Cycling as therapy

First I want to send commiserations to my friend Shai who had a bad accident while cycling in the Santa Monica mountains earlier this month. I don't know the details, but his list of injuries sounds awful. Even worse, his $12,000,000 bicycle was scratched. Hope to see you when all the crazy is over.

I came across an article on news.bbc.com about a new scheme to encourage Brits to ride bicycles. To quote...

GPs in areas of England with poor health will be encouraged to prescribe cycling, with patients able to access bikes through their local surgery. 

The idea is that GP surgeries will have a stock of bicycles to lend, with training, access to cycling groups and peer support. 

In some cases, if they used them enough, patients would be allowed to keep them.

The government is also handing out fifty pound (about $70) vouchers so people can get their beat-up old bikes into rideable condition and go get healthy again. Can you imagine your government or healthcare provider doing this for you? Maybe one day. Right now they're probably too worried about you getting hit by a car and suing them.

I also came across an interesting article about boredom and how people deal with it. When I tell people I regularly cycle hundreds of miles they often ask me if I get bored. I don't. Not at all.

“I think everybody gets the boredom signal,” says James Danckert, who heads a boredom lab at the University of Waterloo, Ontario. “Some people are really, really good at dealing with it though.”

Seriously, there's a boredom lab? There's more than one? Can you imagine that first date?
What do you do for a living?
I work in a boredom lab.
Oh..... that's nice
It's more interesting than it sounds
It couldn't be less interesting

What do you do to avoid getting bored? Do you sing or calculate your arrival time at the next control? Do you listen to music or chat with imaginary friends? Do you play music in your head to the beat of your freewheel?

Amber and I have a new eatery to recommend. We've eaten on Main Street in Seal Beach hundreds of times but we always thought the Bistro St. Germain looked a bit pretentious. It isn't. It's superb service, french food prepared correctly, and very reasonable prices.

It has quite a bit of outdoor seating so they're still quite busy despite the current crisis. They are open until 9pm so it's an ideal place to eat during an evening ride. I'm planning on riding down there next Friday evening starting from the SART at 7pm.

It's now our backup for La Crema and our go-to for evening rides. There are so many things on their menu I want to try. Here is the lasagna which was amazing.

Another night ride on the SART

Last week Amber and I tried an alternative route on Paseo de Valencia to avoid that dangerous intersection of Cabot/La Paz/Muirlands and the I5 interchange. It adds a mile and 100' of climbing but we both agree it is much safer so I'm altering the route for the second loop of October's 400k to use this detour. Because it adds that extra mile I can move the turnaround from the nuclear power plant to a vista point which has the unexpected bonus of net reducing the climbing for this loop by 100' bringing it under 4000'

Here's the truncated route we rode with the detour starting at mile 45.7. The official route will be on Los Alisos but the bike path will be an option if you're familiar with it. I suspect the majority of randonneurs have no idea how much effort goes into designing a route. I wonder if people think I comp Amber just because she's my daughter. No, we are both heavily involved in test riding all my routes.

It has been so hot lately I've been riding the SART at night but I'm still worried about them locking the gates on me so I'm just riding from Yorba Linda park to Katella and back repeatedly. I started at 8pm yesterday so the temperature was in the mid 70's and the wind was dying down. It was almost dark and it was quite lovely.

I'm riding with my Cygolite Expilion set on the lowest setting, my Edelux II dynamo light, and a cheap but useful helmet light on the lowest setting. On the back I have my new Bausch dynamo brake light and a Cygolite spot tail light. The two complement each other very well because the Cygolite is VERY bright but has a narrow beam whereas the Bausch has a very wide beam.

I thought it would be interesting to video with the lights in my normal riding mode (lowest settings) and also with all the lights turned full on. Here's the normal riding mode...

.. and here's all the lights at their brightest settings ...

There were a surprising number of cyclists using the SART even at 11pm. Many of them had no lights at all and some of them had no tail lights. It's only because I had exceptional lighting that I didn't run into the back of them. This guy had a tail light but for some reason didn't think he needed to turn it on. He was wrong.

However, most of them had really great lights...

I ended a little after 11pm with 50 miles and over 800'' of climbing (lol I'm no mountain goat). Average speed was 16.1 mph. Time off the bike was only 6 minutes according to my ELEMNT.

The gates at Katella were still open at 11pm so this is two Friday nights in a row they haven't locked the gates. Looks like a pattern.

SART no longer locked

I drove down to Yorba Linda last night to ride up and down the SART from Yorba Linda park to Katella. The free parking area was overflowing with softball teams so I started from the pay area. Three dollars seems quite reasonable.

I had a new flexible mount Cygolite hotspot taillight attached to see how it fared. It has the best flexible mount I've seen. I attached it to a seat stay and adjusted the angle until the beam was roughly horizontal.

I started at 7pm as the sun was getting low. There was a fairly strong headwind.

As I turned on Katella I made a stupid mistake and allowed my knee to come out wide as I pushed down on the pedal. I pulled something in my hip and was in severe pain for a few minutes. I decided to turn around and ride back with a tailwind in case the damage was serious. Fortunately, after 15 minutes the pain mostly went away and I was able to complete the ride.

After 19 miles I was back at the car, grabbed some water and set out for a second loop. Even after the sun had been down for 30 minutes and it was starting to get darker, my GoPro still takes good pictures although you can see the exposure time has increased causing some blurring at speed.

It still amazes me how stupidly some people behave around cyclists. I literally had two people look straight at me and then step out right in front of me. Perhaps they don't understand that I'm travelling at 20mph. I don't know.In the video below I had two front lights on and the runner still thought I would magically teleport through him at the last moment.

I finished the second loop around 9:20pm, grabbed water and ate some food, and headed out for the last loop. I reached Katella at 10pm and the gate was still open. I finished the third loop at about 10:30 with 56 miles and an overall average of 16mph and a moving average of about 18mph.

I drove over to the ARTIC at Katella and walked to the gates across the SART. Even at 11pm they are all open and unlocked. I don't think they're locking the gates anymore. This means we will be able to start the October 400k at 5am which means most riders will finish around 1am and not have to take the road detour on the way back.

Let's hope they don't change their minds.