single track.

The only drama was in the water crossing in Camp French. On the pre-ride I did last weekend, there was a way to ride over some rocks on the left and avoid the foot deep water in the middle. This weekend I arrived at speed expecting to see the same thing but there was a fallen branch covering the rocky line. Tried to go around it but drilled a big rock and stopped up short. Got a foot down but took a handlebar end to the thigh. That left a mark.

On lap two the trail was a bit more clear. I was saving it a bit more on the climbs so I'd have some energy left for the run, but letting it fly on the downhills. There was still some free time out there by laying off the brakes more. And I bombed the deepest water in the crossing without incident. Both laps were 28 minutes and change. GPS said lap two was 10 seconds slower.

Run track:

[Click to see a bigger image]

Data for show and tell:

[Click to see a bigger image]

Not bad. Had no real feel for how fast the pace was at first. Calf muscles were tight for the first half mile or so as usual. Just worked on picking my feet up as much as possible. Once the legs were loose and breathing had settled down I tried to stretch out the stride whenever I could. The hill at the end hurt and I tried my "I'm still looking for the escalator" joke on three people and only one of them deemed it worth comment.

Overall sub 9:30 pace is pretty good for me with hills at the end of a near two hour effort. All in all the effort level here in this 100 minute event was about the same as the 65 minute sprint in June. Not really sure if I had any such gameplan today but it worked out.

Missed the podium by less than a minute. Will this stick in my mind in future when I'm thinking about transition strategy? Perhaps.

This was the first time camping at an event.

[Click to see a bigger image]

It was good in spite of my concerns going in that it could be crowded or noisy. It was mostly racers nearby and they were toes-up by 10pm. The last family with kids within earshot was in bed by 10:30. After that it was just me sipping a beverage and tending the fire with a stick.

[Click to see a bigger image]

That and checking the stars. Nice dark sky around Lake Lopez. Could see tons of stars around the teapot asterism in Sagittarius. Could see different colors in the stars that make up the W of Cassiopeia. Saw three meteors. Wished I'd brought some binocs. Jupiter was by far the brightest thing in the sky and it is fun to check for its moons. The V of Virgo was clearly visible even before it had cleared the treeline.


This guy and his buddies were making noise all night, but I wouldn't say it detracted from the experience.

[Click to see a bigger image]

And this guy wanted to join the party but a kind soul moved him off to the side of the transition area so he would not get squished. My hand for reference:

[Click to see a bigger image]

Starting to trust the FS

After a month or so of riding a lot of more technical single track stuff, it was interesting to ride some familiar fire road yesterday and see how my perception of it has changed. It was 6 weeks since I last rode this loop.

It was ridiculously hot yesterday and normally that slows me down, but my time around the loop was about 10% faster than before, and I was even trying to save some energy for the run after. The climbs didn't seem as steep. Very noticeable though was how the long steep descent seemed more fun than sketchy. It is the highlighted bit in red above. 15% grade for over half a mile.

It was definitely a good practice brick before the race this weekend, and a good shakedown ride to get used to the new (thicker) grips on the bars and the adjusted ergos of the levers. A little bit of lube on the chain and the bike is good to go for the race. Maybe one more open water swim practice for me and I'm good to go as well.

HOT

95+ up in the hills in the sun today. Good day to get in a bike/run workout. 10 miles of Redwood bike loop with 1200 ft of climb. Transition is removing the rear wheel from the bike, stashing it in the back seat of the truck, changing shoes and hat and heading out. 3.2 miles just to be sure. Lost a few pounds in water weight even though water intake was probably 4 pounds.

Reserved a campground spot at Lake Lopez this weekend. That sounds like commitment to me.

Preparing for success

A few days ago I combined a sight-seeing trip along California's Highway 1

with a recon mission to Lake Lopez. The latter was so I could pre-ride the bike course for the offroad triathlon and see if I could manage the longer course (17 miles) and still have legs to run 6 miles.

Save it for next time, was the measured conclusion. This year, do the 11 mile bike course and then only have to run 3 miles.

Aside from evaluating the effort required, it was interesting to note that the lake levels have risen so much this year that it looked to me like part of a trail that you have to use to complete the loop had been washed away or submerged.

In this satellite image there is plenty of space between the trail and the water (you can see a blue car and a red car on the road near the bottom of the pic, which give you an idea of scale.) But now at the narrow point the water was within a few feet of the vegetation. Parts of the trail had been undermined and it didn't look safe to ride to me. Hike a bike territory.

Zooming out to show where this is:

And a bit more:

The first impression I had from the trip was not so positive and I was leaning towards skipping the event entirely. But the "a race is a race" mentality has been taking over and it really makes sense to do it for several reasons, not the least of which is that I'll no doubt have fun on race day.

Current plan is to try and get down there this Saturday early enough to ride the part of the course (used by the longer distance race) that I didn't ride last Saturday. Plus it will be a first to camp at a race venue. Getting more comfortable with camping as a means to an end will help me with a lot of things I want to do in the years to come.

My fitness seems pretty good right now. We'll see if I've learned anything from this year's triathlons.

Top of my list is get in the dang water before the race starts and get acclimated and ready to start out relaxed and confident.

Beef vegetable soup = Lake Temescal in September

The lake today was a greenish brown with red highlights here and there. Very cloudy too. But it was over 90 in town and if it was not the perfect day for a cool swim in the local lake there might never be one.

This was the first open water swim since the syncope. The time off not only didn't hurt me but maybe somehow helped. Right away without even thinking about it, it was a lot easier for me to swim straighter than I've ever done before without the benefit of a lane line.

The time in the water was more chill and fun than a workout, but the pace was OK and it was easy to do 2x the race distance I'm planning on doing next week. Short race for sure, but that which is good for ones confidence is good for ones confidence.

Terrible pic of the point to point route out to the lane swim area, then some laps, then point to point back in to shore. I usually just pick a buoy or something and swim toward it to practice sighting.

Annadel Park and a few comments about photoshop

Was shown around Annadel Park in Santa Rosa yesterday. Fun. Tiring, but fun.

Data looked like this [as always, click any image to embiggen]:

• Rode just about 21 miles, probably 20 of it was single track.
• Moving time was 3hrs even. Wall time was about 3hrs45min. Didn't seem like the talk/powerbar breaks added up to 45 minutes but it was a bit warm (85-90) and I'm still a noob with a bit more enthusiasm than technique, so a few breaks happened.
• There isn't a lot of steepness in the direction of travel (down or up) nor cross-trail (no cliffs or super-steep drops along the trail). But there are a lot of rocks. This is the stuff my all-mountain 140mm FS is supposed to eat for breakfast.
• It was a good thing I had my new Camelbak with 100 oz. of water given the temps and the lack of places to top-up.

Many (most?) dirt trails in parks and OHV areas are not (yet) labelled in Google Maps. There is a labor intensive way to see your GPS track on top of a labelled map. Use the online park maps and superimpose the GPS track.

Typical default output of a fitness log or GPS UI is like so:

All you want is the track though. In something like SportTracks you can set the background to be nothing. You just have the track over a white background. You can save that as an image. That app was not available on Mac when I gave up Windows a few years ago, so I switched to Rubitrack. That's where the image above came from. It doesn't offer a no-background track though.

However, it does export just the track to GPX. You can import that to another app, like Google Earth. In GE there is a slider too that adjusts the transparency of the background image. At full transparency, you get just the track, like so:

Now you open the track image and the park map image, align them to direction (North straight up is good) and scale and merge them. Here's the park map:

In this case the park map was 26 degrees off from North and needed a bit of rotation to align it with the track image. The scale was about 3 times bigger than what would fit on a screen easily. After getting things oriented and sized properly, the track image was overlaid as a layer on top of the map, and the opacity was set to 30% to allow the map to show through. If I'd made the track image background white it would have been neater. But this way you can see where the layers were.

This was an interesting ride. My favorite of the highly regarded local sites so far. [Others were China Camp and Tamarancho.] The trails here challenge your technique plenty, but if you screw up you have room to avert disaster.

Since I wasn't wasting so much of my energy and focus here on death grip on the bars, I was able to work on one-finger braking on the downhills and slow-crawling on the rocky climbs. After 20 miles of it I was tired but felt like I'd learned some things. It will be interesting to see if I could clean Two Quarry better next time. It wasn't dabs that were the problem, it was trying to climb too fast to keep up momentum. Heart rate hit 189 at one point and I had to just stop and gulp air for a minute. Keeping the thing on two wheels while spinning a little slower in a lower gear takes better balance but I think I made a little progress there.

And I was glad I'd taken the precaution of wearing my elbow pads. Didn't need them this week, unlike a few weeks ago at Tamarancho:

but my buddy John had a rare off and his elbows paid the price:

Oh, and Lepe's hit the spot on the way home.

The fish taco was good. Next time I'd get it with the combo with sides, rice, beans, etc.