Two indispensable items

In the giant list of everything that you're supposed to bring with you on your bike while doing the ride, I've got two items that often get overlooked but make the ride much better for me. One of them you probably know about; the other, possibly not.

Lip balm -- preferably with sunscreen -- is extremely important. Even during our last few training rides, the rides are now long enough that you can do serious damage to your lips if you don't protect them from the sun and the wind. As with all such items (including sunscreen), you are expected to bring your own on the ride. Although the medical tent might have some available, it's only for emergency use ... and they often run out or start rationing anyway as the week progresses.

The item you might not have thought about is a tiny water mister. This tiny bottle (see how it's only a little larger than the lip balm) can make you feel immeasurably better on hot days -- and it can make you a lot of instant best friends when you walk around Mission San Miguel with a cool spray of mist in your wake. It really only makes sense when the temperature is above about 85 degrees or so, but we have enough of that on Days 2 and 3 (and, this year, maybe Day 5) that this dollar-store item is a wise investment.

I've certainly gotten the strange looks when I've pulled the mister out of my jersey pocket (or perhaps I just get strange looks anyway), but then folks go "wow."

Just remember: If you mist yourself heavily, your sunscreen might wash off. Remember to reapply it!

It can happen without warning

On the part of Highway 9 that we rode Saturday afternoon, a tragic incident occurred the next day. KCBS radio reports:

24-year-old Ashley Jackson of the Alto Velo cycling team was riding in the bike lane on Highway 9 toward Los Gatos with her boyfriend and cycling coach, Dave Nelson, when Nelson said they were both hit from behind by a late-model, silver, 4-door BMW 7 Series sedan. "I can't even speak the words of what this person did," said Nelson. "You can ruin someone's life by one action and not even care to stop."

Nelson said it appears the car's right mirror clipped Jackon and knocked her to the ground. "The car comes flying through, by me, grazes me with the broken mirror, hits me with his broken mirror, kind of shocks you, wondering what he's doing. At that point, I have to turn around and see my girlfriend laying in the road. She's crumpled up and hit by this car." Jackson was knocked unconscious, with a broken collarbone and a serious brain injury.

The Mercury News adds, just in case anyone was wondering:

The two were cycling together, he said, single-file in the bike lane, with helmets on.

Ride report: Cat-3 Distance Training #8

Go, riders!

The longest day of AIDS/LifeCycle is Day 2, from Santa Cruz to King City. It's about 108 miles, the day starts off cool and foggy, things really get hot toward the end, and while most of the hills are rolling, there are a couple of attention-getters along the way. Sounds just like Saturday's 100-mile century loop around the South Bay! Congratulations to the 29 riders who were part of this event, and extra special thanks to SAG driver Susan for another day of outstanding service. Special congratulations go to the riders who completed their first-ever century.

By this point, just about everyone has mastered basic riding techniques, and you're all mostly following the safety rules. (I did see someone roll through a red light, though. Don't do that!) Again this time, I'll take a few minutes to talk about all of the various management tasks that you have to do while riding. Getting to Los Angeles is not as simple as pedaling over and over and over again!

Saturday's ride was our first ride that had rest stop closing times -- and they never became an issue for anyone, which was good. In fact, some of you joked about how generous the time limits were. The good news is that these are roughly the same time limits you'll have on most days of the ride in June.

But here's the other news: We had only four stops. A long day on the ride can have as many as six official stops -- four rest stops, a lunch stop, and a water stop -- and two or three unofficial stops, such as Paradise Pit in Santa Barbara on Day 6. That can be nine stops in one day. If you were to spend just 30 minutes at each stop, that would be 4.5 hours off your bike out of the 12.5-hour time limit that you'll have on most days. And 30 minutes at a stop isn't all that unreasonable, even if you're a "fast" rest stop person, because much of that time you'll be waiting in lines ... for the toilet, for food and water, etc. So you could be spending as much as one-third of your day not riding! All of a sudden, the 12-hour time limit becomes just eight hours on the bike, and you start watching the clock to make sure you don't miss a closing time.

That's why time management is such an important factor. You know roughly how fast a rider you are. Based on that, you can budget time for off-the-bike activities, and then you need to stick to that budget. If you're a slower rider, try to get in and out of rest stops more quickly. Doing so can allow you to reach camp earlier than riders who are faster than you.

But also remember that the fun stops along the way are a key part of the ride. Don't become so focused on reaching camp that you forget to have fun along the way! The challenge for you is to find the proper balance between completing the ride and enjoying the week. It's not easy.

Another thing that can happen on very long rides is that you might not always be thinking clearly or be as attentive as you should be. I saw it happen yesterday -- a rider in a residential neighborhood didn't even notice a stop sign and went right through it. This wasn't intentional at all on the rider's part; rather, the rider's mind had just gone somewhere else for a few seconds. It's very easy to get yourself into a "zone" where you're extremely focused on the task of riding, and you can lose sight of the world around you. Not only can this lead to things like not seeing a stop sign; it can keep you from having fun and interacting with other riders.

I've seen it on the ride -- a cyclist pulls into a rest stop nearly in a daze and sort-of sleepwalks from bike parking to the toilet to the water line. (I think I might have been that cyclist a couple of times.) Sometimes that's a sign that there's a nutrition or hydration issue; other times, it's a sign that someone has retreated into their own private world. Either way, there's a danger there. If you're not paying attention to your body, you can put yourself at risk of injury; also, however, you can become a risk to other cyclists because you might be more likely to do something unsafe or unexpected. (Ever see anyone bonk and just decide to suddenly stop right in the middle of the bike lane? That's what I'm talking about.)

Use the rest of the training season to get intimately familiar with how your body responds under the stress of a full day on the bike. Fine-tune your time-management skills, and practice pacing yourself so that you can maintain the same pace "forever" -- or, at least, long enough to get you through seven days without injury.

For our next ride in two weeks, we're adding another hour of riding time and keeping the total climbing about the same. Our 113-mile ride will go all the way to Gilroy and back. An added challenge on this ride will be the possibility of strong headwinds on the return from Gilroy to San Jose, so the difficulty might go up a notch or two. Details and RSVP are here.

And next Saturday is Day on the Ride in San Francisco. This year's route is 67 or 42 miles; the longer route includes some challenging hills in central Marin County. Pre-registration is required and limited (and costs $15); details are here.

Day 1 is just six weeks from today! Thank you for being part of AIDS/LifeCycle.

Ride to the Calaveras Reservoir

Here's another pointer to an excellent training ride that's coming up this weekend. On Sunday, Randy Files will lead his Sunnyvale Cat-2 group into the East Bay and up the hills into the area around Calaveras Reservoir. It's a somewhat challenging 80-mile ride, but if you're up for the challenge the day after doing our century, it should be a very scenic (and warm) ride.

I've offered Calaveras rides in previous years, but it's just not on the agenda this time around, so this is probably your only chance this season to get an official ALC training ride to that destination. (And Randy will even have a SAG vehicle!) Unlike my rides, however, Randy is leading the group up Calaveras in the easier direction (from north to south), meaning that you'll have a steep, brake-burning descent into Milpitas.

Cat-3 riders are always welcome on Randy's ride, but you can also use the opportunity to ride at the slower Cat-2 pace if you wish. Details and RSVP are here.

Hot weather is on the way

Looks like this Saturday's ride could see the hottest temperatures so far this year.

We'll be riding through south San Jose, where temps generally are a few degrees warmer than in Mountain View, and early forecasts suggest that we'll be seeing the mid-80s during the day while we ride through that part of town.

In hot weather, it's vitally important that you drink enough water and replenish your electrolytes. Not enough water, and you could face dehydration. But too much water, and you could face hyponatremia, which is equally dangerous. So yes, like so many other things, here is another important area that you must manage while riding.

Use this weekend's ride to observe how your body reacts to the heat, and use these lessons to adjust your nutrition and fluid intake so that you'll do even better in June when it's 95 degrees as we ride into Paso Robles at the end of Day 3.

And if you haven't RSVP'd for Saturday's ride yet, find out more here.

The joy of riding somewhere different

Today's ride

Share your bike routes @ Bikely.com

Now that we're in the final weeks of training season, you might be feeling the blahs about the training rides you're doing. It's not uncommon!

Part of that might be because we tend to ride the same small set of routes over and over again. This is especially true for folks who ride out of San Francisco, where nearly every training ride begins with the exact same 11-mile trip across the Golden Gate, through Sausalito, and up the Marin Bike Path ... and ends with those same 11 miles. Even the world's most beautiful bridge can get boring after a while.

But even down here where we have more options, we still often ride the same places -- Foothill Expressway, the Stanford loop, along Cañada Road, up Mount Eden and (if your ride leader is particularly demanding) Pierce. It is at times like those that, for me, the training rides become mostly about getting the training and not very much about "having fun." And we're all in this to have fun, too, yes?

I remember the years before I got involved with ALC, back in the 1990s when I was living in the Bay Area. I'd just go ride somewhere. Quite often it was somewhere different. I used to have copies of both regional Krebs maps taped to my bedroom wall, and I'd take out a highlighter and mark every route the first time I did it. Over the course of about four years, those maps got very, very colorful, and many of the routes weren't places that we'd ever go on a training ride. And without the pressure of an upcoming ride to Los Angeles, I didn't do very many long rides. But I did lots of mid-length rides, and I saw some interesting places. (What's really scary is that, thanks to Google, my first-ever century ride report -- from July 1992! -- has been preserved for eternity.)

After being in ALC for many years, we can lose this sense of discovery and adventure ... and fun.

So today, with no group ride planned, I just took off and started riding. I had a general goal of riding part of next Saturday's training ride route, but I took a roundabout way on city streets -- and through downtown San Jose -- to get there. These are places that just aren't appropriate for a group of 30 to 40 riders on a training ride, but I deeply enjoyed seeing sights that I hadn't seen on a bicycle in quite some time. Even the "new" parts of next weekend's training ride route were fun -- especially the flock of wild turkeys that was trying to cross Silver Creek Valley Blvd.

But as soon as I got on Santa Teresa Blvd. through south San Jose, I was struck with a massive case of the blahs. Not this street again! It's not the most exciting or scenic street, and the quality of the riding is usually OK, but it feels like we always go up Santa Teresa every time we're returning from the south. Across Blossom Hill, up through the residential maze of Monte Sereno, and down Quito Road -- all perfectly beautiful, but I just couldn't feel any love for any of it today. The hills were downright drudgery.

The realities of our training rides are such that we unavoidably use many of the same roads over and over again -- often because we have safety in mind and don't want to put other riders in conditions that might be OK for one rider but not OK for 40 riders.

If you're feeling the training-ride blahs, here's some advice: Just go ride somewhere. Don't even try to "train"; just go ride somewhere. If you don't have a good sense of direction and/or knowledge of area roads, take a map with you. (The VTA bike map is perfect for this.) Go somewhere you've never bicycled before, even if it's just a maze of residential streets. Don't worry about trying to keep a particular pace. Experience the world around you. If you want a group ride, consider going to a training ride that starts somewhere unfamiliar to you.

If you're a first-year ALCer, you're just a few weeks away from hundreds of miles of bicycling you've never seen before. But if you're a returning ALCer, you've already seen most of it (except for the 60 new miles this year on Day 5), you know where all the "secret" attractions are, and you probably even remember every false summit and every glorious downhill. If you approach the ride as drudgery, you'll be shortchanging yourself. Even in miles you've seen once before, twice before, or even 12 or more times before, seek the joy and excitement.

But also ... just go ride somewhere.

Paso Robles: Vine Street reconstruction, finally

Work has begun in Paso Robles on one of the worst stretches of pavement along the ALC route: South Vine Street leaving the city and heading toward Highway 46.

As reported last month in the Paso Robles Press:

Commuters utilizing South Vine Street to travel around the Westside of Paso Robles can expect some major improvements come 2010.

On Wednesday, officials, a slew of bicycle riders and other members of the public gathered at the Courtyard by Marriot to celebrate the groundbreaking for a project to widen and rehabilitate a roughly two-mile stretch of South Vine Street from First Street to the Highway 46 West interchange.

Rockwood General Contractors will complete the roughly $2.7 million grant-funded project, likely beginning next week, to construct Class II bike lanes to and resurface South Vine Street, a section of road described by city officials as both narrow and severely deteriorated.

... South Vine Street was originally slated to be closed from First Street to Wilmar Place for an estimated four to six months beginning this month, but the Paso Robles City Council re-considered the closure and opted to keep the road open and extend rehabilitation to the Highway 46 West right-of-way instead of ending at Wilmar Place.

As the story explains, there is really no other viable route southbound out of Paso Robles, so we don't really have any other options. But as my pictures from today show, the road is in absolutely horrible shape (note that, in the bottom photo, that's an actual traffic lane, not a shoulder), made even worse by the beginning of the construction -- which certainly will have progressed by the time we roll through in seven weeks.

This will be an area where extreme caution is advised.