(5-31-08)

May Update: The Backstory

     After hardly any riding since March, I finally started to ride again in May. I rode in the evenings for a while in January and February, then in the mornings for a little while in March. Unfortunately, going for rides after work meant missing out on time with my family and riding in the morning was just a big pain since it was cold and I really don't have any cold weather riding gear. Bike clothes are expensive and we're really not in a position for me to be spending a couple hundred dollars just to ride in the early morning for the 4 month long Arizona winter. With May having arrived however, there was no longer any excuse not to ride in the mornings.

     As a recap, I used to ride bicycles for hours at a time when I was a kid. I had a few different bikes, but certainly once I had a mountain bike I was one happy kid indeed. The huge wheels and tires meant I could go over curbs and run over debris on the ground without it immediately causing the bike to lose control like tended to happen on the smaller wheels that BMX style bikes used. I rode that thing everywhere, although mainly just around the block a dizzying number of times. I do however remember waking up real early one Saturday morning when I was in high school but before I had my own car, so I was probably 15-16 by then and I rode all the way to a friend's house who moved to Gilbert. It seemed like it must have been a hundred miles away although checking online maps shows it was about 4 miles one way, so even with some random side trips it would have been around 9 miles round trip.

     I never did a long ride after that. It was right around then that I got a driver's license and was allowed to use my mom's car for getting about town, and driving to and from school and work. A quick glance at my other website, autocrossing.com could be a good indication of how things went after that. I did actually purchase a new mountain bike when I was 19, but I took it down a canal ride and flatted both front and rear tires on the first ride. Nothing spoils an experience like getting two flat tires in two miles of riding, and that was pretty much the end of ever riding that bike again. It now is in a state of progressing oxidation on the side of my house, awaiting me to haul it away to the dump or something.

     Fast forward to last July. By July 2007 I no longer had a roommate, nor did I own a second car for racing, so I had no alternate transportation at home at all. It was my car, now 10 years old, or walking. Having a tire go flat on my Civic brought the realization that walking any further than my mailbox was absolutely no fun at all. I needed alternate transportation. After spending a week or so contemplating a Honda Ruckus motor scooter for a while, I decided that $2000 for something that was essentially a toy may be overkill for my purposes. I had just recently noticed a new bike shop opened up a mile from my home, so I stopped by there.

     I walked in and explained to the guy in the shop I just wanted an inexpensive bike that was still good quality for riding short distances around town. Nothing special, just something for getting from point A to B. He pointed me to a 2007 Specialized Globe they had on closeout as the new 2008 bikes were already starting to arrive, I rode it maybe 200 feet around the parking lot and decided it was good enough for my purposes. I rode pretty regularly for the first month of ownership, then got busy with the wedding plans and the weather started cooling down. That was pretty much it for 2007. The longest ride I'd logged in 2007 was 26.41 miles.

The Long Distance Personal Bests

     By January 2008 I was out and riding again. This time I was riding after work, since it was warm enough to ride in the late part of the day at least. I rode pretty regularly from January through March with the real highlight coming on March 1st when I rode 31.74 miles up and down the Scottsdale Greenbelt, seeing both north Scottsdale and Tempe Town lake. It was a long, but rewarding ride for myself and my friend Brady, who did the ride on his hardtail mountain bike. I continued to ride pretty regularly until the end of March when my schedule filled up once again.

     By mid-May I was doing early morning rides again, at least here and there, and straight away I wanted to go for a distance record. I came close at first, managing 30.29 miles riding around the east valley hitting some newly completed bike paths along the freeway and canal banks, some of which were just completed within the last few months apparently. It was exhausting, but I struggled with overdoing it at first, plus I had headwinds, no food, and only 42psi in the tires as opposed to my normal 75psi or so. You know, all the usual excuses for failure.

     I didn't let it bother me though, I knew that even a modestly slower pace would result in far more range. I'd already seen how riding very hard would tire me out in just 5-6 miles whereas riding 75% as fast could carry me 20 miles with very little fatigue. I planned to break my record in a big way, and soon. In fact just two days later I set out with the goal of riding from my house to the fountain in Fountain Hills and back. It was an ambitious goal, but one I had total faith that I could achieve. In fact I never doubted I could do it, I just wasn't sure when.

     Two days after my 30 mile ride, I woke up at 1:50am for no reason, having "only" gone to bed at 8pm the previous night. To me that was all the encouragement I needed to start my ride. It was a Sunday morning and I knew I had a long time before church. My goal was to ride to the Fountain Hills fountain, just over 25 miles away, and back home again in 5 hours. It took me a lot longer than expected to get ready for the ride, partly because I wasn't actually planning on going riding that morning, so I still had to pack everything and get all my gear together and arranged. By 3am however, I was on the road.

     The first hour went by without any trouble at all. The only thing I was a little worried about was my low average speed. Normally on flat ground I can maintain 12.5mph or so and most of this ride I was doing 10.5-11 or so, but preserving energy was the top priority, so I didn't let it bother me. In just one hour, I'd already made it plenty far enough without incident. Midway into the second hour I started heading up the segment on highway 87 which is when it first heads uphill. I realized at that point I have never ridden a sustained uphill. I've done short bits, like freeway overpasses and such, but nothing like this - hundreds of feet of elevation in the next 8 miles.

     With my speed falling to 7-8mph or so, suddenly it wasn't looking so good to make it to the fountain in 2.5 hours. Inclines and flat ground really are different. At this point I decided it was time to really start praying and asking God for guidance. Now I already had faith I would be fine one way or another. Worst case, I get exhausted and just sit on the side of the road and call my wife and ask her to pick me up. Sure, it was still early in the morning and all, but it wasn't like I was going to die of starvation or get eaten by wild animals. I knew my physical safety was already fine. Second to that, I decided that I should turn back once I've been on the road for 2.5 hours. The sun was going to break soon and I didn't want to be riding in open sunlight for too long since I didn't have sunblock. My prayer was for wisdom of how to pace myself and knowledge of if I should make it, or turn back early and try again another day. After all, I'd done 17 miles already, so even if I turned back now it was a new record.

     It was around now that I thought of a book my friend Dave had told me about. It was apparently the story a monk who was the cook for a monastery. He was cooking meals all the time, but wanted to be praying and spending quiet time with his savior, like all the other monks. Rather than being bitter about being the cook, he decided to have a continual dialogue with God. Apparently in pretty much everything he did, he acted with the mind of what would be pleasing to God and talking to God.

     I still remember Ron, the pastor who married my wife and I, delivering a service at church once where he talked about this type of behavior of a never-ending dialogue with God. The most amusing was when he said that you can be at Burger King and as you're eating your juicy quarter-pounder, tell God how thankful you are for it. It was funnier the way Ron did it, since he's a great voice actor, and did the whole thing of pretending to eat a cheeseburger while saying "Oh wow, God thank you *much much* for this *chew* cheeseburger. You know, *chomp, munch* I'm really glad *munch* you made cows *munch* taste so good. *chomp, chomp, chomp* They really are quite *gulp* wonderful, *bite, chew* you did a great job *munch, munch* and come to think of it, *chomp* this is wonderful cheese. *gulp, munch* Cheese comes from cows too, what do you know?"

     In retrospect, both of those examples involved food, so perhaps there's a definite relationship there between food and dialogue with the Lord. In any case, I spent the remainder of the ride trying to conduct a similar dialogue with the Lord. I told him about how nice it was this morning, how I am getting tired, but I know the downhill will be easier, about the weeds on the side of the road, and everything I could think of. Before I knew it, 2.5 hours had passed and I was only about a mile from the fountain. I was behind schedule, but not by much and I had accomplished half of my goal by reaching the fountain, and just had the other half of riding home to take care of now.

     There's a lot of ups and downs in Fountain Hills and I was going as slowly as 4mph or a little less on the steepest uphill segments which is pretty discouraging. A later analysis of the log shows they calculated at around 5.5% grade, which is just slightly steeper than the 5% or so that highway 87 does to Payson. Still, 4mph is really, really slow. It took until beyond the 3 hour mark to get out of town and climb the last hill beyond which it was literally all downhill from there on home. That first touch of sustained downhill was a real eye-opener for me. Never before had I gone so fast on so little effort.

     Now to put it all in perspective, it's no surprise that I like to go fast. After all those years racing, the desire to go fast is still alive and well in me, I just don't go fast in cars anymore. On my bike however, I'll take speed any way I can get it. My previous flat ground record was about 23mph and my absolute top speed was 25.4 on a very, very slight downhill grade. I'd also done 25mph with a good tail wind on flat ground. Still, I was well acquainted with 20-25mph being a sprint-only speed, after which my muscles were burned out and I could do no more.

     Today, I was in for a real treat. Thanks to the roughly 1-1.5% downhill grade, I could do the high teens with no pedaling at all, and maintain 22-25mph with only as much effort as I used to do 7-8mph on the uphill climb before. Very quickly I had put several miles behind me and in what felt like no time at all, I was already off the 87 and headed south on Gilbert road. I managed to cover 13 miles and was already well into town again, easily ahead of schedule by several minutes to get home in under 5 hours. With nothing but flat ground on the rest of the way home, I covered the last stretch with minutes to spare, pulling in to my driveway after covering 51.25 miles in 4 hours 54 minutes with about 30 minutes spent stationary for stop lights and my hourly rest breaks.

     For this ride I had set some new personal firsts and bests. It was my first "half century" ride, or ride of more than 50 miles. Granted, it wasn't sanctioned by a club or anything, but it still meant a lot to me. It was my first time doing real hill climbing, ascending from around 1200 feet in the valley to a peak just shy of 1600 feet in Fountain Hills. Best of all, I was exhausted upon finishing the ride, but not to the point where I felt physically ill, which I have had happen to me on much shorter rides where I just totally overdid it and rode way too fast. I was tired, but not to the point where I felt like I had overdone anything. Best of all, I felt like I'd gotten to spend some real quality time in dialogue with Jesus on my ride through the desert.

     So what's all this leading to? Well, I'd like to do a real century next year. Not just a hundred mile ride on my own, but The 2009 Solvang Century which is a hundred mile ride through the hilly countryside around the town of Solvang, California, outside of Santa Barbara. Melissa and I went there two years ago and I thought it was absolutely beautiful. Green, rolling hills, the cool town of Solvang, wine vineyards, the whole nine yards of pretty scenery. It has about 5000 feet of elevation gain, which is more than ten times as much elevation gain as the total for all hills on my Fountain Hills ride. I don't plan to think about that so much right now though, that's a challenge for another day.

My First Large Group Ride

     The next interesting ride I did was another first for me, I participated in my first real group ride. While I did ride the Scottsdale Greenbelt with Brady, that was just the two of us, plus it was along bike paths, not all along public roads. I read a story in the news online about how there was a free bicycle ride in Mesa to support the annual ride for silence, which is a once-a-year ride that is done on the same day all over the US and in a few other countries to bring attention to the cause of bicycle safety. It was from near my parents old house in Mesa to Kiwanis Park in Tempe which for some reason sounded like a really long ride to me, so of course I wanted to do it.

     Well, as it turns out, there's not much to say about this one. I got there late so I missed the whole meeting before the ride and rode at the back of the pack. There were about 60 of us according to the event organizer and we all rode pretty much single-file in the bike lane along Guadalupe. As it turned out, it was only a little over 9 miles round trip and overall I can't say the ride really fit my style. It was during the evening rush hour, tons of traffic, and because our line of cyclists stretched out hundreds of feet long, it caused a lot of motorist frustration with motorists that needed to turn right and faced a huge wall of bicycles in the bike lane.

     Everyone seemed to have a good time and we only had one car with some kid leaning out the passenger window shouting at us. It was funny though because he was driving so fast that all you could hear was indistinct shouting as he was behind us, then a couple words like "all of you to" and then you couldn't hear anything at all because he was already past us. I don't think he quite understood that if you're speeding along at 50mph, that's about 75 feet per second, so you're only in earshot for one, maybe two seconds at most. I found that part especially funny that he wasn't achieving anything other than giving all of us a good laugh.

Let's Break That Speed Record!

     So yeah, the "Let's break that speed record" is from the old Speed Racer cartoon, immortalized in dance-club song by Alpha Team years ago. The original cartoon was just silly enough for phrases like "I accept the challenge!" and "let's break that speed record!" to be fun to say when you're in a goofy mood. Since I essentially tied my old record on highway 87 with just a 1.5% downhill grade, I knew that if I did the steepest hill I knew of, I should easily be able to smash the record if I actually set out specifically to do so. No long ride, just drive to the site, and bomb down it as fast as humanly possible.

     The site in question is Chandler Blvd. just west of Desert Foothills Park, in Ahwatukee. It might not be quite as steep as one hill that Brady told me about in Fountain Hills, but it's only about a 20 minute drive instead of 45 minutes, so it had to do for now. At the very least, I knew by calculation I would be able to obliterate my old record and beat 30mph at a minimum, and probably 35mph too, although I was doubtful of much more than that. On the flipside of the downhills, I knew it was a very steep uphill and if I was to do a ride like biking to Payson or the Solvang Century, I had to know my body was capable of doing 5% grades for a long time. The climbs in the Solvang century are 250, 650, and 1100 feet long for the major ones and going to Payson has up to 2000 feet of vertical gain at 5% grade!

     While I mainly set out just to enjoy the fun of bombing downhill as fast as possible, I knew that if I couldn't ride up the hill multiple times, there was no way I could ever hope to do even the Solvang Half-Century ride. So enough of the setup, first ride down I gave it a lot of effort, but I didn't tuck down, I rode fairly upright, just leaned forward over the bars a little. I wanted to be a little conservative anyway since I honestly didn't even know how stable my bike would be at such high speed. I glanced down a couple times to see speeds somewhere up in the 36-37mph range. The wind noise was positively deafening compared to anything I had experienced on my bicycle before.

     In less than a minute, I had blasted down a hill of unknown steepness at a speed that was well above what I had even guessed possible. I knew that either my bike had a lot less drag than I had thought or else the hill is steeper than 5% grade. Next came the climb. I dropped down to my lowest low gear and started up the hill. I still felt great so I was able to make short work of the hill, seeing 5-6mph up the roughly 135 foot total climb back to the top again. This time I knew that I had to give it my all and that I would be too tired for a maximum effort sprint after this run. I set back slightly on the uphill portion, then started cranking over the hill, so I was already moving a good 13-14mph by the time I crested the hill and could really lay the power on.

     Cresting the hill I was just starting to really put the torque to the pedals and seeing 14mph or so. I quickly worked through the gears, glancing down and seeing 22 already. Some more pedaling, some more shifting. I glance down again and see 32mph. That's not good enough, time to tuck down and really lay on it. Fully tucked down, pedaling as hard as I can, I glance down again and see 38-something miles an hour. I was almost out of hill already, only a few more seconds before it starts flattening out! At this speed, even in top gear I am pedaling so fast that I'm actually having trouble making full torque on each pedal stroke. As I reach the bottom of the steepest part, I feel the sensation of having reached my physical limit. That was my goal - to reach physical maximum before running out of road.

     I knew that everything came together as best as it could have. I had my warmup downhill run to get a feel for the speed, spin my legs real fast and make note of where any debris and manhole covers are near the bike lane. That was followed by the long uphill climb to fully warm up my legs. On the downhill, I had my running start, tucked as far down as possible and felt myself reach physical maximum just before the hill flattened out. That run truly was as good as it got, I just hoped that if I could do 37 on the previous that I would break 40 on this run. I checked the trip computer's maximum speed and sure enough, I cleared it by 8 tenths. 40.8mph. Unless I find a steeper hill, this would be the functional maximum this bike can do.

     One more climb up the hill and this time I was well and truly tired on the climb. I held more like 4mph for the whole climb this time. The final run was a simple one - just coast down in full crouch and see what speed is shown with no pedaling at possible. I was actually able to get even lower coasting than I was pedaling, and even bumped my chin on my GPS on the handlebars over one of the big bumps. This was as aerodynamic as I could be, but since I didn't want to reset the top speed in the trip computer, I wouldn't know the exact velocity until I got home. Checking the software revealed two interesting things.

     First, I found the steepest downhill segment had 85 feet of descent over 0.22 miles (1162 feet). So when you divide 85 by 1162, it shows the hill was actually a 7.3% grade. Sure enough, the hill really was quite a lot steeper than I had figured. No way would I be able to touch these speeds on highway 87 but that's fine because 40mph on a commuter bike with no suspension is kind of pushing the limits of what I'm comfortable with anyway. Checking the software revealed that my peak speed coasting, no pedaling was 36mph. This shows how much it's just gravity versus aerodynamic drag. Zero pedaling: 36mph, hard pedaling: 41mph. All that work just for the last 5mph of speed. On the upside, it does mean that for things like Solvang or Payson, you can go extremely fast on the downhill without pedaling at all, thus giving yourself some rest time while still covering tons of ground.

     So what's in store for the future? I think more rides at higher speed is what I need to be training for at this point. I have a family and I can't dedicate 5 hours a day to riding, so I need to make the most of my time on the bike. Also, the faster you ride, the more effort you're putting forth, and thus the more it is strength training and not just building endurance. In total, my GPS showed 460 feet of ascent on the ride, with the majority being those 3 times up the hill, which as it turns out, is even steeper than I would encounter in Payson and likely steeper than I would encounter on the Solvang Century too, since 5% is usually the most you'll see on highways. The fact that I could make it up over 7% for at least 400 feet of climbing tells me that the potential is there as long as I keep training regularly.

     These two goals seem to work well together. Since I plan to continue to ride only in the mornings, certainly until at least October when the weather cools down and I'll probably only have 60-120 minutes in the morning to ride on work days, I can somewhat simulate hill climbing by simply riding faster and having that additional wind resistance. I also may ride with the minimum tire pressure, since that too means you have to work a lot harder to maintain speed. Thus, I should be riding more often, spending a reasonable amount of time at it, and preparing for the big hill climbs in the process. Already in 2008 I've logged 322 miles versus the 215 I rode in 2007, but I'd like to be doing at least 150 miles a month from now on. We'll see how it goes.

Page last updated: May 31, 2008