How we used to ride

 I've been cycling since my early teens - let's call that the mid 1970's. I was thinking about the heavy five speed steel bikes with 36 spoke wheels, down-tube shifters, quill stems, seat post clamps, cotter-pins, and all that good stuff. But I especially thought about the lights we used to use. I found a picture of my first set of lights on the wonderful Sheldon Brown website.

The front light took a weird three volt battery that looks like two D-cells glued together. The rear light just took two D-cells.

For a poor English boy, Ever Ready was the only option available. My local Halfords didn't carry any fancy hardware. Those batteries only ran that weak light for five or six hours and they didn't recharge so they were good for two evening rides and they weren't cheap. Fortunately, in the deep English countryside it is so dark only one rider needs their lights on so David, Kevin, and I would save money by taking turns running our lights.

When I compare them to the Schmidt dynamo, Edelux front light, and Busch & Muller brake tail light that I currently use, supplemented by Cygolite front and rear rechargeable lights, it's amazing how far the technology has come. My lighting set in 1975 cost about $7 whereas my current lights cost a total of about $500 which would have bought quite a nice used car back then. Mind you, I save a lot on batteries now.

This web page says it all so much better than I can.

I had no computer, but I did save up and buy one of these mileage counters. You mounted it on the front dropout and a peg attached to a spoke would move the device one fifth of a turn every time the wheel rotated. The device assumed I had a 27" wheel and it had gearing to display the total distance travelled. I don't think it had a reset feature so I would have to memorize the distance at the start of the ride and subtract it. I stopped using it eventually because it was so hard to read while riding and I kept forgetting the starting distance anyway.

I don't remember ever wearing a helmet, either.

More beach riding - maybe a 200k in the near future

 I drove down to Yorba Linda park last Friday evening and rode from there to the beach and back starting at 6pm. It was 88F when I started which was pretty uncomfortable for me, but it cooled down quickly. For some reason, 80F at dusk is less oppressive than 80F in the middle of the day.

Ten miles from the beach I met up with a couple of strong young riders and we rode together at a pretty good pace down to the beach and back to Anaheim. We were riding a bit faster than I would normally ride solo and I knew I would pay for it the next day, but it was so worth it. At the end they asked me how old I am and when I told them they seemed pretty impressed. Made my day!

I rode 45 miles in 2:46 but it seemed much faster :-)

The next day Amber and I rode from Anaheim to Seal Beach and back. We were planning on riding Back Bay but the day turned out hotter than predicted, plus my legs were aching from last night. I haven't been to The Crema since the heat wave made it unpleasant to ride during the day, so that was nice. Although I love riding at night, there is one thing I miss about riding during the day.

It was 86F when we finished in Anaheim and I melted the last five miles. Nevertheless, it was a good weekend of riding.

I love night rides

 To commemorate 9-11 I drove down to Yorba Linda park and, starting at 6pm, rode to Seal Beach and back. When you've got good lights (and a pair of clear glasses) there's nothing like night riding to replenish your soul. Well, OK, there's probably lots of things, but I like night riding.

This heat wave seems to be tailing off and we're back to normal September temperatures, which is still hot but not deadly. The wind was predominantly from the North so I had to take it easy as  I rode into it on the beach path which was as crowded as you would expect on a nice Friday evening. Riding through an oblivious crowd of people is a great way to improve bike handling skills. As usual, there were cyclists with no lights and e-bikes going way to fast making us considerate cyclists look bad.

I had the chicken sandwich at Bistro St .Germain. You know how people like to take photographs of their food to send to their friends? I couldn't wait so I ate the food first, then took the photograph.

On the way back someone was letting off fireworks in the parking lot by the beach. Again, rather there than in tinder dry forest. I wish that chap in El Dorado park had had his gender reveal party at the beach.

I finished just before 11pm with 68 miles and feeling very happy.

Finally cool enough to enjoy

Those of us that live in SoCal have been living through a heat wave for the past two weeks so when I saw the high in Anaheim would only be 86F on Sunday I decided to do a night ride at the beach.

It was only 78F at 7pm in Yorba Linda so I jumped onto my bicycle and gleefully rode towards the beach into a gentle onshore flow. The sun set thirty minutes later and the temperature dropped to about 70 pretty quickly. Lovely.

Because it was so cool (64F at the beach), I decided to ride along the beach path to the end and eat at Jack-in-the-Box. The beach trail was quieter that normal, possibly because it was Sunday, and possibly because it was cool. Someone was letting off fireworks at the beach. Better there than in the tinder dry forest.

I ate meat at Jack-in-the-Box because there aren't veggie options and I needed more than just fries. Turning back South on the beach trail I had a tailwind and the trail had cleared out so I was riding along at 18-20 mph with a full belly, very happy. Even when I turned inland I still had a 5mph tailwind so I finished 61 miles in 4:22 elapsed. Not bad considering for eight miles of that I was constrained to 10mph.

Next weekend looks horrific. Why does the weather always get more extreme on the weekends?

Killer ride

 Normally "killer ride" would be a good thing but yesterday was painful. Amber and I decided to do the Sam Woo loop which involves riding from Anaheim to Dana Point, then Irvine, Huntington Beach, and back to Anaheim. As it never goes more than 15 miles inland it's normally a good route for a warm day but yesterday was extremely hot. It was still 85 when we finished the ride at 5pm. It must have been close to 90 in the mid-afternoon in Irvine - well outside my comfort zone. A brutal ride, not made any better by the fact I was still getting over a cold.

Oh well - I survived and I'm stronger now.

Unrelated to cycling, I've been reading about a huge controversy in Scotland about end-of-year exam grades. All exams were cancelled because of COVID-19 so the exam board tried to guess the exam results from teacher evaluations and in-course test results. Many students received grades that were lower than their teachers had recommended so there has been understandable outrage. Some people are asserting that the results were affected by the location of the school, with the grades of students in poorer locations being downgraded more often. 

So here's an image of a protester's sign I pulled from the BBC website. Can you see the irony?

Obviously, if you are claiming your exam results should be better, you shouldn't use the noun form "effect" where you should have used the verb form "affect". I have to wonder if this is why the BBC chose to use this image. The Brits can get fussy about grammar.

So, new app, "GrammarCheckMySign"?

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.