tour de crikey

i did just a tad over 40 miles today, being the first time i've done above 33, which was last week, being the first time i'd done over 30. we previewed the planned route yesterday and measured elevation gain with a gps, which is what i did last week only last week i did that on the bike.

the route was similar this week to last but instead of taking ralston to ralston trail to canada, we took edgewood and did only 3/4 of the canada roundtrip. as i was pedaling up the first part of edgewood (from alameda (not the one where they keep the nuclear wessels, the one with the fleas)) i was thinking what an easy ride edgewood was and how it was way easier than ralston, which itself wasn't really all that hard.

then i got to the actual incline, which, while still not being tremendously hard (though the speeding SUVs, absent on ralston but abundant on edgewood, did make it a bit more harrowing (i've never had a full appreciation for the enormity of lumbering monster SUVs, but today, in a flash of insight, i gained exactly such appreciation. crikey those things are huge. that's a whole lot of groceries you must be hauling there)) the climbing part seemed at least as long as ralston, if not longer, and at least as steep (though I think the GPS disagrees with me). anyhow, i realized that i was doing ralston with about 3 extra miles of "warmup", so while it may have been gentler it felt tougher.

i was noticeably fatigued on canada, not great. in fact my average speed for today was below 14mph, i think, well into the zone of "are you even pedaling that thing?"

one nice thing from today's ride: i no longer think the little climb up the arse end of bunker hill is hard. it sure ain't easy and i'm not going even 10mph, but i've learned how to make it "not hard". now all i have to do is learn how to make it "not slow".

i got honked at by a jackass in a bmw on canada. i was not in the "no cars" portion and i came about 1 foot outside the "bike lane" to pass someone. there was no oncoming traffic but the bmw felt the need to honk at me. also, much later, some truck honked at me while i was going up bunker hill. i think he was just your average truck asshat, since i can't think of anything even questionable that i did there.

anyhow, after zipping down BH, i rode up to ralston and then down ralston, and up ECR to home. at the merging stoplight in front of the mall, a teenage jerk on a cell phone in a coffee-can honda cut me off, but it only took one look at him while we were stopped to know he was going to do it, so i escaped without injury.

the planned route was to take ECR to crystal spring to polhemus to de anza to parrot, and then "down" parrot to home. but the route preview yesterday taught me something i didn't know: parrot, though far above home, is not a "down" route. it's a "why am i going up to get down?" route. going down parrot actually adds some 400 feet of climb to the route. what? when i'm already not just tired but pushing my distance limit?

i rode up to parrot and turned around, making up an extra .25mi on ECR to round my trip up to 40mi. hops was waiting for me when i got there, having done the same route sans the last 8 miles, for her own record breaking 32 miles.

as i was coming down the hill, trying to miss all the potholes (i managed to hit a really big one. my bike seems very well built but those giant, shade hidden potholes all over SM just really can't be good for the bike) i thought of amusing phrases to write on the blog to describe what would have happened had i taken parrot.

but first: a few words on route planning. one of the things i like about the way i plan routes (when i plan them) is that generally, the "questionable" bits are all preceded by an easy escape route, and usually, are also part of the escape route. last week, the questionable bit was climbing up to ralston from BH. but at any point during that climb, i could have turned around and coasted home. that's a great feature to have at the "pack on more miles at the end" part of the ride. parrot, OTOH, did not have this feature (it probably does but only if you know the area, which i do not). so i didn't take it.

had i taken it, i decided, i'd not only be in a world of hurt, i'd be buried alive 600 feet beneath the surface of a world of hurt, surrounded by burning lakes of hurt, about to be flooded and drowned by hurt, orbiting a sun of hurt right in the midst of the universe of hurt.

so there you have it, it's probably best that i didn't take that last leg of the ride.

my area is really a pretty good place for "training", if not for pleasure riding. with the requirement of "i do not want to drive to my ride", the safest places to ride are peppered with steep hills, leading to places with long gradual hills, and the only flat place to ride is ECR which will eventually get you killed, probably by a truck asshat, an SUV mom, or a snotty cellphone brat with a coffee-can muffler.

so the end result is i get lots of hill training, whether i like it or not, whether it helps me or not. psychologically, it does. example: the solvang half century (50 miles) contains a bit more than half the climbing i did today. easy. (although that "no hill more than 800 feet" bit scares me a little.)

anyhow, i'll keep on pushing and resting and so forth and maybe i'll get better.