doing as i do, not as i say, or: getting lost is the only way to have fun, or: nothing metric about this half century

i had a lot of time today to think up blog entry titles.

yesterday at the bike shop, i accidentally had the dude ring up a pair of medium bike shorts. i had tried them on and they seemed to fit. i thought i was trying on a large. "i must have lost some weight!" i quipped. they're the same brand as my "old" bike pants, so maybe i did lose a bit around the waist. anyhow, they're the medium-fancy model and my ass is much less sore than usual, so i guess i got what i paid for!

the ride today didn't start out well. i also bought a sleeveless jersey, the more to enjoy our fine weather with, only it was cloudy and smoky and gross so i didn't wear it. on the way out to the road, i fell upon some slippery linoleum. why the hell does our apt building have frictionless linoleum in a major walkway? because they suck, that's why.

my plan was to take ralston up to canada, then at woodside, coast down a bit to... oh crap! as I was reviewing my planned route during my warmup, i realized i didn't know the name of the crossroad. i wasn't too worried, i figured i'd recognize it, which i did. it's whiskey hill road: my kinda road! whiskey hill road to sand hill, down to alameda de las nuclear wessels, then back to ralston, where, at my discretion, i'd brave the intimidating alameda route back home, or wuss out and take ECR.

that was the plan. a couple days ago i drove the route from sand hill to ralston to verify that there was nothing... unpleasant... on that route. there wasn't.

i've gotten myself a book on cycling, and maybe i'll get another. this one stresses the importance of staying aerobic for a long ride. "don't go anaerobic" it says, in case you couldn't infer that from my previous sentence. even though i've never taken a stress test (the book contains two methods for self testing, neither is pleasant, but a stress test never is) and even though i failed to calculate 85 percent of 220 minus my age, i have a pretty good idea of where my lactic threshold is. so i vowed to really watch my heart rate and stay aerobic.

now, after about 2.5 miles of easy warmup, my route has a nice 20% incline. yup, 20%. no, it's not long, but it doesn't have to be, and it's not like it goes downhill, 20%, downhill, no, it's more like 15%, 20%, 10%. i don't think i'll ever be in the kind of shape where i can climb a 20% grade without twitching fast (get it!?) but who can say? i'm already in my easiest gear for the 15% part of the hill.

i made it up that hill, down it, and up ralston without pausing for a rest like i did last time. i watched my HRM closely and kept it as low as i could. by the time i got to wooside i was feeling good, aside from not knowing my turn, but i found it easily. some guys were huffing up what appeared to be not much of a climb, but you never know where someone's come from when you see them on the road.

whiskey hill is easy and incredibly scenic. i'm very glad i went there. sand hill had a bit of an easy climb -- ralston was steeper -- and then it was all downhill to... we'll get to that. i saw more huffing people opposing my direction on sand hill, but i thought to myself that it looked like a really easy climb. sure, longer than any climb i'm used to (really? crystal springs/polhemus might be longer) but gentle. in fact, i figured i'd have no trouble at all climbing it if i ever wanted to try such a route.

by the time i made it to stanford shopping mall, failing utterly to find my turn to alameda, i decided i wanted to try such a route. i was a couple blocks from ECR and I could have taken that home, but that's way more risk of death than i wanted for today. so back up sand hill i went. it sure was easy. and so was whiskey hill in the other direction, and it was a descent (not a climb, as i misrememberd) to get back to woodside. doing the calculation at the bottom of sand hill, i realized i'd get darn close to 50 miles on this ride, no matter how i chose to get home from woodside/canada.

i took the ralston trail rather than the arse-end of bunker hill, i wanted to be gentle to me. i had not taken my camelbak because i wasn't planning to do a long ride. but the weather was not too hot so i wasn't bad off. there had been some nice people with a "free rest stop" at edgewood on my way out, and i planned to stop there on my way back, but they were gone. the ranger's water cooler was way back in the dirt, and who know if it had water in it? so i skipped it. i had enough.

as i climbed up ralston trail with no sweat, as my mile counter passed 42, i thought: "i remember when this hill was so hard i had to stop!" nothing's nicer than improvement.

i zipped down ralston and took ECR home. I had to do some noodling around the 'hood to round it up to 50. i whistled for nearly the entire last 8 miles.

things of note: a boy on the back of a tandem said "hi!" to me as i came on to woodside. an indian dude passed me at about the same time, and i couldn't catch him, but saw him at edgewood, resting. he saw me jockin him, i guess, because he smiled and nodded as he passed me downhill on my ascent up sand hill. a dickhead honked at me as i passed someone on the unclosed part of canada. i did not retaliate. really wish i had a richer communication channel, one where i could say "look, einstein, the line i crossed is white, not double yellow. i'm doing you a courtesy by being in the bike lane at all, on my vehicle here."

much later, as a guy waved me through a turn, i realized that i'm fortunate to live in such a bike friendly area. for every retard or downright hostile person, there are 20 people who yield their right of way, move over, slow down, and otherwise make room for me. also, palo alto has nice bike lanes.

and now, the stats. my fargen cyclocomputer freaked out again today, and clocked me at 45mph with 144 RPMs. uh-huh. oddly, this did not seem to affect the mileage counter, though i can't be entirely sure. i guess since it only freaked out for a minute or two out of > 3 hours the numbers are not too far off, but those numbers are wonky enough to really throw things off. maybe the cyclocomputer is smart enough to throw out outliers like those, especially given how ridiculous they are.

the numbers:

time: 3:09
avg bpm: 142
max bpm: 173
distance: 50.3 mi
max speed: 49.7 (ha ha ha!)
avg speed: 16.4. corrected (50.3/3.15): 15.968. hey, that's not bad!
max cadence: 149 (ha!)
avg cadence: 82, but who really knows? know way to calculate the corrected version of this.
ride time: 3:03 (for a whopping 7 minutes of rest)
elevation gain: 2800 feet (total WAG)

and now, i owe myself an arrogant bastard jersey.