New Bike

I bought my wife a new bike yesterday. It's a Felt F6. I've not heard of Felt bikes before but the local Don's bike store carries them and the wife loved it. Typically she came home and told me she had found 'her' bike. She told me "It's a Felt and it's black and yellow". I asked her what model, what groupo, etc? She had no idea :-) It turns out it has SRAMApex.

Somehow she had managed to get the saleswoman down to $1800  and they would eat the tax (thanks Miriam). So my wife now has an entry level carbon bike to replace her 15 year old Italian steel Marin which is no posted on eBay. It's yours for $200.

If the Santa Ana winds calm down this afternoon as they are predicting, my wife and I will head down to the SART and take it for a quick ride.

What's better than French Fries?

I rode my monthly Santa Ana 200k yesterday. Like all long rides, I learned something. It's easy to learn new stuff - you just have to pay attention.

It was cool enough to ride during the day at last. At 8:30am it was a lovely 66F and stayed around 75 all day - briefly touching 80 at the coast. I even had a little rain - the lightest of mists, as welcome as morning dew to a thirsty rabbit (poetic, ain't I?). I had a moderate headwind for the last 30 miles to the coast - perhaps 10mph.

I'd made a deliberate effort to take this ride easy. Instead of riding straight through the first 60 miles I stopped and ate a double-double at In-and-Out burgers. For those of you who are not familiar with In-and-Out I pity you.

At the turn-around point at Huntington Beach I ate a lovely turkey and avocado sandwich and then turned around expecting a well-deserved tail wind. Well I did get the tailwind but for some reason I was bonking horribly so I could barely hold 12mph on the flat with a 10mph tailwind. Pathetic.

So the question is how can I bonk right after an ideal carb heavy meal. It's happened before but I still haven't figured out why. I kept waiting for the sandwich to kick in but it never did. It's like the sandwich had no nutritional value at all. After an hour of bonking I realized I needed more calories. Fortunately I had an Odwalla bar with me (my first ever). It was pretty good and got me to the 90 mile mark, although still a little slower than normal. I'll be buying some more.

At the 90 mile mark is the Lucky Greek - I've mentioned it before. I bought a large order of french fries and a large cherry coke. So now I can answer the question 'What is better than french fries?'. The answer is french fries eaten out of my top-tube bag and washed down with iced coke from my water bottle. Apparantly there's about 400 calories in a large order of fries and about the same in the coke and it was just what I needed to recover fully from the bonk and finish strong.

That's something inexperienced riders don't understand - you can recover from a massive bonk.

I think I had a tailwind all the way home. I swear it was fully 20mph for the last 40 miles of the permanent. Even though I had a headwind on the way out and bonked on the way back and stopped to eat a nice relaxed meal at two of my three stops, I still managed a sub 10 hour 200k which is about par for me even when I'm 'hammering'. Maybe I should be more relaxed about these things. Hammering doesn't seem to improve my time.

First ride of Lucky Greek

Last week I rode my new Lucky Greek Permanent Populaire after work. It was nice and cold with a storm headed in but with a strong headwind. Had zuchini at the Lucky Greek. Nice tailwind home. Tried to finish in 4h30 but took 4h45 so Panera was closed when I finished. Need to ride faster next time.

Still working on next year's 600k route

Rode 75 miles with Amber yesterday and it was finally cool enough to enjoy. I wanted to try some modifications to last year's 600k final loop. The return section through Irvine just has too many stop lights. The idea was to pick up the 'Regional Bike Path' as early as possible, then work up to Chapman and finish along Walnut. However, the route to the very start of the bike path is complex and requires a lot of left turns on busy roads. The climb up Pioneer, Jamboree and Chapman at the end of a 600k wasn't a good idea either. So it looks like we will pick up the bike path at Alton, which is much easier to navigate and still avoids quite a few stop lights. We'll be finishing the ride either on the old Sunflower route or on MacArthur - a test ride is required to determine which feels safest and is easiest to follow.

I'm looking forward to riding my new 100k permanent populaire on Wednesday after work. I think I can start around 4:30pm after work and still get home and showered at a reasonable time. I'm going to try to ride that once a week while the weather is suitable. I'm also planning on riding my October R12 next weekend.

Last week I rode a total of 230 miles. I'm halfway from Lands End to John O Groats - somewhere in Carlisle. It's a wonderful ride, except for the day 7 which was pretty mediocre. I jumped on the scales for the first time in several months and I was amazed to see that I've lost 20lbs in that time. That's so cool.

I'm supposed to take Sundays off but I really want to ride! My rules, I can break them if I want.

Populaire

It has been a while since my last blog entry - I've been busy virtually cycling from Lands End to John O Groats. I just arrived at Chester after 600k of riding. There's about 1200k to go.

I finally got to ride with my wife last weekend. She's trying to get back into shape after being hit with breast cancer last year. We rode 22 miles along the beach at Santa Monica. It's sad to see a woman who used to ride double centuries being challanged by a flat 20 mile ride, but she'll come back - I'm sure of it.

To help her, I just registered a new populaire ride with RUSA. A populaire is a brevet style ride between 100k and 200k in length. They are intended to attract new randonneurs who might consider a 124 mile ride too extreme but would consider a 62 mile ride "doable". It's a slightly extended version of one of my favorite rides and it goes from the Panera in San Bernardino to the Lucky Greek in Corona and back.

I hope that Sherry will be able to ride it with me by the end of the year. I'll sign her up with RUSA and we can work on our P12 award together. The P12 award is given to members who ride a populaire for twelve consecutive calendar months. I also plan to ride it once a week after work to help me accumulate miles towards a mondaix award.

The mondaix award is given to a RUSA member who rides a lifetime total of 40,000km of sanctioned rides. I currently have about 17,000km so I have a long way to go. By the way, 40,000km is the approximate circumference of the earth (mondaix is French for world or something).

Hopefully the populaire will be accredited soon so I can start riding it. The temps in the evening are finally starting to cool down to the point where I could squeeze a 100k ride in after work.

Lejog

Lejog is an acronym for Lands End - John O' Groats. Lands End is the most SW point in the UK and John O' Groats is the most NE point. At any time you can find people skating, hopping, jogging, and even cycling from one to the other. Lejog is more popular than Jogel because of the prevailing winds.

I downloaded a set of Lejog gpx files from http://www.cycle-endtoend.org.uk/ (thanks Michael) in 17 stages, ran them through www.ridewithgps.com to add elevation data, and dropped them onto my computer. I plan on virtually riding the whole trip on my exercise bike. I already completed stage 1 from Lands End to Bodmin. What a great route!

Went for a short bike ride to The Crema with Amber on Sunday. What a crazy ride. There was some kind of walk in Anaheim that had the entrance to the Amtrak station closed but I just drove around the cones. Who the hell closes off an Amtrak station for a public event?

There was a lot of traffic on the trail too, some kind of Get Fit Relay. But the really unique aspect of the ride was that the police had the bike trail closed off at Warner. When we got around the closure we saw they were recovering a body from the river bed. I have no idea why they felt they needed to close the trail though - we came nowhere near the investigation scene. Simply a waste of police resources and an inconvenience to all the trail users.

I've been having an email conversation recently with David Nakai who is concerned about safety on the Santa Ana trail especially after dark. When I saw the body I began to think he might have a good point. But when I started researching the incident on the Orange County Coroner's website I noticed that in the same batch of coroner's reports that included the dead man, there were three reports of deaths to cyclists caused by traffic collisions. However you cut it, cycling on the road is more dangerous than cycling on the bike path.

Overdid it this weekend so I'm taking the day off from cycling. Tomorrow I plan on cycling from Bodmin to Bristol (virtually).

Another night 200k - Virtual cycling part 3

Funny how a ride can go great and yet the same ride a week later doesn't. I rode the Santa Ana 200k again Friday night and logged one of my worst times ever 11h05. It was windy as usual at the start so my time down to the beach was about average. I was trying to use soft cookies and Perpetuum for energy but they weren't working. I also had to take a nap at the 80 miles mark. Mentally I was strong but I just didn't have a good ride.

Three more 200k rides and I have another R12 medal, yay!

I want to finish up the software part of my current project. Starting from where we left off in the last blog entry, add the following line at the end of the initialize function...

panorama = new google.maps.StreetViewPanorama(street_canvas, {});
walkRoute();

Remove the alert from the end of the initialize() function.

Now change the <body></body> section to look like this...

<body style="height:98%" onload="initialize()" onmousedown="walkRoute();">
<div id="street_canvas" style="height:98%; width:100%"></div>
</body>

Everytime the left or right mouse button is pressed we will call a function called WalkRoute. This will display a Google Streetlevel image in the new street_canvas div. Add the following global variable declarations after the line that says 'var R = 6371;'

var panorama;
var waypoint = 0;
var distanceThisLeg = 0; // km
var rideDistancekm = 0; // Distance ridden - controls start point
var courseLengthkm = 0; // course length
var stepDistancekm = .015; // km - controls distance between frames
var rpf = 4 // revolutions per frame - controls speed
var rslf = rpf; // revolutions since last frame

Now let's write WalkRoute(). Insert this code after the initialize() functions.

function walkRoute() 
{   if (rslf < rpf) 
    {   rslf++;
        return;
    }
    try 
    {   rideDistancekm += stepDistancekm;
        while (rideDistancekm >= route[waypoint].totalAtStartkm + route[waypoint].distancem / 1000)    // Start next leg
        {   waypoint += 1;
            if (waypoint >= route.length)
            {   alert("Done");
                return;
           }
       }
       var legDistancekm = rideDistancekm - route[waypoint].totalAtStartkm;
       var point = getNextLatLong(route[waypoint].latitude, route[waypoint].longitude, legDistancekm, route[waypoint].bearing);
    }
    catch (ex)
    {   alert("Stepping: " + ex.message);
    }
    try
    {   var povOptions = { heading: route[waypoint].bearing, pitch: 0, zoom: 1 };
        panorama.setPov(povOptions);
        panorama.setPosition(point);
        panorama.setVisible(true);
    }
    catch (ex)
    {   alert("Rendering:" + ex.message);
    }
    rslf = 1;
}

function getNextLatLong(oldLat, oldLong, distance, bearing) 
{   var latRad = toRad(oldLat);
    var lngRad = toRad(oldLong);
    var Rdistance = distance / R;    // km
    var dirRad = toRad(bearing);
    var newLatRad = Math.asin(Math.sin(latRad) * Math.cos(Rdistance) + Math.cos(latRad) * Math.sin(Rdistance) * Math.cos(dirRad));
    var newLngRad = lngRad + Math.atan2(Math.sin(dirRad) * Math.sin(Rdistance) * Math.cos(latRad), Math.cos(Rdistance) - Math.sin(latRad) * Math.sin(latRad));

    newLngRad = ((newLngRad + (3 * Math.PI)) % (2 * Math.PI)) - Math.PI;
    var point = new google.maps.LatLng(toDeg(newLatRad),toDeg(newLngRad));
    return point;
}

function toRad(d) {
    return d * Math.PI / 180;
}

function toDeg(r) {
    return r * 180 / Math.PI;
}

Although this works, there's several things that could be improved.

• Add some information such as distance, elevation, speed, rate of climb.
• There are small pans left and right on several frames that I would like to remove.
• When you get to an intersection it's difficult to tell which way you are turning.
• Magnetic switches tend to bounce. We can detect and ignore bounces.