4 posts tagged “cycling”

Well the old odometer rolled over 8000 mlles a short ways from the finish of the 100K course of the 2007 Strawberry Fields Forever ride, and I wish i could say it was a triumphant finish but unfortunately it was not a great ride. Part of the problem was localized (my brother and his friend were both ill and not really up to the course) and part was generalized. The organizers moved the ride start from Cabrillo College to Pajaro Valley High School in Watsonville and shuffled the stops to match the new endpoint. The first rest area was at the factory home of Calfee bikes, in a weird industrial area right on the ocean. The view was beautiful and the stop was organized well, but it took us pretty far out of the way from the regular course.

After fueling up on dates and bananas, Bjorn, Ian and I took off and got into the first real climbing of the day. Ian was getting over a bout of pneumonia (!) but, undeterred by pragmatism was riding a custom singlespeed road bike made for him by Jim Kish for one of the UBI semesters Kish teaches. Gorgeous ride, but 42x16 is tough sledding in the Santa Cruz hills even for healthy riders.  I felt a bit bad about it, but I ditched my homies about five miles after the first stop and trucked onwards, solo.

I was pretty pleased with my riding this year as I was able to make it up the hill at Mile 37 by pedalling when most of the other folks were walking their bikes. To keep me from feeling too pleased with myself though, the fellow I was laboring alongside reached the top just after me and then pulled out his Albuterol inhaler to stave off an athsma attack!  Some fun descending and a couple more steep climbs brought us to Royal Oaks Park for lunch.

Again, I'm not sure if this was a restructuring of the route but the third stop was only eight or so miles past lunch. Though the cider and blintzes at Gizditch Ranch looked appealing, I just downed a quick cup of coffee and kept rolling. Time was running short and I recalled that the big climb of the day, Mount Madonna, was between the third and fourth stop.

 Except this year, there was no fourth stop, and no Mount Madonna either! The entirety of the climbing was already behind me and the rest of the ride was just a quick punch through the backroads (and, for the last five miles, the main drags) of Watsonville back to  the high school.  The most challenging part of the 100K ride, and my main motivation for doing it, was cut out entirely. What a letdown.  I rolled into the high school, grabbed my t-shirt and met back up with Bjorn and Ian who had SAG'ed it back after lunch.

We were home by 3:30 and truly, I am looking for some different events for the rest of the season and next year because this ride went from my favorite to a big WHY BOTHER. I didn't see the route map for the 100 mile, but really it shouldn't be necessary to do the full century in order to get a good ride in, as the earlier years proved.

The morning and day/evening Cycling events are my commute, which is a pretty consistent 32 minutes. The 'Other' are either runs or commutes on my fixed-gear bike, which doesn't have a HRM sensor strapped to it. The 1-hour 22-minute run for today (Sunday) was a very nice 8 miler with Laswell, who was well-muddied and happy by the end of it.

So here are the main good and bad points about the CS300:

Likes:

• Reasonably sized wristwatch form factor
• Can upload own bitmap for logo display! 1-bit grayscale, and numberTheDraw rides again.
• Aforementioned cycling/non-cycling event tracking

Dislikes:

• SonicLink 110-baud audio upload annoyingly unreliable
• Upload software Windows-only (though it works fine under Parallels, yay)
• OwnZone limits cryptic and wrong IMO

Overall, a great device that combines two interests of mine in one compact package: exercise and gadgetry.

4. Gaming - 1 Year of Xbox Live Gold. Not nearly as much time spent playing video games as in the pre-kid years, but I did pick up Gears of War last week and have been working through it late at night. 

The other time-sink is reading SF, more on that later, but HBM just hooked me up with 1000 thick pages of Alistair Reynolds and Charles Stross so I'm pretty much set at this point.

I am really fond of the look, it's very much the aesthetic I was shooting for. The B72 saddle really ties the thing together, as Lebowski said of his rug.