Cycling Smackdown - Small Cog Tale

Introduction

I’m an assistant coach for the Albany High School Cougars mountain biking team. As described in a previous smackdown post, my bike—with its triple crankset—seems, to the Cougars, as antiquated as I am. (More on gearing later—I’ll bet you can’t wait!) Part of my role as coach is to inspire these kids, so I need to convey, through actions alone, that I’m not actually obsolete. This can mean giving them a run for their money which, as you can imagine, gets harder every year. Read on for a white-knuckled (or at least old-knuckled) account of my latest endeavor.

Small cog tale

The weather looked iffy but none of the forecasts matched, so although it had rained all morning, the ride was on. Coach M—, our fastest, was MIA so I got put with the fastest group. As we set out and headed up Thousand Oaks Blvd, I noted that C—, our top rider, was rocking his NorCal League Champion jersey from last season, with the California flag on it. I said to him, “Nice jersey! Where can I get one?”

C— said to S—, “Where’s Coach M—, our fearless leader?”(or something to that effect). S—, who looks like a Pixar superhero, and who almost beat me in two all-out sprints last week, said, “Actually, Coach M— is 0 for 2 this season.” C— asked, “Who’d he lose to?” S— gestured in my direction and said, “Coach Dana.” C— replied, “Oh, shit!” He was surely thinking about the final sprint of the ride, a tradition that, several years ago, was oddly named “VO2.” It’s contested along the final stretch of Wildcat Canyon Road, which descends at 1-2% and winds around like a serpent. The finish line is the intersection with Grizzly Peak Blvd, near the Summit Reservoir where the Cougar ride groups (and those of other teams) tend to congregate before the final (controlled-pace) descent to the high school.

By the end of the first climb a wind had picked up, big dark clouds had rolled in, and the temperature was dropping. We regrouped at the reservoir and then I dragged everyone along Wildcat Canyon Road, heading east. Several times I gestured with a flick of the elbow for somebody to pull through but either I haven’t successfully taught that signal to the riders, or they just didn’t want to help. I was hoping for a team time trial type of group effort, but when I pointedly pulled off and looked at C—, he launched a devastating attack. He totally soloed and S— dropped me too. I overhauled S— on the short downhill toward the Botanical Garden, before the climbing resumed, but never caught C—. We regrouped at Inspiration Point and as the rest of the kids (and the other coach) trickled in, it started to rain.

I decided to lead everyone down Wildcat to where it hits El Toyonal, and back up. Several kids protested but only pro forma … I think we were all electrified by the rain, which increased as I drilled it down Wildcat. Before the ride I’d put a new clear lens in my sunglasses and it worked great deflecting the spray off the road. I could actually (basically) see, though the ridge of hills and all the trees had effectively hastened the sunset. I reached the junction with El Toyonal and turned around. We’d agreed to regroup again at Inspiration Point again after the climb, so I didn’t wait for anyone … they’d be along soon enough.

True to form, C— blew by me with S— dying on his wheel. S— came off and I managed to stay with him to the top. When we arrived C— was jumping up and down to stay warm as he had no jacket and no body fat. Eventually the others arrived, and we turned on our lights and put on all the gear we had as the rain was pounding down now. I loaned C— a spare pair of arm warmers but his arms were too wet and he lost patience pulling them on and chucked them back to me.

A— was still futzing with his gloves when a number of riders rolled out. I yelled at them to hold up. They ignored me—a mutiny!—and ramped up the speed. The cowards! Apparently certain Cougars didn’t want me around to contest VO2. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for cunning tactics, but this didn’t seem very sporting.

Annoyed, I hammered to catch up, moving through our group like in a racecar video game, but it was pretty hopeless. Three of the kids were way off the front, taking turns pulling, fighting the wind together, and I was only one guy. Still, on the downhill toward the Regional Parks Botanical Garden I felt I could close the gap a bit since I’m bigger than these kids and punch through the wind better. But my progress was incremental and not enough.

I was ready to just call it a day—I mean, who cares, really?—when I remembered my mantra: “I … WILL … NOT … LOSE … EVER.” I guess it’s not really my mantra in the sense that I came up with it or anything; I stole it from some rap song. Plus, it’s kind of disingenuous because I actually lose all the time. But “I … LOSE … ALL … THE … TIME” is not a suitable mantra, and when I’m slaying myself on the bike in a dim rainstorm with possibly toxic levels of adrenaline coursing through my system, I sometimes become pleasantly delusional and can pretend I never lose. But how could I possibly manage to prevail now, when already so far off the back?

Ah, I thought. There’s always the “I hate pain” hill.

The “I hate pain” hill is the short, somewhat steep (perhaps 9%) climb between the Botanical Garden and the Brazil Building. My wife gave this hill its name, back when we were first dating. She rode over it and said, “I just learned something about myself. I hate pain!” I can usually do this one in the big ring, after getting up as much speed as possible on the downhill before. For some reason, the mountain bike team always goes around it, via Anza View Road, even though they’re young and strong and fearless. Probably the coaches set the standard ages ago and nobody ever thought to change it up. Well, on a previous showdown, during a ride with my road team that a former Cougar had attended, I’d had a chance to do a little A/B test. He’d dropped our entire group including me and, not knowing any better, went around the hill while I, in desperate pursuit, went over it and discovered that up-and-over is actually faster. So now I figured that maybe, just maybe, I could make up enough time to get back in contention.

Well, it worked perfectly. I came over the top, and as the road dipped down again I could just see the top three riders rejoining the road ahead. I gave it full gas and managed to claw my way across and latch on to the back. I hung out there for a bit, recovering, and before long the last of the three, G—, looked back and saw me there. Haha! Surely they’d looked back several times and confirmed I was nowhere in sight. It must have seemed like I came out of nowhere.

C— was on the front driving a furious pace. I was getting a pretty good draft off G— (who must have grown three inches since last season) but he was dying and letting little gaps open, so riding behind him was unwise, like getting too close to a drowning victim. To G—’s credit, it took me a few tries to take S—’s wheel away from him. As I’ve taught the riders, you look at the wheel you want, not at the rider who’s on it, and you just have to kind of insinuate yourself onto the wheel. Eventually I had S—’s wheel but he’s not such a good draft. I was bent way over the bars, but I’ve got this giant Camelbak stuffed with the tool set, the first aid kit, every size of inner tube, extra clothes, and other bulky stuff so I wasn’t very aero.

The pace was relentless, and pedaling was even harder than usual because my shoes, being absolutely soaked, seemed to weigh about five pounds each. The chamois in my shorts was also sodden and droopy … is this what it’s like having a full diaper? I sensed S— starting to tire … so it was time to move into second. He didn’t seem to mind when I came past him; he knew he’d get a sweet draft off of me and have plenty of time to recover, so he could try to come past at the last second. (He’d come so very close to pulling it off last week, after all.) So now I was right on C—’s wheel and he’s just as lithe and wiry as a greyhound, blocking the wind even less than S—. It was absolutely brutal staying in that draft at that searing pace. C—’s rear tire sprayed up a rooster tail of water right in my face, but my clear goggles protected my eyes, and the water hitting my mouth, though befouled with grit, was almost refreshing. Meanwhile, C—’s unrelenting verve was inspirational, and as I clung to his wheel for dear life I tried to conjure up a plot to defeat him.

This kid had been pulling ever since I’d caught up, and probably almost the whole way from Inspiration Point. Sure, he’s the League Champ, but he’s not invincible … possibly I could come off his wheel with like 100 meters to go and punch his ticket. I was actually more worried about S—, who was just sitting perfectly in position behind me, and who’d have a pretty good idea of when I’d launch my sprint. I decided I had to go early, for the element of surprise.

There’s a spot maybe 300 meters from the end where the road curves around and the downhill gets just a bit steeper, from like 1% to 1.5%. It’s subtle, but the perfect moment to take advantage of my 11-tooth cog. I guess that’s not really such a tiny cog by modern standards—after all, my daughter’s bike has a 10—but that’s because most kids are running the so called “one-by” setup, with only one chainring, which is typically a measly 32-tooth. My triple crankset has a 42-tooth big ring, giving me a 20-30% higher gear than they have, and at a high enough speed, it’s like having nitro or something (if only my legs can manage to push hard enough).

Needless to say what you’re reading here isn’t technically a Big Ring Tale, because we’d all already been in our big rings, and/or our highest gears, for several minutes before the denouement of our battle began. For me, the battle came down to the cog. All last season I couldn’t use my smallest rear cog because it was worn out and skipped like crazy. This season I finally got around to addressing it—but I couldn’t find the new cassette I thought I had somewhere. I ended up finding some random, lone 11-tooth cog floating around in my big bin of extra parts. I had no idea where it came from or what kind of shape it was in, but  to my delight it works great—no skipping at all. So instead of setting up the climax of this yarn with the standard convention of  “I threw ‘er in the big ring,” this is the part of the story where I get to tell you “I dropped ‘er in the small cog.” (Who knows, perhaps with the growing popularity of these one-by setups, and mountain biking vs. road, the term “big ring tale” will become obsolete, and “small cog tale” will take its place.) Now, full disclosure, I might well have already been in the small cog, but that’s immaterial … the point is, now I launched the big move that demanded the 42x11 gear. I was going to spin that gear all the way up or die trying.

Well, the good news is, I did succeed in taking both kids by surprise and quickly got a good gap. The bad news is, with the rain and the dark and my somewhat fogged-up goggles I’d totally misjudged where we were; maybe it was wishful thinking that we were finally close to the end. I’d gone several curves too early! No wonder my sudden move had been so effective: you’d have to be a  fool to go from that far out! O my god, what had I done? But there was no way to change my plan now … if I let up at all, both kids would fly by and that would be the end of me. There was nothing to do but try to make the move stick. I had that 42x11 turning pretty well now. (Having gone back and done the math, I can tell you my cadence was just under 100 rpm, which isn’t so fast for a track racer, but pretty much perfect for a mosher like me.)

I died over and over again with every pedal stroke, and the wimp in my brain was chanting its usual defeatist litany, notions like “It’s over, you went too early, you’re doomed, just sit up, these kids are in their prime, S— looks like a Pixar superhero, C— is the reigning League Champ, there’s no shame, you gave them a good run for it.” Fortunately the song in my head (there’s always a song in my head), which was “King of Pain” by the Police, was drowning out the inner voice. Going early had not been the plan, of course, and yet I seemed to be following a familiar script. There seemed something so inevitable about the excruciating suffering I was going through once again: the blood-taste in my mouth, the turbine-like whoosh-whine of my breathing, the white-hot burn in my legs. It could be no other way and I wasn’t going to let up for a second until I’d won or lost. No looking back, either—I cannot fathom why pro racers in solo breakaways so often look back; it’s like the kiss of death. Just face forward, face the music: “I will always be King of Pain!”

I was around the final curve, out of the saddle now, thrashing, feeling like I had a bear trap clamped to each leg. This twisty road with the tall trees around it, and the dark and gloom, with sometimes even a bat or two, have often made me think of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, and now I felt very much like Ichabod Crane dashing madly toward the final bridge, the Headless Horseman hot on my tail. The end in sight, I flogged myself like it mattered, and less than 50 meters from the finish still no kid had flashed by. With 25 meters to go I finally looked back. C— was there, of course, but well behind me, not even in my draft, and S— was nowhere to be seen. I’d pulled it off! Something like a wicked laugh fluttered to life deep within me but couldn’t make it anywhere close to my mouth, not with all that sucking wind and other respiratory havoc. But the feeling that flickered there was real and joyful. Can you imagine it? Actual joy, at my advanced age?

Needless to say my triumph, for all the thrill of the moment, was actually meaningless, a matter of pure trivia, something to be forgotten almost instantly (were it not for the stubborn persistence of this text). Surely C— didn’t much care. It’s just one more sprint of many, and like every coach I’m just a stepping stone on the kid’s way to greater things, if even that. But hey, that’s what I’m here for … my glory days were over thirty years ago and the point here is the current crop, the Cougars. When, some weeks from now, an actual race—a sanctioned NorCal mountain bike race—comes down to a final sprint, and C— wins it through timing, tactics, and grit, I will be stoked to have played any role at all in helping him reach that level. As for myself, I’m just glad to still be in the mix.

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Cycling Smackdown - Middle Ring Tale

Introduction

I am an assistant coach for the Albany High School mountain biking team. The age difference between the student-athletes and me keeps growing, and my bike isn’t getting any younger, either. In fact, it sports a triple crankset, a technology that has all but disappeared from the mountain bike racing circuit. One of the kids said, “We were trying to imagine you on a modern bike with a one-by, but it just wouldn’t seem right.” So this configuration has, for better or worse, become part of my “personal brand.”

What’s that, you ask? What’s a “one-by”? It’s a crankset with only one chainring, which is what most modern mountain bikes have now, paired with a  wide-range cluster of gears in the back (the opposite of the “corn cob” I coveted as a youngster). The problem with the one-by setup is, how do you properly execute the maneuver required for a Big Ring Tale?

I did not coin the term “Big Ring Tale”—at least, I don’t think I did, having used this term since the early ‘80s—but when I googled this phrase just now every single hit was this blog. Suffice to say, “Big Ring Tale” refers to a story of a showdown on bikes, with the climax coming when the hero, just before launching his final, devastating attack, “throws it in the big ring”—that is, shifts into his bike’s higher gear range. But this tale takes place on a climb far too steep for the big ring, which is why we’ll have to make do with a smaller one.

Middle ring tale

Our team rides are largely on dirt trails, but getting to them and back requires some asphalt. There’s a classic climb we do, on the road, that’s short but very steep. It’s called Canon Drive and it gains 244 feet in 0.39 miles, for an average grade of 11.7%. The top stretch is a fricking wall, topping out at 24.7%! Canon Drive is the last big hurdle we must get over during our weekday rides before descending all the way back to the high school. Most kids hate this climb because we usually have to tackle it when they’re already pretty knackered. They’ll beg for crazy long detours just to get around having to face it; one coach calls this chorus of whining “the ABCs,” for “anything but Canon.”

In my group (only the second fastest, but hey, I’m old!), there’s a kid named S— who is what we call a pocket climber. His physique is just ridiculously spare and lean, his upper body an inverted trapezoid from somewhat aerodynamic shoulders to an ideally narrow waist, and the inevitable “ripped” (i.e., lean) legs. He looks like a Pixar character, someone who could feature in the next “Incredibles” movie or something. On the big climbs I can almost never keep up with him. Today I was hoping he’d be tired enough, this having been a long ride, that I could prevail on this last, beastly climb.

So, I took the front right from the get-go, hoping to perhaps demoralize everyone into just slacking off (being teenagers, after all). I kicked out the hardest pace I could handle, which had my heart into the low 160s, which is over 90% of my maximum heart rate. The wimp that lives in my brain said, “Anyone who can come by me when I’m going this hard deserves to drop me.”

(Obviously the above photo is from a different ride when I had the opportunity to futz with a phone camera. Note the heart rate percent-of-max display, in the upper right, showing 84%, with the “ring of fire” showing in red how close to maxed out I am.)

Notwithstanding this fatalistic sentiment, my self-talk in such cases isn’t all negative. Much of the time I’m simply marveling how high I can get my heart rate when I’m riding with these kids. On no level do I feel like I need to beat them, or that anything is at stake; it’s just that their verve is infectious. Overall think my spirit animal is the cat; that is, I’m kind of a loner. But these team rides bring out my inner sled dog and I can’t help but exuberantly run with the pack, no matter how hard that is.

Soon enough, S—, the pocket climber, as if following a script, came drilling it past me. This was about 5/8 of the way to the top. (Why don’t I just say “about halfway”? Easy for you to say, armchair reader. On a climb like this, practically every foot of every effort is metered out.) S— started to pull away and I thought, “Well, he’s gone, but at least maybe I can hold off Z—.” Z— is the head coach’s kid, who has been putting the hurt on me more and more on every ride, in the process of eventually becoming faster than I, which most of these kids do (and which, let’s face it, is the whole point of coaching them, though it’s a bittersweet experience when they leave you, often literally, in the dust). Sure enough, Z— pulled level a moment later: the next thread in my weave unraveling.

Except it wasn’t Z—! It was this other kid, T—, who is a bit stockier than the others and generally isn’t a factor on the climbs. He’s not naturally built for uphills, perhaps even less than I am, plus he’s pretty new to the sport. Something about how he squares his shoulders, especially when I see him next to a pocket climber, makes me think of Frankenstein’s monster. And, when the hammer goes down, he really thrashes, body rocking all over the place. But here he was, totally going for it, attempting to burst forth and chase S— down, just flying in the face of Fate, despite the iron seeming stone cold!

It was such a cheeky move, so dismissive of  the established hierarchy, it inspired me! So I thought, heck, I’m already in the middle ring, which isn’t bad, on a grade this steep, and even though we’d just reached the final wall, where I would normally shift into my largest cog in the back, I thought: what if I just fricking shifted UP, into a harder gear? Or, even, like, two gears up? As in, what if I put the bike in the gear a real man would use here if he were going to lay down a rubber road straight to freedom?!

(Yes, I know in a classic Big Ring Tale I’d be honor-bound to throw her in the big ring at this point, but let’s be real. The grade is more than 20%. I guess I could have taken some liberties and written that I’d been in the little ring, and now threw her in the middle, but that would be false. Could I have called this a “smaller cog” story? No, that just doesn’t make any sense. And one more thing: if “lay down a rubber road straight to freedom” confuses you, you need to go watch “Mad Max” as soon as possible. I believe the expression has to do with accelerating so hard, even when already at highway speed, that you spin the tires and burn rubber.)

Could I really do this? Decide to shift up two gears, and just honor that crazy commitment? Well, my back to the wall, I was just crazy enough to try it. So I stood up (so I’d be standing already when the shift was complete) and clicked the lever twice. My derailleur is pretty bent, so under load it takes a while to shift into a smaller cog, and during this process I kind of lose some power, so mid-shift Z— finally came up next to me, like I’d known he would...

Except it still wasn’t Z—! It was this French kid, G—, the son of a fellow coach who is a brilliant world class physicist living in the US for a while helping America’s best scientists solve some crazy problem using a giant multibillion particle accelerator, but I digress. He (the kid, not the physicist) is normally off the back on these climbs, given the elite group he’s in, but he was having the ride of his life! He had dropped Z— and A— and was about to drop the fricking coach, that being me!

But it was not to be, because suddenly my bike was in gear and I fricking went! I accelerated with astonishing effect and I heard G— make this kind of odd noise, between a sigh and a puff of air bursting from his lungs through his mouth as his dream was instantly scuttled.

Okay, so, at the risk of exhausting your patience with another aside, I need to get something straight here, because when I regale my wife with tales such as this, she doesn’t quite understand the dynamic and to her, these acts of aggression are puzzling, even disconcerting. She ran track in high school but it was mostly a social thing, without much rivalry within the team. But the fact is, high school mountain bikers are just aggressive. Every climb, every descent, heck, even the rare flat section, is an opportunity to thrash your teammates. It’s automatic. It’s not the same as the road teams I was on at their age, where we were on a team with adults who let us ride with them so long as we behaved (i.e. rode predictably). And when we teen roadies went on long rides together, sure, the hammer would go down from time to time, but we also chatted quite a bit, at a casual pace, and at other times relied on each other for a good draft, taking turns facing the wind because it was a long way home. Mountain biking is different. The rides are shorter, more intense, and generally a free-for-all. And as a coach, my job is to lead, inspire, and demonstrate the subtle arts of tactics, psychology, and (when I can manage it) brute force. This isn’t like other team sports where the coach just does a lot of talking from the sidelines. We NICA coaches suffer right along with our student-athletes, on every ride. And, in the faster groups, we coaches pwn these youngsters whenever we can because our window for doing so is slowly but inexorably closing. We know it, and the kids know it: virtually anybody who sticks with the program for all four years can look forward to eventually surpassing the coach. Until that moment, we coaches are all-in, comfortably confident in the knowledge that even the most solid drubbing we can inflict won’t discourage these kids. They look at us: we’re old, we’re oddly fast, but we’re mainly old, and eventually, one day, vengeance is theirs. They will repay. [Insert winking emoticon here.]

Okay, where was I? Ah, yes, I’d completed my brave upshift and launched my quixotic attack. I was drilling it like a madman! Now, as you already know, anybody—even a guy who’s already hammering, even at >90% of his max heart rate—can stomp on the pedals and accelerate for a little while, maybe 50 or 100 feet, before he totally detonates. Such accelerations are impressive until they fizzle. Except that I didn’t! I just felt this crazy surge of power, like a giant wave had just swept me up and was hurtling me toward the beach—except it wasn’t a beach, it was a wall! The ruthless final stretch of Canon Drive! And I was flying!

The pain was so severe it just triggered some altered state where nothing could stop me, and I flew up that hellish pitch with absolutely no regard for the abuse I was inflicting on myself, much less for the laws of gravity. I felt like a squirrel running straight up a tree! It seemed impossible to catch the other two, except that suddenly they were in great difficulty—the difficulty I should have been in, but somehow wasn’t—and I was gaining on them with a quickness!

As I raged up the slope, fate caught up to T— and he detonated, right near the top, less than fifty feet from the prize, and as I overtook him I was in striking range of S—. As we went around the ridiculous corner at the top (where it’s so steep it’s impossible not to peel out in your car after stopping at the stop sign), I squeezed past S— and just nipped him at the line! Or did he nip me? There was no photo-finish camera, but either way, he must have been astonished I was even there, after having been so thoroughly distanced earlier. I looked down at my heart rate monitor, and for the first time ever, I mean in my entire life, it read 100%! So this was kind of a triple-victory! Man vs. Nature, Man vs. Man, and Man vs. Himself! Daaaaaamn!

So was there a victory salute? Applause? A ticker-tape parade? An engraving in some memorial plaque? Of course not: just a fist-bump and a breathless “NOOICE.” Of course in the moment this tête-à-tête felt like kind of a big deal, as in “What a rush!” but it was ultimately just another hill, just another sprint. And when intense, all-in suffering like this becomes routine, that’s when the humble teenager becomes an athlete, ideally for life.

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How to Avoid Being Bike-Jacked

Introduction

About a month ago, an email went around my cycling team about a bike-jacking on Wildcat Canyon Road up in the Berkeley hills: two men ran a guy off the road with their car, then stole his bike at knifepoint. (The Nextdoor report is here.) A week later, another report came in, this one from Strava and also reported in Berkeleyside, about two more cyclists being robbed of their bike, this time at gunpoint. Also mentioned were two other tales of cyclists escaping apparent robbery attempts. And just last week I came across yet another report of a cyclist being robbed at gunpoint, this time of his mountain bike.

I have continued to ride throughout this crime spree, and now, as a service to my fellow Bay Area cyclists and anyone anywhere who faces this threat, I offer my strategies for protecting yourself and—more importantly—your bike.

A few details 

I’ve pored over the articles for as much information as possible, but there are a lot of gaps. The first guy, we’re told, “had been run off the road about halfway between El Toyonol [sic] and Inspiration Point, by two men in a grey VW or Toyota sedan – ‘looked like primer’. He surrendered his bike when threatened with a knife. One of the men left with the car and the second rode the bike, both toward Berkeley. He was not clear on the description of the two men saying he was mostly focused on the knife.” Other than his bike being a “Trek Madrone” [sic] there’s not much more info.

Right off the bat, I’m pretty frustrated. I mean, “VW or Toyota”—what the hell is that? Any normal male above the age of ten should be able to tell the make, model, and year (give or take) of just about any car. But this guy? Let’s face it, VWs and Toyotas don’t look very much alike, whereas Toyotas and Hondas are practically identical. Consider the following exhibits:

Obviously, the car could have just as easily been a Honda, and by extension a Lexus or Acura. So all we really know about the vehicle is that it’s not a Prius and not an SUV. Gee, thanks. (Actually, a Prius would be the perfect getaway vehicle around here because it would be so inconspicuous. But an eco-friendly villain? I can’t see it happening.)

Perhaps more annoying than the victim’s poor observational skills is the typical prevalence of stupid comments below the news story. Lots of politically charged stuff in there about “PC politics,” “defunding the police,” etc. One guy wrote, “Race of criminals; suppressed. Type of bikes; secret.” What does he mean “suppressed”? By whom? There’s a difference between neglecting (or failing to notice) this or that detail vs. it being kept from us as though by conspiracy. And really, the type of bike is irrelevant. Am I safer because I ride a Giant, when the criminals are apparently targeting Treks? Uh huh.

I would argue that the thieves’ race (though it was brought up by four commenters in the first Berkeleyside article) is also irrelevant. We cyclists want info that will help us keep an eye out for the perps during our rides. This is why knowing it was, say, a mid-‘80s VW Jetta would be really useful. But suppose, for the sake of argument, the perps were white guys. Does this mean I need to peer into every car I see and try to make sure the driver isn’t white? Pffff.

There’s also the probability that multiple, independent criminals are involved. Copycat thieves, if you will. Which brings me to my perp-agnostic strategies.

Strategy 1 - Choose different routes

The hardest thing to figure out with these reports is whether the victim was riding uphill or down. This makes a big difference. Consider the guy run off the road on Wildcat Canyon. If he was climbing, he’d have been a sitting duck for the thieves; that climb (from San Pablo Dam Road to Inspiration Point) takes me like 13 minutes (and chances are I go faster than a bike-jacking victim plucked at random). But the descent is under six minutes, so a thief would have to be pretty lucky to happen upon me (unless he’s sitting in wait—but his VW or Toyota or whatever the hell it is better be pretty fast to catch up from a dead stop on that twisty road). So I’ve stopped climbing Wildcat (but I’ll still descend it). Instead, I can go up El Toyonal and Lomas Cantadas and then down South Park Drive . (Lomas is closed to through traffic except bikes; South Park is closed to cars during the pandemic.)

Other thefts and attempts were on Grizzly Peak Blvd, most of which isn’t that great a road anyway. The residential section is dangerous because the locals tend to drive poorly; e.g., pulling out of their driveways without looking , or worse. (Click here for a particularly egregious example.) This stupid street is easily avoided if you go up South Park, and if you don’t want that steep a climb but want to reach destinations south, you could ride through Berkeley and go up Tunnel Road to Skyline. So far those roads haven’t been a target.

Bear in mind, I don’t always feel like climbing Lomas, in which case I stay on El Toyonal. The section east of Lomas, which connects to Wildcat Canyon Road, is closed to cars. I do have to then ride up the top half of Wildcat, but I can do that in under six minutes—a risk I’m generally willing to take. More on this later.

(Am I doing a disservice to my fellow cyclists by giving away these secret routes to prospective thieves? No. First of all, there’s nothing they can do about these roads being closed. Second, thieves don’t read this blog. If they did, they wouldn’t be thieves … they’d be procrastinating grad students, retirees, and/or my mom.)

Strategy 2 - Evasive action

If you’re descending and somebody tries to pull alongside to run you off the road, you could try to outmaneuver them. For example, you could take the left lane. The evil driver would have to have balls like King Kong to follow you over there. After all, if you encountered an oncoming car, you could ditch off the left side and probably not crash—but the would-be thief would be out of luck. Of course this technique has the moral flaw of putting an innocent motorist or cyclist (i.e., the one possibly coming the other way) in danger. So I don’t really recommend it.

Now, if you’re climbing, and really paying attention, you could probably stop quickly enough to avoid being run off the road. Then you could pop your feet out of the pedals and roll backward, paddling with your feet, long enough turn your bike around, clip back in, and flee downhill.

When I climb Wildcat from El Toyonal to the summit, I figure that if I do encounter a thief, and can manage to turn around, I could be back at El Toyonal and the safety of its gate in under three minutes, worst case. That’s not so long to hold off a deranged motorist. And the gate really would save me … it’s not like one of those matchstick ones the bad guys plow through on TV.

Strategy 3 - the “human shield”

I’ve only used this technique by accident. I was descending Wildcat and caught up to another cyclist. I didn’t want to pass (because it’s hard to give the guy the requisite six feet of COVID clearance, so passing would be rude). I hung back 100 feet or so, and in the process realized that if a would-be thief were lying in wait ahead, he’d get the guy ahead of me, and I could turn around and flee. (Er, turn around and get help—that’s what I meant.) And if a motorist started trying to catch me from behind, I could just sprint a bit, pass the other cyclist, and let him be the victim. (While I went for help, of course.) Employing this strategy while riding up a hill would require more patience, but could be done. A downside to this scheme is that you’d have to wait at the top or bottom of the climb for a suitable human shield to show up.

A variation on this would be “humans shield” whereby you ride in a large group. (History has shown that two riders isn’t enough.) Of course, everyone in your group would have to be vaccinated first … but we’re getting there.

Strategy 4 - the “I’m-with-Grandma”

This is a variation on the human shield, with the human being in a car. I discovered this by accident too, when I got stuck behind an elderly, slow driver on the way down Wildcat. Again, a thief sitting in wait ahead would rule me out because there wouldn’t be enough space between me and Grandma’s car to move in. And if a thief came from behind, I could sprint around Grandma … the thief probably wouldn’t dare follow.

Strategy 5 - Capitulate

Of course you could just willingly comply and cooperate with the thief. After all, it’s just a bike, right? And isn’t every cyclist always looking for an excuse to buy a new ride? Consider the following exhibit, a chat I had with a friend recently over the absurd price of new chainrings and even replacing a simple bolt:

(Harrison, in this context, is my late father.)

The are problems with this strategy, though. As far as I can tell, homeowners’ and auto insurance don’t cover this kind of theft—and proper racing bikes are expensive. On top of that, I don’t trust criminals to be reasonable just because I’m cooperating. They’re loose cannons, right? Finally, I don’t trust myself to follow through and be docile. When I think of how angry I got when some shitbird stole the handlebars off my commuter bike, I sense I’d be ready for hand-to-hand combat if someone went for my entire bike. As a kid I used to get in a fair number of fistfights, and a weird, crude part of me misses them. Which brings me to the next strategy.

Strategy 6 - the Walt Longmire

I was unarmed—who brings a Colt M1911 on a bike ride?—so I decided to hand over my bike, even though the guy only had a knife. But knowing he’d try to escape on my bike, I opened the rear quick release as I rolled it to him. I’d taken off my helmet to try to draw his eyes away from my tampering, but he didn’t fall for it. “What did you do?” he asked, looking down. I saw my opportunity and swung my helmet as hard as I could up into his face. As he recoiled, I threw my entire bulk at him, pinning him to the ground under the bike. I wrested the knife from his hand and was about to pummel his face when his accomplice yelled, “Think again, asshole!”

I looked over to see the endless, stainless barrel of a Colt .357 pointed at my face… All I could think was that this was the last thing I would see. Time froze then, and it was as if the air had died…” Suddenly a giant cyclist came barreling down toward us doing at least thirty, stuck out a knee and an elbow, and nailed the gunman, sending him sprawling across the asphalt. I jumped to my feet, seized the dropped sidearm even before it stopped skittering across the road, and had the perp covered within seconds. Henry Standing Bear downshifted, turned around, and rode back up in time to yank the other thief from the ground and put him in a hammerlock before he could do anything.

The big Indian said calmly, “The thieves clearly did not realize you were riding with a friend. It is a good thing you dropped me before beginning your descent of Wildcat.”

(Note: the italicized text above is taken verbatim from Death Without Company by Craig Johnson, Penguin Books, 2006, page 245. Used without permission.)

Strategy 7 - Ride in the morning

There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you: I don’t rely on clever routes alone to avoid bike-jackers. I also ride bloody early in the morning—as in, before dawn. Why am I confident in this strategy? Well, so far the documented thefts have occurred between 11:00 a.m. and 6:30 p.m. And think about it: thieves are never morning persons. If they were morning persons, they’d have fricking jobs and wouldn’t have to rob people!

So you may be wondering how this is working out for me. So far, it’s great! For one thing, it’s a lot quieter and more peaceful … just me and the turkeys and an occasional jogger. That photo at the top of this post is the view of Mount Diablo from Wildcat Canyon Road, snapped during one of these morning rides.

On a recent outing, I didn’t encounter my first car until almost half an hour in, when a douchebag in a big Benz blew by me, coming way closer to me than necessary—practically grazing me—and going waaaaay over the speed limit. He wasn’t trying to rob me, though—he turned in to the parking lot at Inspiration Point. Why the rush? I’m guessing he wanted to get to his favorite meadow in time to do his sun salutation just as the sun came up over the horizon. What a git.

(Ironically enough, his unsafe pass occurred within twenty feet of this sign:

So you see, he was a scofflaw; just not a bike thief.)

Minutes later, I encountered another vehicle, suspiciously parked at the side of Wildcat Canyon Road, on the stretch where the first cyclist was robbed. But the vehicle was a Honda Element: way too conspicuous, not to mention nerdy, for thieves … it is beneath their criminal dignity. Meanwhile, the aroma of burning ganja emanating from the vehicle was strong enough to put me at ease. Even if the driver tried to rob me, I’d just have to stall him for a bit and he’d forget what he was doing and wander off.

After that, there were a few cars on San Pablo Dam Road but that’s a major commuter thoroughfare (with the traffic in the opposite direction, happily enough). Next up was El Toyonal, which is a beast of a climb but zero mugging risk … even the most boneheaded thief knows almost nobody rides here. You could wait half a day for a victim to happen along.

Not feeling like tackling Lomas Cantadas, I took the El Toyonal cut-through to Wildcat. It’s as peaceful a road as you could want:

Probably the riskiest part of my ride was heading up the top half of Wildcat towards Inspiration Point. That vulnerable bit of the route is why I ride so early. As it turned out, the only other car that passed me was a Tesla. I wasn’t bothered in the slightest, because Tesla owners are more the type to commit white collar crime.

Note that if you adopt the early morning strategy, it’ll get easier as summer approaches and the days got longer. Here’s a handy chart showing civil twilight times for this area:

This morning, civil twilight started at 5:56 a.m. I was on the road at 6:04, plenty early enough to get 20 miles in and still show up to work (at home, of course) by 8:00.

But what if you want to do a much longer ride, like the 70-mile round trip to the Mount Diablo summit? That brings me to my last anti-mugging strategy.

Strategy 8 - Slip between the horns

The other weekend, I wanted to ride Mount Diablo, but wouldn’t make it back to the Berkeley hills until early afternoon. The obvious solution to this problem would be to ride home over El Toyonal and Lomas Cantadas. But I don’t have nearly the fitness to do that … I missed a lot of riding last year due to injury, and I knew I’d be pretty well shattered by the Diablo summit, over thirty miles from home. The alternative would be crawling home over Wildcat in the afternoon, clearly a risky behavior. As I silently pondered the matter, my wife said, “Hey, how about I go shopping in Walnut Creek and meet you for lunch? You could throw a change of clothes in the car and drive home with me.”

Genius! She had seemingly recognized my false dichotomy (the fallacy that Lomas and Wildcat were my only options) and deftly slipped between the horns of the dilemma. Actually, her plan had nothing to do with the local crime spree, which (thankfully) I don’t reckon she thinks much about. It was just a novel idea of how to spend the afternoon.

It worked out perfectly: I destroyed myself on the mountain, coasted down the other side, found the car, changed, and twenty minutes later I was inhaling yucca fries, a Cuban sandwich, and a pint of IPA, with my bike safely locked up in the back of the car. This became the first point-to-point training ride of the year, with a sprinkling of net elevation gain to boot ... and exactly zero bike thieves. NOOICE!

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Ode to Lomas Cantadas

NOTE:  This post is rated PG-13 for mild strong language.

Introduction

Years ago, I posted here my Ode to South Park, about one of my favorite cycling climbs.  Ever since, I’ve had this nagging feeling of something left undone:  an ode to another climb, that’s my very favorite.  So, here it is.  (Photos included here are of my daughter, who first rode Lomas Cantadas a couple of years ago.)

The Poem

Ode to Lomas Cantadas

El Toyonal is a beast of an uphill;

Pedaling here is a bit self-defeating.                                      2

Lomas Cantadas will sweeten your beating:

Insult to injury, sweet overkill!

Most riders wisely take Wildcat Canyon.

Half the uphill, after all—and you’re tired!                          6

Wisdom, alas, is a flaw when you’re mired

In glory, in notions of being a man.

  Sometimes caprice is much better than ease:

  Radical freedom is here to be seized!                                10

Footnotes & Commentary

Title:  Lomas Cantadas

What does “Lomas Cantadas” mean?  That’s a bit tricky.  Google translate says “sung hills.”  Hills that have been celebrated in song?  Perhaps.  But the spelling of “Cantadas” isn’t consistent.  Google Maps says “Cantadas,” but the street sign says “Contadas,” which would be “Counted Hills.”  Aren’t all hills counted, or at least eligible to be counted, making this modifier pretty much meaningless?

Among my riding pals, I’m always the one pushing to do this climb.  In fact, I tend to try to foist it on everybody I ever ride with.  Occasionally, someone will ask me what the name means, and I tell them, “Lomas means hills, and Cantadas is actually an acronym for ‘Can’t A Dana Albert Suffer?’”

Line 1:  El Toyonal

Okay, I admit this is a confusing start to the poem.  Why do I mention this other road?  Well, the only way to get to Lomas Cantadas is from El Toyonal.  But it’s possible to ride up El Toyonal without continuing on to Lomas; you can bail out and cut over to Wildcat Canyon and save yourself a lot of suffering.

Line 2:  self-defeating

Defeating yourself is really the point here.  An East Bay Velo Club teammate of mine, Muzzy, who is kind of the Obi Wan Kenobi of our club, says that the course doesn’t make the race—the racers do.  That is, any course can be hard if your competition is tough.  But for those of us who don’t race anymore, and do a lot of riding alone, motivation can be a problem.  That’s where it’s nice to have a gradient so severe that you couldn’t loaf if you wanted to.  You yourself become the foe who must be defeated.

Line 3:  sweeten the beating

A jolly good beating is one of the great joys of cycling (and similar athletic disciplines, I’d imagine).  The long term rewards (e.g., stress release, fitness, the freedom to eat whatever you want whenever you want in whatever quantities you want without getting a big gut like E.T.) are well and good, as is the worthy knackered feeling you get in your legs after a ride.  But on top of all that, the immediate, in-the-moment, muscle-searing, chest-heaving discomfort of extreme exertion can provide a strange kind of tactile pleasure, if you do this often enough to acquire a taste for it.  There’s a purity to athletic struggle, a distillation and concentration of what it means to be alive in your body, and it can be habit-forming.

Line 4:  insult to injury

The injury mentioned here is metaphorical; of course I’m not advocating going out and harming yourself.  But the insult is literal:  I find it impossible to tackle a climb like this—averaging over 10% with pitches of 15-20%—without feeling sheepishly insufficient to the task.  On top of that, I doubt I’m alone among cyclists in instinctively comparing one’s current effort to one’s past best, which so often recedes ever further into history.  For ageing bikers like me, this can be disheartening or even humiliating.  So we disparage ourselves.  We can’t help it. 

Case in point:  I haven’t trained hard in six months and am at least ten pounds heavier than usual.  I’ve been afraid to ride Lomas this year, but yesterday I finally bit the bullet (despite being totally fried from four days of riding in a row).  My time (including El Toyonal) was 22:27, whereas my personal best was 16:47, set about two years ago.  So I’m almost 30% slower now, a difference which manifests as a grotesquely slow cadence and a lot of weaving back and forth like a paperboy.  I didn’t just feel slightly off my game yesterday morning; I felt borderline incompetent.  The insults I hurl at myself in such cases are nonverbal, but nonetheless vicious and cutting.  And yet, even as I lament my poor form, I enjoy the satisfaction of doing something about it.  

Line 4:  sweet overkill

You could accuse me of being redundant, with “sweeten” in the third line and “sweet” in the fourth.  But “sweet” as an adjective has taken on so many meanings in modern vernacular, I’d argue it has almost nothing to do with the verb “sweeten.”  You might tell somebody he has a sweet bike, but if you asked a bike shop guy, “How can I sweeten my bike?” he’d find your usage highly nonstandard.

Line 5:  Wildcat Canyon

East Bay cyclists do all kinds of short rides in the Berkeley hills, but our longer rides invariably take us across these hills to destinations east, such as Mount Diablo.  Our last obstacle to getting home from these adventures is crossing back over this ridge of hills.  Wildcat Canyon Road is the logical choice, as it’s a pretty mellow climb and usually you’ve done plenty of suffering by the time you reach it.  Zoom in on the below map and you’ll see the three possible routes:  Wildcat (farthest north); El Toyonal with the cut-through to Wildcat; and El Toyonal to Lomas.  (Note the “Decision Point” callout in the lower right of the map.)

Line 6:  half the uphill

Wildcat gains only 187 meters (614 feet) at an average gradient of 5%.  Lomas, on the other hand, is essentially twice as hard, gaining 372 meters (1,221) feet over about the same distance.  In other words, it’s twice as steep, and takes you to a much higher summit than you need to reach.

The problem is, on the way to Wildcat you go right by the turnoff to El Toyonal.  To me, this is a gauntlet thrown down that cannot be ignored.  To continue straight, toward the easier climb, is to acknowledge my own laziness and/or weakness.  The turnoff taunts me, and I, in turn, taunt myself, along with anybody else who’s riding with me—unless my pals beat me to the punch.  It’s like a dare.  A double-dog-dare.  You reach the intersection and—if you ignore the sober, serious, and completely reasonable voice in your head, and listen instead to the gonzo, irrational troublemaker in your skull, or on the bike next to you, you turn left.  You know it’s a bad idea and that’s essentially why do you it.  One moment of rash decision, when you make that turn, is followed by around 20 minutes of paying dearly for it.

Lines 7-8:  mired in glory, in notions of being a man

We really are mired.  Modern men, the sensitive and enlightened kind, can tell themselves—and others—that they’re over all that macho bullshit, but they aren’t.  No, not really.  They might deceive themselves, but we all have vainglorious impulses, chronic ones, rooted in testosterone and savagery and a lust for combat (whether it’s man-vs.-man, man-vs.-nature, or man-vs.-himself).  If a male completely subjugates or denies this impulse, he will face the consequences.  Maybe that’s the root of all this emo nonsense. 

Myself, I see sport as a great way to get this stuff out of our systems in a healthy, consequence-free manner.  I suspect that the truly sexist men among us, such as the ones who belittle their female colleagues, are reacting to feelings of unresolved inadequacy, which they senselessly blame on the women who (they fear) harshly judge them.  So when I see a male cyclist taunting his pal, casting aspersions on his manhood based on whether to take the harder climb or the easier one, I call that good clean fun.

Usually, this climb isn’t one where I’ll encounter other bikers.  But occasionally I do, and once or twice a battle has occurred.  Here’s an entry from my training diary, from August 2013: 

I had a smackdown with a d’bag on a really expensive bike, clad in really expensive clothing.  He took a good while to overtake me, and then rode just ahead of me, and he fricking stunk!  I don’t mean he reeked of sweat, which is normal and understandable, but he smelled like shit!  If he’d just been faster everything would have been fine—he’d have gone on ahead and I’d be rid of him.  But it was as though it took everything he had to pass me, and now we were in lockstep.  I wasn’t going to slow down just to escape the stench, especially because my gearing is just barely low enough for this grade to begin with.  So I sat on his wheel tolerating the odor.

I figured this guy would try to be in the lead at the place where the road splits [one route has a bit of a descent before eventually joining Lomas], so he could take the easy route and pretend he won something.  I didn’t want to give him that satisfaction so I passed him and drilled it just before the junction, where it’s is super-steep, hoping to Cancellara him.  I did get a pretty sweet gap and in the process made the halfway point in record time.  Alas, the rich & stinky d’bag ended up doing the same route I was, so I had to keep hammering.  At the really steep parts I dug extra deep and increased my lead, hoping to shatter his morale.  I managed to extend my gap to ~30 seconds by the end.  I hope he felt good and slapped-down.  Anyway, the really great part is that I have a new lifetime PR for Lomas [17:05]! 

It’s worth pointing out that solo, self-motivated trips up Lomas, after your pals have turned off, are just as common (and in my case more common) than getting shoehorned into the effort by your pals.  (I’ve done this climb well over 500 times, but only a few dozen times with teammates.  Huh, I guess this is a “counted climb.”)  Choosing Lomas is a manner of personal pride, of knowing you didn’t slink away from a challenge.  Beyond that, dudes sometimes do check up after the fact:  “So did you do Lomas on the way back from Diablo?”  The mere chance of this inquiry, and the glory of saying, “Of course” rather than, “Well, no, I kind of had to get home” is sufficient motivation, for many of us, to take on the extra suffering. 

This was even the case after a brutal group ride up Mount Hamilton a few years back, when the day’s most stalwart rider, Kromer, diverged from the group to ride the Morgan Territory Road solo, and then—on a whim—climbed Mount Diablo.  On the way home, after more than 150 miles in the saddle, he decided to take on one more challenge.  In his e-mail to the club that night he wrote, “You know what’s next. I knew you’d ask, and I knew I had to say yes. So. Lomas.”  Many of us, particularly the ones who’d cheated and took Bart home (under the Berkeley hills), had to bow down before him.

(All this male competitive stuff aside, of course I acknowledge and respect that other drives than machismo exist, and women also challenge themselves and each other.  But I only see these behaviors; I cannot experience the motivations behind them.  I’m telling my story here and cannot tell theirs.  I thrill to the yarns my teenage daughter has been writing about her high school mountain bike races, and if she ever has her own blog you can bet I’ll link to it!)

Line 10:  radical freedom

It isn’t the case that a cyclist is strictly compelled by male ego, peer pressure, or insecurity to take the harder climb.  We are fully capable of saying “screw that” and riding up Wildcat, and we often do.  But by the same token, we are not compelled by logic or fatigue to ride up Wildcat, either.  Any rationale we could apply to either decision is flimsy, and to pretend otherwise takes us toward self-deception.  We are not doomed to take one route or another in the way that a chair is doomed to be a chair.

Meanwhile, we are free to throw all rationale out the window and exercise our radical freedom by behaving perversely.  (This freedom carries responsibility, but very little is at stake here other than lactic acid buildup and residual soreness.)  Steering the bike toward El Toyonal, while thinking “This is a bad idea,” is a reckless act, and perhaps that’s the point.  Humans behave recklessly all the time, but usually it’s eating that second bag of chips or giving in to the temptation to buy something we can’t afford.  (Nike’s slogan “Just do it” is a brilliant strategy for helping make this happen.)  An extra serving of pain and struggle is a pretty minor consequence for getting out your irrational, impulsive ya-yahs.

Appendix:  Why did I write about South Park years before Lomas Cantadas?

It’s been more than four years since I wrote my Ode to South Park.  Why did that one come first, and why has it taken me so long to honor my very favorite climb?

It comes down to laziness, frankly.  As poems go, I’m most comfortable writing sonnets, as I’ve done a lot with this form and consider myself something of an authority.  Knowing what I do about the iambic pentameter featured in a sonnet, I’m well aware that the phrase “Lomas Cantadas” is fundamentally incompatible with this meter.  Consider:

I really want to ride up South Park Drive

Works great, right?  The inflection naturally falls where it needs to.  But check this out:

I want to ride up Lomas Cantadas

Everything is fine until the last word, and then the meter breaks down.  Unless you force an emphasis (inflection) on the last syllable (i.e., CANT-ah-DAS), you break the rules (which the reader grasps intuitively) of iambic pentameter. When you pronounce this word properly, within a line of iambic pentameter, you experience the poetic equivalent of being clotheslined.

Having recently reviewed a couple of my old Kroopian poems—which are based on dactylic trimeter—I was emboldened to finally tackle this ode.  In case you’re wondering, this was a lot harder than writing a sonnet.

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New Cycling World Record Set in Berkeley!

Introduction

Remember that “Brady Bunch” episode where Bobby and Cindy tried to set a world record for continuous teeter-tottering?  Well even if you don’t, imagine trying to go watch their attempt, as a complete stranger.  You’d be chased off by Mr. Brady, or maybe Alice.  But today I had a chance to interview a daring world record attempter even while he made his attempt.

The challenge

The current world record—yes, as in Guinness Book of World Records record—for “the most vertical metres cycled in 48 hours” is 28,789 meters (94,452 feet), set in 2012 by a Swiss rider.  That’s more than three trips up Mount Everest, if its base elevation were at sea level. 

The guy out there attempting a new world record, even as I type, is named Craig Cannon.  In addition to wanting to set a new record, he’s hoping to accumulate 100,000 vertical feet.  Something I’m particularly excited about is that Craig is doing this via endless trips up my favorite climb, South Park Drive in the Berkeley hills.  (I love this climb so much, I wrote an Ode to it, replete with footnotes & commentary, which you can read here.)  But as difficult as this climb is, Craig is doing his laps on the hardest section, which is 1.1 km (0.68 miles) long, at an average grade of 12%.  The elevation difference between the top and bottom of this section is 129 meters (423 feet).  So he’ll need to have completed about 236 laps (about 321 miles) in 48 hours.  You can see the Strava segment by clicking here.

So how much is 100,000 vertical feet?  Let’s put it in perspective.  A staircase gaining that much elevation would be 35 miles long; would have 166,667 steps; and would take you to the top of an 8,000 story building!

Wait.  Stop.  Set aside, for a second, the math and the grade and even the 100,000 feet.  Just think about bicycling up and down a murderously steep grade for 48 hours straight.  It’s an unbelievably difficult challenge Craig has undertaken.

The challenger

Until this past Thursday, I’d never heard of Craig or this effort.  What I can tell you is that he’s an Oakland area cyclist, a member of the Knackered Tyres cycling club, and has ridden with my East Bay Velo Club teammates a few times.  He asked one of them, Mike, to get the word out about his effort.  Craig wanted to have as much company as possible on the road, for moral support.

The only other thing I’d heard, before meeting up with him on the road, is that he started a little after 5:00 p.m. on Friday, rode through the night, and was joined by a couple of my teammates at around 11:30 a.m. on Saturday.  Here he is—he’s the guy in all black—riding with Muzzy (white arm warmers) and Jamey (behind him).  So this is 18½ hours into his effort.

And here he is at 9:48 p.m. on Saturday, close to 29 hours in.

My teammate MB snapped that photo; she and Muzzy, her husband, had gone to check on him that night (but without bikes).  No good action shots due to the darkness, of course.  That’s Craig’s mom, by the way, with the headlight.

The next morning MB, Muzzy, and another teammate, Lucas, joined Craig for some more pacing.  This photo is from about 9:50 a.m. when he was about 41 hours in.  Still looking pretty chipper, eh?

Riding with Craig

I thought about leaving for my own ride extra early this morning to ride a lap or two with Craig on the way to meeting another teammate, but I just didn’t feel like getting up that early, even to witness history being made.  I figured I’d drop in on the action on my way back from Mount Diablo.  Now, the easy way to come home from Diablo is via Wildcat Canyon Road, which links right up with South Park.  But to be honest, I was afraid that if I took this route, I’d chicken out, tell myself some lie like “He’s surely given up,” and go straight home.  I mean, cycling is hard, and attempting even one out-of-the-way trip up South Park presents a serious “gumption trap” (to borrow a term from Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance).

So I came home over Lomas Cantadas, so I could descend South Park and look for Craig.  I have to admit, the small, weak part of me wouldn’t have been too disappointed if he’d given up, because I really, really didn’t feel like riding up South Park, even once.  And frankly, even though Craig had invited us to ride alongside him, I wasn’t at all sure I’d actually be welcome.  I mean, it was close to noon, meaning this guy had been riding for 43 fricking hours straight.  If I get less than 7 or 8 hours of sleep, I’m pretty grouchy.  I’ve pulled one all-nighter in my life, and was a beast afterward.  And that didn’t even involve continuous cycling on a brutal grade.  I feared that, by this point, Craig might be in no mood to deal with anybody, least of all a chatty guy like me.  Plus, not having seen the Sunday morning photo shown above, I figured Craig would look like absolute hell, presenting a truly pitiful sight.  So though I hate to admit it, I was prepared to be (one one level) kind of relieved if he wasn’t there.

But then there he was, cranking his way up the road, flanked by my teammate, MB.  By the time I safely turned around to catch up with them, they were pretty far ahead.  I had to really work to close the gap.  What the hell?  I’d ridden, what, 5 hours?  Amazingly, even after 43 hours, he was putting out a good pace.  After a short introduction whereby I invited him to tell me to shut up and/or go away if I bothered him—because I totally understood the pain cave where you want to suffer in peace—we had a nice chat over three laps (1,269 vertical feet) of the climb.

Some Q&A with the world record challenger

So, how was he doing?  Just fine!  Still on target!  With about 5 hours to go, he’d tallied up about 90,000 feet of vertical gain.  So he had to average 2,000 feet per hour for the rest of his ride to make his goal (half that to break the current record), and we were doing about 2,500 as we rode.  (To put this in perspective, the Tour de France peloton does around 4,200 feet per hour during the mountain stages.)  Craig had been through a pretty difficult period but had come through it.  He’d taken about a 25-minute rest during the night, but couldn’t tell if he’d actually slept or not.

He really did look relaxed and strong.  Here are a couple of photos, taken a little before noon.

 

Is his bike anything special?  Not really.  Another guy who was riding with us complimented him on using an old school steel frame.  “Yeah, I like the feel of steel, and it’s cool to get to hang out with the guy who built it,” Craig said.  “It’s not the lightest bike in the world, but....”  I decided to finish his sentence:  “It’s not like you ride a lot of hills or anything.”

Does he race?  No, he just likes “messing around on a bike,” as he put it.  (I’m quoting him as though verbatim but it’s just from memory.  To do otherwise is just too clunky.)  He hasn’t ruled out racing in the future.  He did do a pretty gnarly competitive event that had the word “Everest” in it.  It wasn’t the Everest Challenge, a race I’ve done and written about a few times, which features 29,000 feet of climbing over two days, but rather a self-paced, virtualized GPS-based event where you try to accumulate that much vertical gain in just one ride.  Craig accomplished that on this very climb—South Park Drive—though he was doing longer laps, from the very bottom to the top.

So, why South Park Drive?  He worked with a coach and thought hard about the best way to tackle this world record, and ultimately decided this climb was perfect because it was steep enough that his speed would be low enough (too shallow a grade = too much speed = excessive wind resistance); the grade wasn’t so steep that his pedaling cadence would get too slow; and this road has a lot of cyclists on it so he’d have plenty of moral support.  He emphasized the need for camaraderie since so much of such an effort is psychological.  Oh, and he needed a route that has restrooms.  And an extra bonus is that when you descend this road, there aren’t any roads connecting to it from the right.  This makes it a lot safer.

Tons of food?  Yes, though most of the calories are from energy drink (I think he said this, and no, I didn’t manage to remember what brand he uses).  Beyond that he eats a total hodgepodge of things, including potato chunks with olive oil and salt.  Caffeine?  Yes, plenty, and he went off it completely for two weeks prior to lower his tolerance.  He also stopped having any alcohol for like six weeks leading up to the record attempt.

Longest ride before this?  Low 40s.  As in, more than 40 hours.  Unbelievable.  He’d also done a 48-hour double-all-nighter (not on the bike) just to make sure he could do it, and then immediately rode up Mount Diablo.  As we chatted, I couldn’t get over how chipper and good-natured he was, and how solid a pace we were knocking out.  Occasionally on a particularly steep pitch he’d stop mid-sentence and say, “Can’t talk now.”  Then he’d pick right back up again later.

Bike lights?  Of course, and good ones.  Three headlights, NiteRider brand (which are sweet), though not the very fanciest ones available.  Also a good tail light, of course, even though very few cars would be driving on South Park Drive at night.  (This is something I love about this road.  It’s just not a very useful route for a motorist to take.  Yeah, there are cars, but no commuters, and generally nobody in a hurry.)

Craig’s support crew

In addition to Knackered Tyre teammates joining him on the road (in shifts, like my EBVC pals were doing), Craig had a team based at the bottom of his route, at the turnaround point.  His mom, who had flown out from Boston to support him, was there for the entire duration of his effort and stayed awake the entire time!  A woman whom I believe is his girlfriend had put an image of him on a stick.  I’m not entirely sure what this was used for, but I like it!

I think it’s pretty impressive that he was able to get these people to devote so much time, through the night no less, to an endeavor that just seems so crazy.  His coach was among those gathered.  At one point his mom poured some water on him (it’s a hot day out there) and he cautioned her not to pour too much—he didn’t want it getting into his chamois.  (In case you’re wondering about his, uh, comfort in the saddle, I was too but I didn’t ask.  If he’d managed to stop thinking about how much his butt hurt, I didn’t want to break the spell.)

The suspense!

It’s 5:02 p.m.  I think he said he started at 5:10 p.m. (last fricking Friday, for crying out loud!) so he might already have the record ... and he might already have crossed that miraculous 100,000-feet threshold!

It was fun getting Craig’s story even as he lived it, and part of me wanted to ride with him the rest of the time, but a) the part of me that wanted to keep going was only the mental part, whereas my body had had quite enough, thank you; b) I was out of energy drink and gels and wasn’t about to bum some off him; and c) I was sure he’d get sick of me.  (I would.)  So I rolled home at around 12:20 p.m., thinking how cool it would be to rest a bit, have some food, and then return to join him for those last few victorious laps.  But in my heart I knew I wouldn’t make the effort.  Bicycling up hills is really hard and we’re not, any of us, made of such stuff as Craig obviously is.

Well?!  Did he make it?!

It’s now 6:17 p.m.  I’ve fact-checked the world record; proofread this report; checked Strava a dozen times; and I’m still waiting....

And now, at 7:00 p.m., I have just received a triumphant e-mail from MB:  “He did beat the record. Muzzy, Sean, Mike and I were there.  Awesome!”

Here are some final photos. The first was taken a little before 5 p.m. (assuming the camera time was set correctly), around ten minutes before the end:

And here he is checking his GPS device. I can well imagine it would be difficult to interpret (much less believe) the instrument’s data after 48 hours of cycling. Good thing he has other people corroborating.  (There was also the (perhaps not wholly unwarranted) fear of the device malfunctioning and losing his record-breaking data, so several pals snapped photos of it.) His total elevation gain was 95,622 feet ... more than enough to set a new world record, though a bit short of his (albeit arbitrary) goal of 100,000. Kind of like hitting a grand slam home run but not sending the ball into low Earth orbit like you thought might be cool to do.

And here he is with MB enjoying a cold post-ride beverage. I’m told NBC News showed up at the end to cover the victory celebration.  Way to go, Craig!

About the type

Assuming default configuration of your Internet browser and computer operating system, this blog post will be set in Georgia, a typeface originally cut with a crude hunting knife into the trunk of a Mongolian oak (quercus mongolica) in Izborsk, Russia, in the early 1800s by Ivan Ivanovich Zakareishvili in memory of Tsar Alexandar I.   Georgia was first introduced to the web in 1997 when bundled with the Internet Explorer 4.0 supplemental font pack.

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