Random Musings and Nicknacks

I’m home, I’ve had a nice, hot, long shower, a nap, am wrapped up in my bathrobe and think I have finally defrosted enough to describe what I did today.

A friend texted me last night – he and his wife were planning to bike up Cypress mountain today, and wondered if I wanted to join them? I checked the Cypress web page for the conditions – it was -2C at 8:30 that morning, and the snow making was going well. But the forecast was for sun, and I figured it would get above freezing by mid-day, so why not?

I checked the forecast once last time before going to bed. Now it was rain. Rain + mountain in November = , well I didn’t want to think about it – but the thing about a ride is the best ones have to be epic. There has to be a story you can tell, and this one would almost certainly live up to that.
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I’ve been thinking about why, when I am on a bike, I get so frustrated by the cars around me. I’ve realized it’s because I think that what I expect out of them is so basic, and yet the average driver seems to fail so spectacularly at it.  As I’ve spent time on the bike thinking about this, I’ve boiled it down to three basic requests:

1. Please ensure the lane is empty before either changing into it, or turning across it
2. Please, as required by law, leave a safe distance when passing a bike.  ICBC defines this as a minimum of 3 feet
3. Please stop at all red lights

That’s it. Basically anything else that I see day to day I can deal with. So here’s my question: is the list really unreasonable? Based on what I deal with daily, it would seem that most people think it is.

My new baby on her inaugural ride

A Vancouver winter is hard on bikes. Very hard. You ride through the rain and the water gets into places where it really shouldn’t be. The sand and grit gets thrown up with the water and acts like sandpaper. It turns out bearings really don’t react well to having sand and water get inside them.

That’s why most Pacific North West cyclists, like me, keep at least two bikes – a summer bike, and a lower end winter bike that they don’t mind letting get beat up. My workhorse for the last several years has been my Kona Jake – a vey basic cyclocross bike that replaced my old mountain bike. I love my Jake (I have often said if I lived in a cruel universe that only allowed me to have one bike, that would be it) and by riding it only in the rain I have abused it horribly.
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Part of the start line for the Cypress Challenge, Photo courtesy Glotman Simpson Cycling

I discovered something this weekend – maintaining an average heart rate of 170 for 49 minutes really takes a lot out of you!

For a change of pace, the friends that I ride with on the weekends decided to enter the Cypress Challenge, a “fun ride” up Cypress mountain (according to my iPhone, a 12 km ride at an average 5.8% grade) to raise money for cancer. I thought this was a great idea, and prepared for it Friday night by staying up way too late watching a movie, having some wine, and having a small dinner. The alarm Saturday morning came way too early – a mere 5 hours after going to bed. This was going to be fun…

I met with my friends, we drove out to Cypress, signed in, and by 8:50 were at the bottom of the mountain (just past the highway exit) surrounded by 200 other cyclists. I figured this would be interesting, I’ve never ridden in a group like this – although that would only last until the real climbing started.

The announcer over the megaphone reminded everyone that this was a fun ride not a race, so you could take your time (everybody laughed – I don’t think you’re allowed to buy a bike unless you have a competitive streak), then he pointed out that we had a local celebrity at the front – Sebastian Salas who has just set the Grouse Grind record at 23 minutes, 48 seconds, so he might be a good wheel to follow up (if you could).

The countdown went … 3 … 2 … 1, the horn sounded, the bikes started to roll, then the woman in front of me couldn’t get clipped in, and was having trouble pedalling. I hadn’t even crossed the official start line, and I was already falling behind!
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This is my new commute, from Richmond into Burnaby (BCIT area). Since I was on the bike today, and most of the way there, I wanted to try it out to ensure I knew how to do it, and what was in store for me.

The good news is the entire distance is on designated bike routes – I start up “Ontario”, turn right onto “Ridgeway”, then onto “Mid-Town”, before finally turning onto “River to Ocean” which takes me into BCIT. Interestingly the distance is almost the same as the trip to Ritchie – 19 vs 21 KM!

There is a significant difference though – this one is going to involve a lot more hills. A LOT more hills. That will probably be good for me, I’m not as strong a climber as I was at this point last year.

It should take me slightly under an hour – I was slow this time, because I had to get there first, and that involved riding from Boundary and Marine to Metrotown. If you think about what Boundary looks like from Marine to 49th (I actually rode up Patterson, a bike route, but it’s the same) and combine it with what I did two days ago I think I can be excused for being a bit slow!

Cypress Mountain, first lookout

Last year I started doing weekly rides on a loop from Vancouver, up Cypress Mountain, out to Horseshoe Bay and back. This year the weather has finally started to get nice enough to do it again, and today was our first attempt. With the start of the year, we didn’t even attempt the whole loop, and the goal was the first lookout at Cypress – although this is quite a goal in itself. The loop is 55 km, and although the climb up Cypress is daunting – climbing 250 m over 5.5 km (820 feet in 3.5 miles) – the hard part is earlier in North Vancouver, where we spend 1.3 km climbing at an average 11% grade. All year that section makes me consider getting off the bike and abandoning – after about the first 30 metres, it gets so steep I can no longer sit and turn the pedals, I have to stand and use my weight to push them.
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Riding the Olmo home from work last Thursday, I noticed the rear wheel felt a bit funny. I looked down and could see that it was slightly out of true. On the Olmo this is unheard of! I pulled over, took a look and discovered that the wheel had cracked at the eyelet and the spoke was pulling through. Definitely not something you want to ride very far with.

This means it was time to bite the bullet and actually take the bike in for maintenance. I had a pretty good idea that it also needed new chainrings, a new cassette, a new chain, new cables, and probably a good round of greasing. While that sounds drastic, it is also about right for a bike that has 15,000 km on it!

Now, there is one difficulty with taking the Olmo in for maintenance…
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I arrived at work this morning, parked the bike outside my cubicle (let’s see a car get that prime a parking spot!) stripped off my winter gear, and went for a shower.

Just a few minutes after I got back upstairs and sat down at my desk, a co-worker walked by and asked if my bike was supposed to look like that. This was a bit of a concern — my bike isn’t particularly different looking, usually, and my coworkers see it every day. What was she talking about?

We walked back to my bike, and the answer became self-evident. I ride with full fenders on the Kona — the back one attaches to the bottom of the seat tube (right down where the pedals and chain are) and extends up, over the top of the tire, and about half way down the back of the tire.

Well, that’s what it usually does. Today my rear fender was sporting a different look. It started at the bottom of the seat tube like it was supposed to. It extended up to the seat stays (diagonal tubes at the back of the bike), then ended. There was nothing covering the top of the tire. Then it started again — just at the point it would normally bend down, there was fender that went down to the back of the tire.

I had lost the middle half of the fender. Not the front half, not the back half, but the middle.

So no, it wasn’t supposed to look like that. And if it hadn’t been for the fact that I was going to get really dirty riding, I would have left it like that for the stares!

Unfortunately, instead, I have now had to replace it and have a boring looking full fender again.

I rode my bike to work today for the first time in a month (exactly a month, actually – my last ride was on December 11). This is the longest I have been off the bike in over 4 years, and boy, I could tell; I have definitely lost a significant amount of my conditioning. Not only due to the length of time, but also because of my complete inactivity. Typically before this when I wasn’t riding it was because of a vacation, so I would spend two weeks walking 8 hours a day. This time I was completely sedentary. Whereas a typical morning commute would result in an average speed between 24 and 26 kph, today I averaged 22kph, and felt it. 10% might not seem like a lot when you first think about it, but in fitness performance that is huge! Over the ride that can add up to more than 10 minutes, and can mean the difference between an earlier and a later seabus.

The first thing I noticed riding through Vancouver was just how much more snow they got than I did in Richmond. At home the snow is gone — there are still small piles in front of people’s driveways, that’s it. In Vancouver, starting around 45th Ave they still have several inches of snow on the ground. When I got down to 16th Ave the roads were still just two tire tracks through the snow!

Not only is this the longest I have been off the bike, this is also the largest sustained period I have driven to work — for two straight weeks, and that gave me an opportunity to compare the amount of time both methods take.

Driving, I got up consistently at 6:10, and arrived in the office at 7:45. So this morning I got up at 6:10 to see what happened. By the time I had put my bike by the cubicle and taken off all my winter gear I sat down at … 7:50. Five extra minutes.

I know the ride home will be no contest. Twice last week it took me almost 2 hours to drive home. Biking is a very constant 75 minutes or less.

“You owe me 500 dollars, I’ll call the Police if you don’t pay me!’

Generally those are not words you want to hear, sometimes they are downright surreal. Today was the surreal part.
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