The Grand Tour is getting closer

Me wearing an old Grand Tour jersey

Amber, Edgar, and I have been training for the Grand Tour in June. They just opened registration and the route has changed a lot. Mostly for the better, I think.

https://ridewithgps.com/routes/27799496

The ride now starts in Port Hueneme at the Holiday Inn Express which is way more convenient and safer that driving 20 minutes from the end of the ride in Malibu to our Comfort Inn at Calabasas. It's a double loop, the first being 41 miles and the second being 150 miles. Yes, I know it doesn't add up to 200 miles 😢 and it's also slightly flatter.

This will be Edgar's first double century. He has a new Lynskey titanium gravel bike which will be ideal for him. It has 40mm tires with light tread so he will be super comfortable. I don't know what brand tires they are, but they puncture too much. Need to upgrade to Schwalbe.

It will be Amber's first major ride since giving birth earlier this year. She's naturally very fit so she will not have any issues. She will be riding her titanium Lynskey with 32mm Schwalbe tires.

I'm getting old and even though I rode a 300km brevet a couple of months ago, I'm slightly nervous about this ride. I will be riding my trusty Serotta titanium road bike with 28mm Gatorskins.

My wife will be baby sitting for the event. Because it starts at a hotel, Amber and Edgar can drop Camilla (their baby) off with my wife before the ride and hang out for a while afterwards. They live about a 40 minute drive away so they don't need a hotel room. It all works out really well*.

* Ask me again after the ride 😁

I've been watching a GCN video about tire pressure on YouTube. That's why I'm kind of fixating on tires right now. I've always known that wider tires are more comfortable but now it seems they can be more efficient too.

The SRAM online tire pressure calculator says I should be running 72 and 76 psi front and back. It has taken me ten years to reduce my tire pressure from 115 to 100 and I'm still too high. I'm not going to change the pressures for the 200km training ride this weekend, but I might try it on a shorter ride later.

Bikes on trainers need maintenance too

I've had a Trek Madone on a smart trainer for a year now, I know this because my Rouvy subscription just renewed. Lately it has been shifting poorly and the drive train has become very noisy. I cleaned the chain, but it only helped a bit.

Eventually it occurred to me that I couldn't remember the last time I replaced the chain. I've ridden about six thousand miles on it while it was on the trainer, and I had quite a few miles on the chain before that. I grabbed my Parks chain wear tester and WOW the chain was toast! You're supposed to replace the chain when it reaches 0.75 wear. This chain was at 1.0 and the tool still wasn't tight in the chain.

I had always assumed that an indoor trainer would not wear out a drive train as quickly because there's no road grime getting up into the mech. It seems it wears just as quickly inside as outside.

The chain was so bad I checked the cassette and found it was badly worn too. The chainrings seem OK for now.

So I bought a new chain and cassette from Amazon for a total of $80 (love Shimano) and installed them last night. I couldn't find my Shimano cassette tool (I think its in a shed under six feet of snow) so I bought a new one. The shifting is now silky smooth and the drive train is much quieter. I must remember to monitor the chain for wear.

One of the SPD pedals was very squeaky so I replaced them with an old pair from one of my (stuff-which-is-used-but-might-be-useful-one-day) drawers which solved the problem temporarily. I ordered new ones from Amazon (only $42). When they arrive I'll install them.

So with the chain, cassette, cassette tool, and pedals I have spent about $150 on my trainer bike which is about the same as my annual Rouvy subscription. The total I've spent on the trainer bike for a year of usage is about $300. I spend about 400 hours a year on the trainer. Sounds like a good deal to me.

I live at the top of a mountain and no local roads are suitable for bicycle riding. If I add up all the money I spend on riding outside, including maintenance, gas costs, wear and tear on my car, I spend quite a bit more riding about the same distance on the road.

I have the indoor trainer setup for convenience more than anything, but it turns out it saves money as well.

Not much chance of riding lately

We here in SoCal have been hit with a series of storms, the like of which we haven't seen in 30 years. I got out of my house for the first time in a week today. This is what my street looks like.

There's a road somewhere under that snow

I've had to shovel about two tons of snow just to get to the road. It's probably going to be even harder to get the two cars out. I had dug my car out, but the last storm undid most of that. The lump on the left is my wife's truck.

How many ton's of snow will I shovel to free these vehicles?

I haven't even been able to do much riding on Rouvy. If I have any energy, it goes towards shoveling. They're plowing my street as I write this. I'm keen to see how much of a berm they've saddled me with.

Using DALL-E to create imagery for YouTube videos

This may not seem to have much to do with cycling, and it doesn't. I have some YouTube channels and I have been playing with DALL-E to generate some imagery to make the videos more appealing. Here's an example.

I created a DALL-E account and asked it to create an image using the prompt "a cyclist on a long country road in perspective in the style of turner". I got this.

 A cyclist on a long country road in perspective in the style of turner

Actually it was one of four images. I chose this one because it encapsulated "long" the best. But it's 1024x1024 pixels. I want a 16:9 aspect ratio so I cropped it using Windows Photo Editor. I could also have used a technique called out-painting but that gobbles up DALL-E points. With cropping, the image looks like this.

Cyclist 16:9 aspect ratio 1024x576 pixels 1.08Mb

The new image is 1024 x 576 pixels - quite low resolution even for an impressionist painting. My next task is to increase the resolution. This task would be even more important if I had asked DALL-E to generate a photographic quality image  This article has some options and I tried both BigJpg.com and Upscaler because they both have the ability to test drive them before paying money. Both have failed miserably.

BigJpg can't finish an upscaling. With and without a free account, both attempts to upscale the image above ran to 95% done and then hung forever. If it ever finishes, I'll update this post. Well, after an hour it did finish but the download times out. My guess is the site didn't make any money and is now not supported. The owner is still happy to take your money, but you won't get anything for it. So that's a huge NO! from me.

Upscaler failed to produce an image and is also flagged as a malware site. 

I tried Topaz last, because the article doesn't mention it offers a demo option. The product is a downloadable app that costs $159 right now. I downloaded it and quickly realized it does a brilliant job. The demo does not allow you to save the image, so I took a screen shot instead. It looks like this.

Cyclist 16:9 aspect ratio upscaled using Topaz

You can see it has increased the resolution (you have to maximize both images to see the difference) but I don't really like what it did with the red flowers. I think I'm more comfortable restricting myself to asking DALL-E for painting styles that still look good in low resolutions.

Sticking with the low resolution image, here is the intro video I created for the 300k brevet.

DaVinci Resolve has an upscaler built in, but it adds a watermark in the free version. The paid version costs $300 and I haven't paid for it. It would make more sense for me to pay for DaVinci than to purchase Topaz.

Here's the same video using DaVinci Resolve's upscaling (please excuse the watermark). I think I'm going to have to buy a license for it. It's difficult to see the difference because of BlogSpot's video compression. So here are the two videos uploaded to YouTube.

No upscaling https://youtu.be/17N89x2GSQU

Upscaled with DaVinci Resolve https://youtu.be/KNaRxN3r-gE

Upper SART reconnaissance

I signed up to ride Greg and Stacy Kline's 300k on Feb 11th which uses the entire length of the Santa Ana River Trail. Last time I was on the upper half (about a year ago) the homeless problem had become quite severe so I thought I should check it out.

I rode the top 10 miles after work on Friday evening and I'm pleased to see it has actually improved slightly. There are still several large encampments in the river bed, but almost no tents next to the trail and nothing encroaching. I still wouldn't feel comfortable being out here at night, and I think I'd like company during the day.

I didn't get a chance to ride the rest of the upper SART, hopefully it's no worse.

BrooksEngland.com website hacked?

I received a notification from YouTube this morning saying that two of my videos had been removed for violating their policies.

It looks like they are objecting to me posting a link to the Brooks saddles website. When I browse to the website I can see that Google has flagged it. As Brooks has been in business for over 100 years I have to assume they've been hacked. I bet there are thousands of YouTube videos that link to this site.

I hope Brooks sorts this out quickly and YouTube puts my content back online soon. I am impressed with the way YouTube handled the problem. Their algorithm surgically disabled the link with an explanation. Hopefully when the Brooks website is unflagged the algorithm will enable the link again.

Tour de Palm Springs

The 25th Tour de Palm Springs will be held on Feb 11th 2023. I decided to ride the route on my Brompton yesterday. I rode the first and second years a century option was offered, which I think was 1999 and 2000. In 2000 I decided to ride as far as I could without refueling. I got about 50 miles before I completely ran out of gas. I didn't really recover full strength until almost the end of the ride. That was very unpleasant but very educational.

The route is a little contrived in places to get the full 100 miles. I straightened out some of the sillier bits and took a detour at the south end to visit a date farm. I got a total of 98.6 miles and ended up riding 90% of the route.

To avoid paying for parking, I started at the Palm Springs Amtrak station instead of downtown. For a town of 45,000 people the train station is remarkably bleak. The only facility is a trash bin. The rest room is locked, the phone is destroyed, and there are no staff or even ticket machines. There are two trains a day arriving from Los Angeles, one at 10am and the other at midnight. This might be the least used station I have ever seen. Fortunately that meant there was plenty of parking available. It has nice views of San Jacinto mountain.

View from Palm Springs Amtrak station

The route can be split in two halves. The first half is through desert, hilly, with narrow or no shoulders, light traffic, poor road surfaces and few stop lights. The second half is more urban, with wider shoulders, heavy traffic, good road surfaces, and lots of stop lights - some of them two to three minutes long. I preferred the second half. The first half was exhausting on a folding bike and even though I had 35mm tires and some suspension, the quality of the road had turned my backside into hamburger. A smooth pavement and frequent rests at the stop lights was welcome.

I cannot imagine paying $100 to ride this with thousands of other cyclists.