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.

Left, right, left, right... eh, makes sense.

Decided that getting in some running real soon now would be a good idea if I really want to do a sprint tri in a few weeks, since after all it has a run at the end of it.

Hit the trails at sunset tonight and it felt pretty good. Legs felt very fresh. 6 weeks of nothing but biking was nice for letting chronic wear and tear repair itself.

The poor dog is really out of shape though. It might not be a bad idea to have a separate user ID in rubiTrack for him and his workload.

Once you get a race on the calendar it all starts to come together.

The Scott Tinley Adventure Offroad traithlon looks like a good one. Still not sure which distance to choose, but will probably go for the one that ends in the 3 mile run instead of the 6 miler.

Hit the pool today and was comforted that I have not completely forgotten how to swim in the last couple of months.

They put those at the check-in desk. Most likely some people would be like "oooh that's cold" and some would think it hot. Seemed a bit warm to me.

It's a trap!

It started out as a plan to add a little more trail to the round trip to home from either Redwood/Joaquin or Lake Chabot parks. When returning from any of those I'd been using the (paved) Skyline Boulevard. Leona Canyon open space looked like it was a good way to get back down the hill on dirt instead of pavement.

Paying a little closer attention to the map might have helped me out in two ways. 1) It is pretty obvious Leona is in a bowl and you have to climb back out if you go in, and you might avoid a little pavement but you might also sweat an extra bucket. 2) The trail that looked most convenient to use as the exit point from the park is landlocked by recent private development. I got within about 50 feet of the exit to the road that was supposed to be the final leg home but had to double back and drop into and climb out of the canyon one more time. What's one more 300ft climb among friends?

The trailhead comes out onto a private drive behind a gate:

Here's the whole route:

Data graph showing pretty clearly how no matter which way you exit Leona, you are climbing out to about 900ft.

At least I saw the yellowjackets swarming in and out of a hole in the ground right at the junction of the Artemisia and Leona trails before they saw me.

Stung twice in one ride. Ow. Ow.

Not to mention the endo I did onto my face when the one wasp stung me just as I was dropping into a steep rut and I grabbed the front brake with my left hand because I was trying to get the wasp out of my shirt with my right hand.

Going to mount a super-soaker full of RAID on my bike before riding in Joaquin Miller again.

OK maybe not. Today's ride was to check out the few remaining trails there I hadn't sampled yet. Fun, but man there is some steep technical stuff there and out and backs seem to involve walking on the uphill legs.

Also

http://forums.mtbr.com/shocks-suspension/2010-150mm-rockshox-revelation-settings-thread-591938.html

And apparently there are 22 clicks of rebound available, so the initial setting on mine of 12 off minimum was someone starting out pretty middle-ish.

Dual Air, and an alternate rebound knob.

After reading this I think I get it. [Most of my personal knowledge of suspension forks comes from motorcycles, so my context below may make more sense if you also understand said.]

http://www.pvdwiki.com/index.php?title=Tuning_Rock_Shox_Dual_Air_Forks

The "positive" air spring is analogous to a traditional coil spring. More pressure equals stiffer spring, and it takes more force to compress anywhere in the stroke versus lower pressure. Compression and rebound must be adjusted to suit.

The "negative" air spring is analogous to a preload spacer on top of the spring. It puts the positive spring under load and you have to exceed that load in order to initiate movement of the positive spring. Since it is a gas and not a solid thing, I think it will act a bit differently throughout the stroke, but that may be a good thing and make for a more progressive system.

And I don't need to replace the rebound adjuster that is missing on my bike. A 2.5mm allen (hex) key of sufficient length is all you need. The OEM knob is just a nice package job of an allen key. Until it falls off.

Conclusion:

Success. Now I have everything I need to make note of how my suspension was delivered, and which direction I should go to start using most of the travel on the forks instead of the 30-40% that's been used so far.

Dear Rockshox, Please make better user manuals.

This article does a great job explaining how the compression adjusters work on many of the Rockshox forks. The OEM user manual doesn't even identify which controls are which or what they adjust.

http://www.bikerumor.com/2010/08/20/tech-article-how-rockshox-motion-control-works/

Now if I can find articles that covers the dual air technology, and the rebound circuit, I'll be in control of my own fate.