hrj

I figured I'd keep the Books I've Read post and a newsy post separate. This is the newsy post.

Not so much an "update" because I have no idea when I last posted anything chatty here. So more like a random check-in.

Since I got my recumbent bike, I've decided to add an occasional longer ride than my usual weekend "down to Walnut Creek and back" loop, which is about 18-19 miles, depending on slight variations in route. The next natural endpoint is in Danville (because of all the nice brunch cafes there), which makes for a 30-mile loop.

The next natural endpoint after that is Dublin, which is 30 miles one way with the option of taking BART back. It would be nice to work up to doing it as a loop, but that would be an all-day undertaking, not just a "morning ride". ALthough I guess I could work up to it with a loop ending in San Ramon (about halfway between Danville and Dublin).

It's always interesting to notice what effect eating patterns have on these rides--especially on the longer ones. I don't normally eat anything before setting out, then have a relatively substantial breakfast at my turnaround. Since the routes are all relatively flat, any difference in difficulty is subjective--a product of blood sugar levels. And the ride back (when, in theory, I'm more tired) is always much easier.

So if I wanted the most efficient cycling plan, I should eat breakfast before starting out and then maybe something light at my turnaround point. But if I stop to think about breakfast before getting on the bike, I'm likely to get distracted and not go at all. And the point isn't "get the most powerful/efficient cycling done" it's "cycle this particular distance for exercise and recreation." And in a way, it's useful to have that sense of the return route being "easier", because it lowers the psychological barrier to going farther.

A "long loop" (i.e., more than 20 miles) means I'm rather wiped out when I finally get home, but I think I can extend the loop while maintaining the degree of wipe-out. It would be nice to do a long loop about once a month.

I keep thinking about what sort of cycling schedule will be a good fit in retirement. Something roughly equivalent to the current seems good: NLT 7 miles every day, ca. 20 miles once a week, and aim for a 30+ mile once a month. Currently I usually take Sundays off, in part because I have a coupld of regular zoom groups in the middle of the day, which makes scheduling awkward. And a regular day off isn't a bad thing either. Of course, special weekend events throw off the routine entirely (which has happened a lot in the last month), but that's what a routine is for: to remind you what "normal" is supposed to be.

The past week at work was stressful (I volunteered to clean up a must-close-now investigation report for an investigator who was out on vacation, which involved multiple rounds of high-stress revisions, plus other stress factors). So I decided that I needed a break from routine on Saturday and decided, rather than doing my usual bike ride to Walnut Creek and back, I'd bike in San Francisco instead.

My usual SF "long bike ride" starts at the Ferry Building (convenient for grabbing breakfast first), then goes along the Embarcadero, past Fisherman's Wharf, along the Marina, along Crissy Field, up to the Golden Gate Bridge, across the bridge, then turn around and the same back.

The bike ride is roughly the same mileage as my Walnut Creek ride, but while my usual ride is almost all on recreation trails, about a quarter of the SF route is on city streets (though mostly with bike lanes). Both are mostly level, but the bit going up from Crissy Field to the bridge abutment is steep enough that when I couldn't convince my bike to go into its lowest gear, I got off and walked partway.

But what made this ride challenging were the following. BART was doing maintenance on the leg between Orinda and Rockridge (the tunnel section) so they were running a bus bridge. This meant carrying my bike down a long flight of stairs, wrestling it into the bus bike rack, then at the other end ignoring usual etiquette and taking the bike up the escalator. Because, you see, they've finally integrated the station elevators into the fare gate system, so instead of tagging in a regular gate, then exiting without tagging and going to the elevator, now the elevator has its own fare gate to tag in/out. But the bus bridge skips the tag in/out, so if I'd used the elevator, I'd have messed up the record of my fare.

Anyway, continue on from Rockridge to Embarcadero (where it was very nice to have the elevator system rationalized). At which point I discover that they're staging the SF Juneteenth parade at that end of Market St. Fortunately the parade was only just starting to stage, so the extra crowds weren't too bad.

Picked up a pastry for breakfast at the Farmer's Market then headed off along the Embarcadero. I think most bicyclists would prefer to avoid going straight through the Fishermans Wharf tourist district, but I considered it part of the fun. Took a jog uphill at the Ghirardelli site to avoid the steep ramp from Aquatic Cover to Fort Mason then a nice slope down through Fort Mason from the SE corner.

There's a really lovely wide rec path with bicycle lanes along Marina Blvd, at which point I discovered that that's where they were staging for the Escape from Alcatraz Triathlon. (I really should research what's going on when I'm planning these rides -- but it was much more impulse than plan.) The actual triathlon was today, not yesterday, which is a good thing because I would have been completely blocked from my planned route. But I didn't know any of that when I headed off on Saturday.

After cruising through Crissy Field, there's a steep bit going up toward the bridge and my bike decided that, although it was perfectly happy going into the lowest gear at any other time, it just wasn't going to oblige when I had a genuine hill, so I ended up walking the steepest part. Across the bridge and back, dodging tourists on rental bikes, then a brief pause at the southern end again to rest and sightsee. Did the usual "be kind to tourists" thing and took group photos for people.

Going back was pretty much the same in reverse, except I took the sharp grade down to Aquatic Cove since it was down this time. Stopped at Fisherman's Wharf to have some crab for lunch, then back along to the Ferry Building where I did a bit of shopping, though most of the produce stands were packing up by then.

As I was crossing the plaza heading back to BART, I spotted a small group of morris dancers who turned out to be Berkeley Morris (several friends used to be in the group). They were planning to dance in about half an hour, so I settled down and waited to watch the show.

BART meant another bus bridge with bicycle fu, and what with one thing and another I got home around 5pm which is WAY longer than my usual Saturday ride. But it was a fun change-up.

So I was hanging out at a 4th of July party last weekend and someone was gushing about how great the Pompeii exhibit at the Palace of the Legion of Honor museum was, which reminded it I wanted to see it. So I picked up my phone and bought a ticket for today at noon. (They limit and schedule tickets to maintain social distancing.) Given San Francisco traffic and PotLoH parking, I decided the most practical thing to do was to bicycle.

Of course, this assumes taking BART over to SF in the first place. I'm not *that* bad-ass. But it's still a bit of a trek from the Embarcadero all the way out past the Golden Gate Bridge footing to the museum. The app on my phone says that bicycling time is about an hour, but I didn't intend to time things quite that tightly. Plus, I wanted to pick up coffee and breakfast at the Ferry Building and not necessarily take the most direct route. So I took the first BART train of the day and got into SF a bit after 9am. Left the Ferry Building having breakfasted and coffeed around 9:30. In theory, that leaves me two and a half hours until my noon appointment, right?

Followed the Embarcadero around until the bike route suggests cutting away from the shoreline to avoid Fisherman's Wharf, then picked up the shoreline again right before Fort Mason. Stopped for a second coffee along Crissy Field then started the climb. First you climb up to the bridge footing, then duck under the highway. Then you continue to climb up through the Presidio. When you hit the highest elevation along that route, it would in theory be a nice gentle downhill to get the to Legion of Honor. Alas, you take a precipitous downhill and then start climbing again. There were a few times I got off and walked the steepest bits. Biking every day on the Concord rec trails doesn't keep you in shape for serious hills. But the scenery is nice (starting around the Marina down in the flats and then all the way through that north-eastern part of SF, you get some fun architecture, more in the Mediterranean style than the Queen Anne's of mid-town).

Made it to the museum with half an hour to spare, which validated my plan to start off early. Lovely exhibit. Besides the Pompeii material (which focuses on food and dining), there was a great sculpture exhibit of the work of Wangechi Mutu, with the works deliberately juxtaposed against and among the permanent Rodin material to interesting effect.

Took a more straightforward bike route back which avoided the steep climbs in the Presidio but still ended up following the Embarcadero back to the Ferry Building. I meant to have a sit-down late lunch but all the sit-down places were full, so I settled for an Acme olive roll and some Cowgirl Creamery cheese, plus a Recchiuti chocolate for dessert. Mmm.

Rather exhausted from all that -- too tired to really have dinner. But it's fun to do something more ambitious even than bopping down to Walnut Creek and back for a change.

Because I wanted to avoid media stress as much as possible, and because I unexpectedly didn't have a podcast recording session Saturday morning, I finally achieved the next step in my "let's bicycle on weekends" program, which was to take the Iron Horse trail all the way down to Dublin. Well, sort of. I usually start my bike route along the Contra Costa Canal trail (which adds some additional distance) rather than picking up the Iron Horse Trail at the start up by Hwy 4. And somehow I missed the start of the trail after ducking under 680 at Walnut Creek, so I took the bike lane on Danville Blvd as far as Danville (where I had lunch) then picked up the official Iron Horse route from there.

My usual route down to Walnut Creek is old hat at this point, though I was feeling more peckish than usual and stopped for coffee in Pleasant Hill. That helped in deciding to go the extra bit down to Danville (which has some really great places to eat). I'd forgotten (or not previously noticed) how the leg form Walnut Creek to Danville is a steady upgrade. The previous times I've done it, I was on the actual Iron Horse Trail, which has a lot of stops for cross-streets, so I suspect there were more distractions. Over lunch, I checked the maps and mileage and confirmed that it was (substantially) shorter to continue on to Dublin BART than to return the way I came. (Although, of course, the long-term goal is to do a round trip to Dublin.) Past Danville the trail has no grade up to Bishop Ranch and then starts a slow but steady down-slope to Dublin. Important to remember.

There's no point to continuing on past Dublin since the trails peter out around the Alameda Fairgrounds. But if I want to continue extending the ride incrementally, there's always the choice to go to Dublin then back to Walnut Creek and BART back to Concord from there. Since I usually break my ride substantially at least twice, I don't have a good time estimate for the whole thing. Mileage estimate (very rough) is about 8 miles from my house to downtown Walnut Creek, another 8 miles to Danville, then 10 miles to Dublin. But all very flat, nothing in the way of hills at all, just some gentle grades.

When I decided to move to the suburbs, I made the commitment to myself that I would not be driving in to work -- not every day, not even most days, in fact, as rarely as possible. So one of my location criteria was close proximity to a BART station. And to make the commute even more practical and flexible, I decided to get a folding bike that I could take on BART during commute hours. Mind you, this wasn't absolutely essential, because there's no parking fee at North Concord BART and the Emery-Go-Round shuttle from Macarthur station gets me to about 3 blocks from work. (And it's quite possible that during the rainy winter season I'll leave the bike home.) But I really wanted to have the flexibility to run errands from work (to my PO box, to the credit union, shopping) and the idea of keeping a bike at work permanently didn't appeal to me.

So having done some preliminary research and consulted knowledgeable experts, I got a Brompton folding bike from a distributor in Palo Alto. It was, to put it bluntly, expensive. However it does live up to the hype. After several days of practice, the fold-down and unfolding are very fast and smooth. When folded up, the bike has a very small footprint. I'm still getting the hang of how to tuck one foot around it to hold it in place when I'm sitting down so that it won't fall over on the curves and decelerations. But on a very crowded train, I can simply stand straddling the bike and it takes up little more space than I would by myself. It's light enough to carry easily up and down stairs (but small enough to take on the escalator), although not light enough to take the stairs at a run to catch a close connection.

As a bike, the Brompton isn't something I'd ride long distances for recreation. The 16" wheels have a very different steering feel than a standard bike. There also isn't a lot of "spring" in the construction and you not only feel every bump, you feel every little stick you run over. (Of course, I'm used to my Trek, which has actual spring suspension on the front end.) The model I got has the hub-internal 3-speed gears and 2 derailleur gears on the crank, for a total of 6 combinations. My commute biking is all essentially flat and I stick mostly to the lower derailleur. The gearing on the 3-speed set doesn't allow for a lot of nuance, but the highest power gear is sufficient to tackle the hills going up to downtown Berkeley.

The commute itself is turning out to be relatively painless. Relatively. For the settling in period, I'm getting up at 6am with a goal of out-the-door at 6:30. That gets me to my desk around quarter of 8. I may adjust things to target an 8am arrival more closely. I don't really have a routine coming home yet, but at least twice last week I managed to get in my gym time before heading home. The routine also works well for picking up groceries at Berkeley Bowl before getting on the shuttle, although not much more than a backpack's worth.

Various house-sale errands meant that I did drive to work twice last week, providing a comparison. So a bike/transit commute of ca. 1:15 compares with a drive time of 0:45, given the same departure time from Concord. (With no unusual Traffic Events on the route. Those could bump it up considerably.) But taking transit means that I get in about 45 minutes each way of reading e-mail and other online material or even books. I remember reading books. I actually read an entire novel in the last two weeks. And the online time is something I'd be doing anyway, so in effect (assuming I don't simply expand my online time) I'm "saving" half an hour a day over driving. Although not over a non-commute life. I'm still settling into a routine at the moment. One of these days I'll even get caught up on my sleep.

I decided to take yesterday off from house-closing work and actually have a "vacation" day during my vacation. Since I'd totally ruined my hands with the cleaning on Wednesday, I decided to splurge and went on yelp.com to find a well-recommended local place for a mani-pedi. The recommendations were dead on: for the "deluxe" version I got a total of about an hour and a half of soaking, clipping, filing, massaging, and whatnot. Next, I headed to a bike shop in Palo Alto that advertised not only the ability to try out the Brompton folding bikes, but the possibility of buying one of their in-stock models off the shelf. It was a bit of an extravagance, but I'm totally committed to not driving in to work except on special logistical occasions, so in the long run I'll consider it worth while. That left me several hours before I needed to be at the Peachwoods Grill for Seth's birthday dinner, so I took a scenic drive along Skyline and looping through Big Basin park. Dinner was a perfect steak and fine company (then an hour and a half drive home).

Today it's back to Oakland to finish up some details. And it occurs to me that if I'm going to bike/BART in to work on Monday, I need to swing by the office to pick up my bike helmet. I parked my old bike at work and left the gear in my desk on the assumption that it would take me a while to pick up a BART-able bike and that it would be useful to keep the bike at work for errands. Hmm, or maybe I should swing by work on Sunday when I could actually pop the bike in the back of the car as well (can't do that today) since I won't need it there. Also: on Sunday there's no chance that I might get shanghaied into doing actual work.

I'm planning to day-trip Beltane on Saturday. I've been seeing all sorts of descriptions of people's contributions for the Saluminati gathering and have been contemplating whether I should try to find some sort of compatible side-snack to bring (like some palate-cleansing fruit) or whether I can get away with taking a pass based on the thread-worn "in the middle of moving" excuse and show up to nosh anyway.

This is a bicycle performance/route tracking application. It's aimed at people who are a bit more serious about their cycling than I am, but to balance it out I'm perhaps more serious about my iPhone toys. The main idea is to use the iPhone's GPS function to track your route, speed, and elevation, along with tracking the total ride time (including the ability to pause the record so, for example, stopping at the store doesn't screw up your overall average speed calculation). So far, except for the mapping, the functions are fairly similar to the small mechanical speed/distance tracking device I got for my bike a couple years ago. But the differences are in the details (and the extras.)

The mapping feature is, of course, not to be sneezed at. It not only shows your route against the standard iPhone version of Google maps, but adds pointers at each mile-post along the route. You can also display the map as you ride. (Positioning the iPhone so it can be viewed with safety to both rider and phone involves a Bracketron bike handlebar mount.)

You can either run metrics on each ride individually, or if you ride the same route and want to compare performance, you can save it under a name and associate new rides on the same route with that name. In addition to the numeric metrics of date/time of start, total ride time, total distance, average speed, fastest speed, maximum climb, and estimated calories burnt, you can do a graphic display of speed or elevation against the route mileage. A calendar view will show you icons for which days you recorded rides and whether the ride was better or worse than your average for the route.

But wait ... there's more! You can set up the app to generate automatic Twitter, Facebook, or email messages providing your stats and route location, either at regular intervals during a ride, or at the completion of the ride. And it is able to do text-to-speech renderings of responses to those postings. So you not only can post your progress as you go, but get feedback (they suggest "from your coach" but we know that's a crock) while in progress.

Although the name of the app indicates it was designed for cyclists, it lets you code routes as Cycle, Hike, Run, Skate, Ski, Swim, or Walk. I haven't checked it it to see if this affects any of the functionality other than how the route is labelled.

Now, the one big problem about this app is that it eats power due to the constant GPS usage. And if you set your phone not to sleep in order to use the map function continuously, it will eat it even faster. (It will continue recording your route data even if you let the phone sleep.) Back at MacWorld in February, I noticed that one of the hot popular products was external booster battery packs for iPhones, laptops, and gadgets, and my immediate thought was "what in the world would someone need all that power for?" Well, as often happens, now I know what they'd be useful for. So now I have one. It'll be interesting to see how long a full charge will last with sort of app running. I was thinking -- since it turns out I won't be painting pottery tomorrow after all -- that I might take a bit of a ride and try it out, but then I decided I really need to so some work around the house instead, so it'll have to wait.

Cyclemeter has a mid-range price: $4.99. It's sophisticated enough that you'd hardly expect it to be a two-buck app, and in fact if it weren't for the skewed pricing expectations of the app store, I'd call it under-priced. Although I plan to use it with the handlebar mount, you can get the stat-tracking functionality with it just sitting in a pocket or bag. So for anyone who happens to have an iPhone and who happens to do any significant biking at all, I'd say what the heck, give it a try!

Having gotten a delightfully full night's sleep (the biggest sleep aid being the knowledge that the project was DONE), I showed up all bright and perky at work at my usual 8am this morning. My boss greeted me with the equivalent of "What the heck are you doing here?" but I figured today I'd have the biggest leverage for my comp time request. I probably needn't have bothered -- he agreed to my request for all next week (i.e., the 4 non-holiday days in addition to Labor Day, which I get anyway) so quickly that I probably could have gotten more if I'd pushed it. But it's all good. Then around about lunchtime he comes into the office and says, "You have an appointment with a chair massage at 1:30 and then I don't want to see you again until tomorrow." Do I have the bestest boss or what?

So ... I had a nice leisurely afternoon to start the logistics for my surprise vacation. Scheduled the Element for its 10,000 mile service (which will be about 400 miles early, but better that than later) and decided to take the opportunity to get a trailer hitch receiver installed because .... went to REI and picked up the bike carrier I've had my eye on. It attaches via a trailer hitch socket and has a hinged arm to swing the bike(s) out of the way to the side for access to the rear doors without having to remove the rack -- or even the bike(s) from the rack. (It still makes more sense to put the bike inside the vehicle for long drives to improve mileage, but the carrier will be more convenient in other circumstances.)

When I was thinking in terms of adding a couple of days to the long weekend, I was thinking of hitting the redwoods and up to Crater Lake. But with a whole week, it occurred to me that I should go a bit farther afield, so I decided on Yellowstone. It isn't an ideal bicycling area (although people do ride there) but there are lots of shortish day hikes and I can mix things up nicely.

So the basic plan is to spend Saturday and Sunday driving out. Then spend the week spread across two or three home bases in the park, taking side trips. Then the second weekend driving back. I've been perusing maps, hiking guides, and the list of the (relatively few) bike-oriented trails to get a sense of where I want to spend how much time, but I figure I'll leave the specifics for when I phone the campground reservation folks tomorrow and see what's available.

Given how hard it is to justify a purely kick-back vacation to myself, it's rather nice to have the time off on such short notice that kicking back makes the most sense. (The comp time policy is pretty much "take it now" -- they don't want people treating it as "bankable" vacation time.) Getting away will be far more relaxing than hanging around the house would have been. I've missed this sort of trip.

Yesterday I went to the porkgasm party thrown by

ppfuf and husband. An homage to the pig, and the many wonderful (and sometimes unexpected) ways one can eat it. I made a deal with myself that I wouldn't worry about portion control or tracking if I put in a bike ride of at least 40 miles today. (I'd been planning a ride one of these weekends anyway.) As those following the ride on facebook may already know, it ended up at 50 miles (exactly -- the bike trip odometer says "50.0something").

I started out thinking in terms of a San Francisco loop and took the same route I did last time: start at Embarcadero BART, light breakfast at the Ferry Building, then along the Embarcadero, past Fishermans Wharf, the Marina, Chrissy Field, climb the hill, and across the Golden Gate bridge. But that's only about 10 miles, and I wasn't sure how much wandering around in SF I wanted to do to stretch it out, so I consulted Google maps on the iPhone and headed down through Sausalito. They have some great bike paths in Marin -- once you claw your way through the hordes of tourists in Sausalito (many of them on rental bikes, creating vast safety hazards for all and sundry) you can take a mixed-use recreation path along the shore (well, actually directly through the wetlands for a lot of it) then eventually turning onto Blithedale, over 101 where it becomes Tiburon Blvd, then following Tiburon Blvd and Paradise Dr to entirely circle the Tiburon peninsula, cut back across on Trestle Glen Dr at the base of the peninsula, and then back along the same route I went out. I wasn't sure whether it would fit my mileage goal, but when I paused at the Tiburon ferry landing, I was at mile 24, so I figured I was good to go.

I stopped for a late lunch in Sausalito to recoup my strength for the climb back up to the bridge (which had seemed very long and steep when I came down it earlier) but it ended up not being too bad at all. In fact, while I won't claim it was a particularly strenuous ride (in terms of Serious Bike Riding), I'm proud of never having stopped to rest or gotten off to walk. And it was all very very scenic and reasonably safe, traffic-wise. There were twice as many bikes as cars on the road around Tiburon and I generally felt in far more hazard from the clueless-tourists-on-rental-bikes than from any of the auto traffic.

I am now totally wiped and intend to do nothing more strenuous than the laundry for the rest of the evening. But I think I'll take this route again in the future. It could be extended maybe another 10 miles by continuing on Paradise Dr up past Corte Madera to Larkspur Landing, then West on Sir Francis Drake Blvd, and south on Camino Alto -- although from the twistiness of that last on the map, I suspect it would add a bit more elevation change as well as miles.

Mostly behind a cut, due to being image-heavy, but here's the final pic as a teaser. ( Read more... )
And that was my weekend as a Death Ride groupie.

The scary thing is that I'm feeling just a little bit inspired ....

( a few more details )

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hrj

July 2025

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Page Summary

Two posts today
A Different Saturday Bike Ride
A San Francisco Adventure
Bicycling for Distraction
This *IS* the Brompton Bike/Commute Review Post
Happy early birthday to me
iPhone app review: Cyclemeter
Relaxation plans
Pork and its expiation
My Weekend as a Death Ride Groupie

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Page generated Jul. 14th, 2025 09:35 pm

Entries tagged with bicycling

Two posts today

A Different Saturday Bike Ride

A San Francisco Adventure

Bicycling for Distraction

This IS the Brompton Bike/Commute Review Post

Happy early birthday to me

iPhone app review: Cyclemeter

Relaxation plans

Pork and its expiation

My Weekend as a Death Ride Groupie