After the Storm

 Amber, Edgar, and I rode the Back Bay ride today. It's a mainly flat route with some climbing at the end. It was crazy warm for the end of November, but actually quite nice. There was a tremendous amount of debris on the trails because of the storm a few days ago. Here's the first example.

I bet that will be gone next weekend. Parks and Recreation do a great job of maintaining this trail. Amber took a huge pull to the beach, making a point of passing as many eBikes as she could.

Here's a stupid sign - I wonder how members of the committee who came up with this could even ride a bike that slowly? By the way, this is on a downhill.

When you have rules this stupid, people won't even try

We ate at Ha Long as usual and headed home. The Vietnamese iced coffee kicked in at the top of Pioneer and we all headed to the park to use the restrooms. It was about 83F when we got back to the cars - a perfect day of cycling.

Wrong time, wrong ride

Last week I decided I needed to do a long ride on the Brompton with a medium bag attached, a semi-touring test. I thought it would be a good idea to make it a night ride after work to make it more challenging. So I decided to ride a century after work on the night before Thanksgiving.

I checked the weather forecasts and it looked like it would be cold with light winds in Anaheim on Wednesday night so I put fleece tights and a windbreaker in my bag and drove down to the Artic arriving about 5pm. It was already dark and about 70F with a light breeze. My wife texted me that it was very windy at home and would I be OK. I told her it was fine where I was. I noticed my aerobar bag rubbed on the medium Brompton bag so I had to slide it forward on the aerobars. I suspect it will not work at all with the large Bromton bag. I will have to try it out.

Everything went well as I headed to Huntington Beach but I realized my new Ergon GP4 bar ends were too high so I adjusted them at Huntington Beach. Then up the beach trail to Seal Beach with almost no trail traffic. At that point the temperature was down to 60F and as I headed inland towards South El Monte it dropped further so I had to put my tights and jacket on. By the time I got to the Shell on Peck Road it was down to 50F and I was at the limit of my gear. I prayed it wouldn't get any colder. However, the wind was still calm. Half my Monster went into the water bottle and half went into me along with half the grinder I had brought with me. I was pleased I was able to ride 50 miles on the Brompton without eating.

I quickly headed back to Seal Beach on the San Gabriel bike path because there was no way I was going to ride the Los Angeles river bike path in the dark, and when I was within five miles of the beach I suddenly got hit with a powerful cross/tailwind. It seems I should have checked the weather forecast for 11pm too, because it was much windier than the 5pm forecast. Of course I was about to turn into the wind - that goes without saying.

Once I got back to Seal Beach the temperature was up to 68F but there was a 30 mph cross/head wind all the way to Huntington Beach. The sand blowing across the beach trail was getting into my eyes, ears, mouth, etc. I'm surprised my Brompton has any paint left on it. Of course the Brompton bag did not help. There wasn't really much point going onto the aerobars with that sticking out in the wind. The weather sites say the wind was 27 mph, so we'll split the difference. I was averaging about 9 mph through this 13 mile section.

I started thinking about the other windy rides I've done and I can think of at least five that were windier. The worst was a 300k in San Luis Obispo. At one point we were riding across an exposed ridge with a 50 mph cross wind. It was impossible to ride our bikes. We had to get off, crouch down, and walk a hundred yards until we reached some shelter and could ride again. There were four Elliptigo riders on the event and one of them ended up being the first Elliptigo rider to complete PBP. I'm sure this is the ride where he realized he could do it. So, yes, it was bad but I've dealt with worse.

Of course, the turn inland kept me into the headwind but oddly it died down a bit as I headed inland for a while and then came back twice as strong once I was about 8 miles inland. I ended up with 96 miles (some math error somewhere). I had planned on finishing around 1am but didn't actually finish until 2:30am. If you look at my speed you can see where I hit the headwind at mile 70.

I learned a lot. 

• Do not assume the weather will be the same for the duration of the ride
• The aerobar bag and large Brompton bag don't work together
• I will need better cold weather gear for Ireland
• I'm still a badass

Loch Leven Hike

There is a 14 mile hike on our mountain that goes from a conference center at Loch Leven up to Angelus Oaks and back. It has a total of about 2600' of climbing and it's all on old highway 38 which was abandoned in 1933. There's quite a bit of decayed pavement left, heavily overgrown and with several land slides and fallen trees to negotiate.

My wife and I are fairly experienced hikers but our daughter, Amber, has hiked Mount Whitney twice plus Half Dome and a bunch of others just this year . We were happy she could join us. We started at 7:30am because even though this is October it's still Southern California and we expected it to get to 80F at 4000' later in the day. Fortunately at that point we would be headed downhill. 

The trail only has one short technical section. The rest is simply hiking.

We were all moving well as we climbed from 4000' to 6000', averaging 2.9 mph according to my phone which was running the ridewithgps app. We turned around at the Oaks Restaurant at Angeles Oaks where the food and service are excellent. I've only ever eaten there midway through this hike so I'm probably going to think any food is excellent at that point.

In some ways, heading down is harder because the load is now on your calf muscles instead of the larger quadriceps. I've always found the hikes with long downhill sections are harder to recover from. The temperature had risen to 72F as we started back but we had a light headwind which felt refreshing. The bugs were becoming a bit of a nuisance so we got our bug nets out

We got back to the cars in the early afternoon with an overall average of 3.3 mph. Total distance was 14.3 miles with about 2,600' of climbing. I'm not sure how we picked up another 500' on the way back.

So that's that for the year. We have such a short window for this hike between blazing heat and snow we missed it last year. Let's do it again next year.