02/07/10- FINDING NEW PLACES TO RIDE ISN'T SO EASY after all these years! But I was determined to take my son someplace new & different. The original plan had been to do a long, hard ride, getting out a bit earlier than normal so we could get back in time to watch the Superbowl commercials. But Kevin gets up all stuffy and sneezing, lying on the couch wrapped up in blankets and a hooded something and looking like the last thing in the world I'm going to get him to do is to get out on a bike. OK fine, we won't do anything too gnarly, but he is going to ride because I know he's not really quite that bad off, plus, as I told him, if he's going to skip riding due to a cold, then he's going to skip LaCross practice tomorrow as well.

And, as usual, after about 20 minutes on the bike he's doing pretty well, the cold doesn't seem to be an issue, the sun is out, and we head out over 92 all the way to the coast, including that nasty stuff towards Half Moon Bay where it gets pretty narrow and scary. Good to teach him how to ride in such conditions, and he generally does pretty well. From Half Moon Bay we do the Higgins/Purissima loop, first time for him, then loop over to Tunitas an on home. Only 46 miles, but pretty good miles, and not so much that he gets run into the ground. Still, if he wakes up worse tomorrow morning, I'm not going to hear the end of it!

02/04/10- CHRIS IS AWESOME/HAVE I FIGURED OUT LOST? What better environment to figure out the strangeness of the TV show "Lost" than when you're climbing Kings, out of breath almost to the point of hallucinating? Yes, that's when it hit me. The Sayid character, who died, and then later came to life inside the temple... that was Jacob inhabiting his body. So now we have John Locke, dead, but the duplicate John Locke who is actually the Man in Black, vs Jacob, who'd been killed by the Man in Black while inhabiting John Locke's duplicate body... it all makes sense. Yeah, right.

Getting back to the ride, it was one of those mornings where you wake up and it looks way, way, way too dark. The days are getting longer, but not fast enough, and the omnipresent overcast got me thinking I was up too early. But a quick check at the kitchen window verified that the sun was rising in the east, as it should. And it was dry outside. I like dry.

Karen, Karl, Eric & John at the start, with Chris joining us a bit later up the hill (he lives on the other side). We rode through the park; they were taking it easy. I was surviving. An easy run across the top of Skyline until Chris and Karen tried to get away on the descent into the Sky Londa sprint. No problem; I didn't mind them getting maybe 100 meters ahead, knowing that those last few turns you can close on someone really fast. Karen tried to move out from behind Chris, which worked perfectly for me, as it creates a whole lot more advantage for the wheel-sucking leech that I've become.

If there was a surprise on the ride, it was coming across a car on west-side Old LaHonda. Don't they know it's a bike-only road??? No problem getting past though. Later on, Karl and Chris got away on the 84 descent, which is fine by me, I'm just not feeling comfortable on that section later. In the old days, I would have pushed it hard anyway. That was then, this is now. The part about Chris being awesome came during the final sprint on Albion. I let Chris get ahead a bit, but I really didn't expect him to be hitting it quite as hard as he did. And then he arranged for that car I had to move out of the way for. Eventually it became an all-out drag race to the stop sign, which I'm willing to call a draw. The way I saw it, the lead changed with each of our downward pedal strokes. Hopefully there will be more of that in the future!

02/02/10- WELL DARN, NICE WEATHER AFTER ALL! Normally if the weather looks cooperative at all I take the "nice" bike (2010 Madone 6.9) but I just wasn't trusting things this morning. It didn't look too bad... but it was still completely overcast and hard to know what might happen in the next hour or two, so the Madone stayed home and I rode the rain bike (my 5900 with fenders). Quite a wreck after it's last mucky ride, but you just pour a bunch of rock n roll lube on the chain and it's ready to go.

Kevin, Shane (once-in-a-while rider, very strong), Eric, a friend of Kevin's whose name I don't recall and Fred started out up the hill with me. I felt better than I expected, but not good enough to stay on Kevin's wheel and, in fact, started coming apart halfway up the climb, allowing Eric to ride past without breaking a sweat. Didn't matter, it seemed really nice out today!

01/31/10- AT 100 YEARS OLD she's still going. Maybe not quite right to say going "strong" but there are a whole lot of people younger than my grandmother who have a lot less going for them. Sure, she's had the selective hearing thing going on for quite some time (as in, she says she can't hear well, but she sure hears things that you didn't think she could hear, if you know what I mean), and sometimes isn't sure who it is that's paying a visit, but surprisingly, and I mean I was really surprised, somehow she recognized me instantly. My wife didn't fare so well, but she doesn't go back quite so far, y'know?

As for me, you see a lot of interesting people that you wonder why you can only see at weddings, funerals and 100-year birthdays. So I've got more issues recognizing people than my grandmother, which doesn't quite seem fair! I suggested to someone at the party (party? I think "family gathering" is probably the better term) that we need cameras that don't just recognize faces, but tell you, when you're taking the photo, who they are.

Was it worth having to get up at 7am and argue with my son that he needs to get going, so we can ride and get back in time for my grandmother's gig? He sure didn't think so at the time! But after being out on the road for an hour or so, he was getting into bike mode and had a much better attitude. He could never be a fireman though. There's just no way to get him up and out of the house in much less than an hour. No big hills, just looping through Woodside and Portola Valley down to our store in Los Altos, and then back. We did start out the first 8 miles or so with the PenVelo Sunday Morning ride, but Kevin got blown off the back after a bit. Not quite enough warm-up for him. Maybe next week? Ah... no. Kevin getting up for a ride that starts at 8am, that he'd have to leave the house 25 minutes earlier than that for? Don't think so!

01/30/10- RIP TED JOHNSTON. I didn't know he'd passed away two weeks ago until a good customer came in and mentioned it today. Ted and I... well, we go back far enough that I don't remember how far we go back. I'm thinking Ted was one of the "old" guys (that would be anyone over 25) at the Western Wheelers meetings I'd go to during the early-70s, back when Western Wheelers was almost a farm club for the local racing team. The "old" guys who'd give us 15-year-olds a bad time because we were being too noisy during the meetings, trying to stifle our grunts & laughs as we removed parts for people's bikes and reassembled them in a way they weren't meant to be (typically taking a crank arm off and setting it in-line with the other crank, that sort of thing).

(Thinking about Ted a bit more after I originally wrote this, I realized it was, indeed, when I was in high school that I met Ted, because whenever he'd come into the store, he'd always ask if "Jake" was around. "Jake" was a name I went by back-in-the-day but nobody who met me after I was 20 or so would know me by that name)

Ted was a regular customer of ours for many years, pretty much from the start of Chain Reaction, 30 years ago that would be, in just a couple of days. Tall, lanky guy, with a huge bike (Ted was something like 6'6" maybe?). Incredibly friendly, lots of opinions but always, always expressed in a way that never showed any rancor or bitterness. He also had one of those voices you could pick out of a crowd too, a bit on the throaty side.

Ted loved riding, commuting to work (Lockheed? SLAC? I don't recall now) for years. He started slowing down a bit maybe 20 years ago, around the time he turned 60. Truth is, I never really knew how old Ted was. I mean, he'd tell me once in a while, but what did it matter if you were still out riding a bike, still loved to climb? And so, as he got older and started having various issues that people get as they age, I never gave it much thought, because I never could see anything really keeping Ted off his bike. Not for long, anyway. He'd be bouncing back, for sure. And so, as he started having problems with his hip, and then it was something else, and it turned out that he was fighting cancer that was spreading throughout his body, I don't think I ever really understood that it was happening. Because it couldn't happen. Not to Ted. Not to someone who really wanted to keep on riding.

I'm told, towards the end, he was still undergoing frequent chemo treatments. Not the sort of thing one goes through, at 80 years old, who doesn't want to live. Eventually he had enough sores in his mouth that he could only eat through a straw. His friend Arlan, the person who told me today that Ted had died, said that he saw Ted just a few says before he died, and he didn't seem all that bad, complaining that it was perhaps the final indignity that he would be drinking wine through a straw!

And so it goes. Ted is gone, but tomorrow I go to my grandmother's 100th birthday party. Her actual birthday is on Feb 5th, but this is when my mom could get people together. At 100, you're probably better off cheating the birthday on the short side than long. I don't know how all this fits together, which is likely the reason we don't get bored by life. It's a puzzle that remains just a bit beyond our grasp. Do the final pieces fall into place as we die? I don't know. That would be the Hollywood version. Is mortality a good or bad thing? I don't know the answer to that one either. I do know that I will miss Ted, and that, as I get older, I'm gradually unraveling the mystery of what it means, to become older. But for now, tomorrow morning, I'm going to be riding my bike with my son, and thinking about an old friend riding beside me.

01/29/10- TIME TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT STOLEN BIKES SOLD ON EBAY! In the last few months, we've helped recover two of our customer's bikes that were stolen from them and sold on eBay. One of them, a pretty expensive Trek Project One, was spotted by Becky (my daughter and our Project One "Queen") in a search through eBay after the customer had reported it stolen. Great that we're able to reunite our customers with their bikes once in a while, but... you really have to wonder what percentage of product people buy on eBay is, in fact, stolen. The bike Becky located was from a supposedly-reputable seller, so positive feedback isn't a good indication that all is right with the sale.

WHAT CAN BE DONE ABOUT IT? I have an idea, one that could dramatically cut down on eBay being used to fence stolen goods. For items that have serial numbers, require that they're disclosed by the seller. That way, it's easy for someone to do a search and find something. You could argue that the seller could report an incorrect serial number, but that would come back to them through the feedback mechanism (somebody buying a product and having it arrive with a different serial number would report it).

WHY WON'T THIS EASILY HAPPEN? Because eBay makes a ton of money selling stolen merchandise. We're talking many hundreds of millions of dollars over the years. Enough that they'd rather turn a blind eye towards most of it while insisting that they do everything they can to cooperate with law enforcement agencies.

IF YOU GOT CAUGHT HELPING SOMEONE FENCE STOLEN MERCHANDISE, you could go to jail. As far as I know, nobody from eBay has ever gone to jail for doing so. I'm not suggesting the should; I'm just saying that this one simple thing I've proposed, posting serial numbers of bicycles (and other serialized items), would dramatically cut down on the use of eBay to sell them. And if the single biggest market for stolen bicycles dried up, there would be a lot less incentive to steal them.

If anyone reading this has connections to someone who could do something about it, please send me an email. I would gladly devote a fair amount of effort trying to reduce the number of bicycles stolen from my customers. Thanks-  --Mike--

01/28/10- THE SUN COMES OUT, THE GANG'S ALL HERE! Or most of them anyway. Nice to finally be on my "nice" bike as I approach the start of the ride and find... let's see... Kevin, Karl, Karen, another Kevin, (neither of them my son Kevin), Eric, Chris... is that everyone? Might be one more. A very civilized pace up Kings, just under 30 minutes. Of course, everyone's yakking away but me... my usual winter heavy-breathing mode. Pretty dry roads except where it counts (on the descent into Sky Londa, and heading down 84 back into Woodside).

As you can tell in the photo, it really was a beautiful morning. Not too cold, maybe around 40 degrees or so in Woodside, and very light clouds. I can take more days like this. Normally we have lots of days like this in the winter! But as you can also see in the photo, the winter storms have taken their toll on our favorite piece of road, dropping small boulders and a lot of dirt onto the pavement. No matter, plenty of room for bikes to get through! Sadly, the weather forecast is scheduling more rain for tomorrow afternoon and Saturday morning. Sigh. But that's why we have our rain bikes.

01/26/10- A LOT OLDER THAN ME, JUST HAD SURGERY ON HIS KNEE LAST WEEK, AND I STILL CAN'T BEAT HIM? What's it going to take??? Sigh. At least I wasn't the only one out there this morning, facing a light drizzle but certainly none of the rain forecast. Eric and Kevin... pilot Kevin, the one who's so much older than me and had knee surgery last week. Well OK, he's just a few months older, but in your mid-50s, those months count a lot more than when you're younger. And the surgery was pretty minor, just having his knee 'scoped to remove some stuff that shouldn't have been there. And sure, I could have, with some effort, put him behind me, but that wouldn't have been very nice, would it? And truthfully, while Kevin may have had surgery on his knee, the past two weeks of gray skies and rain have done a number on the scale at home (which must be reading high, right?) and my mental health is in question!

The good news about riding slowly? In theory, you burn a greater percentage of fat calories that way. Of course, Eric pointed out that a greater effort causes an increase in the rate of burning all calories, so sure, if you rode an easy 60 mile ride maybe you could burn more fat calories than a 35 miles fast ride... but riding the Tuesday/Thursday-morning ride at an slower pace, as is typically the case in the winter, isn't going to be as kind on the scale.

Meanwhile, back at the ride, the most-memorable event was Kevin's two flat tires. Yes, two. We virtually never have flats on our ride, but Kevin got a classic snakebite puncture, the type you get from under-inflating tires and hitting a bump. Kevin weighs a good 30 pounds less than I do; with proper inflation, there's no way he should be getting such punctures, it should be me. But I'm religious about tire pressure, topping them off before every single ride, and that really does make a difference.

01/24/10- QUEST COMPLETE, MACHINE GUN MAN FOUND! For years, a tall metal skeleton holding a machine gun was one of the more-memorable sights of a bike ride on Stage Road, between San Gregorio and Pescadero. A few weeks ago, my son and I were out riding that section of road (it's part of the well-known "Pescadero/Tunitas Loop") and... no more skeleton! I wrote about it at the time, lamenting the loss of yet one more interesting sight on that ride (the first to go being the massive number of Pink Flamingos on Pescadero Road; apparently new owners of the house didn't share the same fetish).

Flash forward to a week ago when I got an email from Michael Head, creator of the interesting artwork we'd seen for so many years while riding. It turns out that the property had been sold (a familiar theme!) and he had to find a new home for his work. The most-famous one, the tall iron sculpture holding the machine gun, had been sold to someone on Highway 84, about three miles east of the coast. He claimed it was visible from the road, so today, my son and I set off looking for it!

It was one of those days where you prepared for weather that simply didn't happen. It was supposed to be raining all day; we saw maybe half an hour of very light rain, which ended before we got to the top of Old LaHonda. We were even more fortunate as this was one of those few rides out to the coast without a headwind! But would be find the sculpture, without knowing its exact location? We scanned the terrain, Kevin looking for the sculpture, while I was looking for a place that someone would likely place the sculpture. There is a fundamental difference between the two; to me, there was too much terrain to scan and I'd have to get darned lucky to happen to look in exactly the right place at the right time. Plus, I was competing with someone with far better eyesight!

Amazingly, I found it first. I just had this feeling for where it might be, what it might be doing. And that feeling was based upon where it was before, and what it was doing. Guarding a house. How could it do anything else? And there it was, as you're heading out towards San Gregorio, just before Bear Gulch Road. You can find the spot here on Google Maps. It's on the left-hand side of the road (heading west), at the end of a long driveway.

I was surprised and pleased we'd been able to find it. There are lots of places for a skeleton to hide, and fantasies ran wild as we rode towards San Gregorio. Could it be standing atop one of the hills? Perhaps armies of skeletons on opposing hills, ready for battle?

But in the end, it was doing exactly what I expected it to be doing. Guarding someone's house.

The rest of the ride was pleasant, including a stop at the San Gregorio General Store (we split a sandwich; Kevin and I learned long ago that half a sandwich is Kevin's limit, anything more than that and he becomes a slug for the next couple hours). They had a pretty cool band playing, although I didn't appreciate it when the singer was asking if everyone had their bloody mary yet, saying "A relaxed driver is a safer driver." Seriously. Trust me, many were taking her advice.

The climb up Tunitas was a bit tougher than it should have been, since this winter hasn't been too kind for riding. Kevin's been getting driven to school most days the past two weeks, and the cold wet weather has put my body into serious hibernation mode, such that even though I'm still riding, I'm eating even more. But hopefully the worst of this weather will be behind us soon!

01/22/10- GOOD NEWS/BAD NEWS. The good news is that my wife, heading back east to visit one of her sisters, was sitting next to former SF 49er offensive lineman (during the time the 49ers won SuperBowls) Bubba Paris. The bad news is that she was in coach. :-)

I mentioned this to Burt, one of our employees, who was surprised that Bubba was in coach. To which I replied, where was his surprise, nay, indignation when he heard that my son and I returned from a Tour de France with Chris Horner, who'd just finished riding the event the day before us, was in coach, one row in front of us???

01/21/10- I'M ALMOST THERE. JUST ONE MORE PIECE OF THE PUZZLE and I'll be able to comfortably ride in cold rain. Sure wished I'd found that piece before this morning's ride though! Unlike Tuesday, which was incredibly wet & windy but not that cold, this morning there was a certain bite to the air that made it seem a lot worse. No problem climbing up to Skyline (alone, nobody else out there today), and no temptation to cut anything short. Skyline itself was pretty nice too, as long as I kept the engine running. I was completely convinced I was doing the full ride, including the west-side Old LaHonda loop, until the descent into Sky Londa, where I found my gloves weren't cutting it... even with an extra outer layer, water was getting through and my fingers felt like ice. So straight down 84 I went, every so relieved to get to the bottom so I could restart the engine and warm up!

If anybody's found gloves that will survive two hours of heavy rain and 40 degree weather, please let me know. I went to the Gore website, and their offerings suggest nothing more than water "resistant." I sent them an email, listing my requirements, and hope to hear back from them soon.

You'd think there wasn't a huge demand for people riding in cold, wet weather... as if they'd rather stay in their nice warm houses and cars? Yeah, I'm nuts.

01/19/10- IF IT'S TUESDAY IT MUST BE RAINING/SAFETY IN NUMBERS. So my daughter Becky comes into the room as I'm getting ready to ride, and tells me "You're not going on a bike ride this morning. It's dangerous out there!" As if. It's Tuesday, so I ride. That's the way it works. Sure, I questioned it a bit at 5-ish am when I woke up to the screaming wind and probably the thunder that everyone else but me heard. But I knew I'd ride. It's what I do. And so I got out there, thinking it likely it would be a modified ride, not heading up to Skyline, because coming down from Skyline on a day like this generally eats through a set of brake shoes and does pretty nasty things to your rims. But if anybody else had shown up with plans to head up there, I was game.

As it was, nobody else showed. Safety in numbers, the numbers being home, safe. I did see one other cyclist out there, a commuter I see regularly. But that was it. Cars, yes, out there dodging the same crud in the road that I was. I looped up through the park before heading back down, spending almost exactly an hour in the downpour. I made sure to keep a decent but not suicidal head of steam going, the idea being that I'd stay warm as long as I could keep my output up, but push too far and have to slack off and bad things happen real fast (the cold and wet start to get to you and you begin a quick slide from an absurd sense of comfort to freezing your tail off and wishing your numb fingers could dial the phone for a rescue).

You can dress for mornings like today. The jacket is a no-brainer- cheapie clear plastic (and waterproof). You don't care about breathability on days like this. For pants, windfront tights to keep the chill off, but not even a thought of trying to stay "dry" because any sort of "waterproof" pant is going to have a strong sauna effect (so you're as wet on the inside as the outside). Wool socks, shoe covers, moderately-warm gloves with waterproof overgloves, and please make sure you put the jacket on last or else the water flows down the arm of the jacket and into the gloves! Not that I screwed up this morning and did something like that. But this really wasn't epic, because it wasn't that cold (mid-40s), the worst of the wind had died down, and I didn't ride up to (and thus down) Skyline. It was fun though.

01/17/10- A BIT OF RAIN, A BIT OF WIND, AN EASY INTRO to the big bad storm that's supposed to be hitting shortly. Kevin (my son) had been home sick from school all last week but felt better Friday and was able to work Saturday, so bad Dad that I am, it was time to get out on a ride, even though it was wet. We stayed out of the mountains, because I didn't think it would be a good idea to subject Kevin to an "epic" ride to the coast, and if we were only going up Old LaHonda, it would hardly be worth the trouble we'd have on the descent.

So instead we did an extended loop, including the east-side Alpine/Joaquin climb, and wound our way down to the Los Altos Chain Reaction where we made a mess of the floor (as both ourselves and the bikes drained) and warmed up a bit. And then, to make the ride a bit more utilitarian, we rode into Mountain View and dropped in at SlingIt, a LaCrosse store, so Kevin could buy some new shoes. No backpacks, so we arranged to have them shipped home (more green than driving down to the store), and then rode El Camino home.

Why on earth would we ride El Camino, with all its traffic and stop lights and right-hand-turn lanes that seem to randomly appear and disappear? Because I wanted to see how Kevin would do in traffic and teach him a thing or two. To be truthful, it was interesting to note the differences between someone very traffic-aware (myself) and not (Kevin). All the little things that keep you alive on a bike, like looking ahead at the intersection and noticing that a car, even though it doesn't have its blinkers on, has its wheels turned slightly as it gets ready to make a right-hand turn right in front of you. And Kevin's tendency to move back in towards the curb after passing a parked car, even though there were more parked cars not too far down the road (the reason you don't want to do that is because you could get potentially squeezed when you have to move back out into the lane to pass the next parked car).

As we approached Redwood City we started to see blue skies and it got a bit warmer, becoming pretty darned pleasant. This in stark contrast to the weather forecast, but we're getting used to that. Perhaps Tuesday morning the forces of nature will seek revenge on me for saying such things. That's certainly the way the forecast is presently shaping up! Doesn't matter, I'll be out there.

01/14/10- THERE'S HOPE! This morning I finally had a bit of fun on Kings, choosing not to try and climb it for speed but rather as a series of intervals, pushing myself to the point where I died, resting a bit, and then going at it again. Eric, John & Chris were out there helping me exorcise my demons this morning, a morning which, if you can believe the weather reports, is the last one we dare enjoy before we start loading our Arks.

As I've said often, any morning you can see your shadow is a good morning, so you can tell in the photo that this was, indeed, a good morning. A bit cool (it is winter I have to remind myself!), but the major challenge was the pavement. It had apparently been pretty foggy during the night, making the descent on either side of 84 a bit nerve wracking. More than once we felt our wheels slip out a bit, including a major (for me) slip descending 84 into Woodside. At one point I just pulled over and let some cars go by. I just didn't feel quite right. Making things worse is that, when you're tense, your bike handling skills pretty much go out the window, making it tougher to recover each time you encounter one of those tar stripes. I would much rather be descending in pouring rain, when traction is consistent and the oil has been washed away. Looks like I may get that wish on Sunday.

01/13/10- A NON-BIKE RAMBLE originally posted to the Bicycle Dealers e-list in response to someone asking how old each of us are and what changes we've seen over the years. --Mike--
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My whole family has gotten too caught up in "life" and what it is to be a part of this time in history. It's too easy, too convenient, to buy things pre-made pre-packaged. Coffee at Starbucks or Donut King. Orange juice by the milk carton instead of frozen. Pre-grated cheese.

Pre-grated cheese???!!! If there is a symbol for everything that's wrong, it's got to be pre-grated cheese. You pay twice as much for a minimal amount of convenience. And who knows what they have to add to the cheese so it stays "fresh" after it's been grated; common sense tells you that enhanced surface area (and pre-grated cheese probably has 10X the surface area of a block of cheese, maybe a whole lot more) is going to enhance spoilage.

01/12/10- A BIT MORE RAIN WOULD HAVE BEEN NICE. Now that's a strange thing to say about a bike ride, but in all seriousness, it's a lot less fun riding in a drizzle than in a downpour. It's tough to get comfortable as you're taking your jacket on & off and thinking it's hardly worth the hassle, and the descents have to be done carefully because it's not raining hard enough to wash the oil off, resulting in inconsistent traction. And your bike comes back a mess, because you pick up all sorts of gunk from the road and the rain isn't heavy enough to wash anything off. As I type this (around midnight), the real storm is finally moving in, a bit of wind, some brief periods of heavy rain now & then, and not terribly cold. And I'm thinking this is what I'd rather be riding in.

Usually it's the larger ride on Tuesdays, but today, just Kevin at the start, meeting up with Chris up on Skyline. A pretty easy ride up the hill (not that it felt that easy at the time), but it was one of those strange days where there are whole sections of the ride that I don't remember much of. Just not that memorable a ride I guess!

01/10/10- EVENTUALLY, EVEN KEVIN WILL GET IT. Get what? Get that you might not feel great at the start of a ride, but you'll likely feel great later on. Today's ride was all about having the patience to see things through. We'd planned to go to Pescadero via Old LaHonda, then do the Lobitos/Tunitas route back. 61 miles, nice climbs, and the possibility that the coast might be having a bit nicer weather than the bay side of the hill.

It was at the base of Old LaHonda where Kevin asked "Dad, this feels like a bad ride day for me. Can't we just do Page Mill and go home?" There was a time when Page Mill would have seemed like the nightmare alternative, so we are making progress! But I told Kevin no, he'd be feeling better soon, let's stick to the plan. And it didn't take all that much time for him to feel much better, with the second half of the Old LaHonda climb going pretty fast. Plus, the more we climbed, the warmer it got! The fog had burned off at the top of the hill, and it was downright nice as we headed towards Pescadero.

Of course we had the mandatory stop for a coke & pastry at the bakery, and came across a couple guys on bikes loaded with the works. I asked where they were heading; from SF to San Diego. Except that they'd already had 6 flats and were out of tubes, had just walked one of the bikes a few miles into town with another one, and there were none to be had in Pescadero. No problem; between myself and Kevin we were able to spare two tubes to keep them going. They wanted to pay for the tubes, which I wouldn't allow... they'd been through enough already. To which they said they couldn't believe how nice people were out here. I asked where they were from... Connecticut... and mentioned that I'm sure there were a lot of nice people there as well.

From there we headed out Stage Road, sadly past the house that used to have the Machine Gun Man sculpture, and on up the coast via Highway 1, past Tunitas to Lobitos, and then looped around the hills a bit to come back to Tunitas. It was on Lobitos that we spied a cyclist a bit further ahead, already on the main climb, which seemed to kick Kevin into high gear. Eventually we caught up to Darrio, one of our customers, nice guy who seems to be able to ride forever, and usually pretty quickly. Looked like he was taking it a bit easy today... but Kevin wasn't. Usually it's no big deal to moderate your pace a bit and be social, but that just wasn't in the cards. But it wasn't too long before Kevin paid for his efforts, having a bit of an asthma issue, so the middle and upper parts of Tunitas weren't entirely to his liking.

What was to his liking were the sprints. The first one, on Pescadero Road for the Loma Mar city limits, no problem for me. If I can keep the speed up high enough, he can't roll past. But the Pescadero City limit sign, the one he always discovers too late? This time he was ready, and this time he'd been drafting closely behind, saving his strength. That plus he gave me about half a foot of pavement to deal with! Yes, he rode a straight line, so technically it was a legal sprint, but it he'd been one of the guys I'd likely have bumped him out of the way. Don't know that my wife would care to hear how it was Kevin's fault that he crashed when I bumped him though. And then the biggie, the sprint on Albion, the final sprint of the Tuesday/Thursday-morning ride. Ouch, he nailed me. I should have had it, but he sat behind me as long as possible and when he came around, I thought I could... but I couldn't. Darn. This is not a good thing. I did take him on the final sprint on Jefferson (at the top), but that again is a fast sprint that I can ride him off my tail on. For now.

01/07/10- WHAT HAPPENED TO THE RAIN? Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining, nor do I think a serious drought once in a while is such a bad thing. Gets us away from our own problems and gives us a chance to complain about all those awful folk in LA who are watering their lawns and washing their cars while we're waiting to flush our toilets until you can no longer see the bottom of the bowl. Besides, droughts are good for the bicycle business.

So yet another opportunity to ride the nice bike, on a cool but not really cold morning (don't think I saw anything lower than 42 degrees) that warmed up nicely on top (51 on Skyline). Pretty big group; Todd, Karl, Karen, Kevin (the pilot), Steve, Eric, and at least one other person. I'll have to check the photos. Rode up through the park (why?), and like most morning rides, I don't feel so great on Kings but gradually feel better as the ride goes along. People who don't enjoy cycling... maybe they're just not riding far enough!

It will rain again, someday, but for now I'll ride the nice weather for as long as possible. Amazing that we don't see more others out riding when it's so nice out!

01/05/10- GOOD PARENT OR BAD PARENT? It's Kevin's (my son Kevin, not the pilot) last day off from school, and he really wasn't that interested in getting up early to go on our regular Tuesday/Thursday-morning ride. He wanted a final day to take it easy, not have to do anything tough because... well just because. I gave him the option of going on a ride on his own, later in the day, but he said no, if he's going to ride, he'd rather "get it over with" so he had the rest of the day for... whatever (never mind that "whatever" meant having to clean up his room).

So I get him up at 6:55am (instead of his preferred 9:30 or however late a teenager can sleep in) and he's actually not in such a bad mood, goes through the motions of getting dressed and eating and ready to ride, pretty much in the correct order. Which is more than I can say for myself some mornings. The plan (there's always a plan when I'm involved) is to get to the start of the ride a bit early and have at least a five minute head start going up the hill. And things were looking good... heading out the door, it looked like we just might do it! Until- until about 100 feet from the house and Kevin's telling me "Dad, we have to go back, I forgot to take my meds." Which doesn't make Dad happy, but what can you do, back he goes into the house... and he doesn't come out. After a couple minutes I go in and he's sitting at the table, experiencing a relatively-mild seizures.

OK, so you might have thought that the good parent/bad parent part was just about getting him up early for a bike ride on his last free day before school? No. The good part/bad part comes when the seizure clears and Kevin looks at me and suggests that maybe he shouldn't go on a ride this morning. Many sensible people would think yeah, good idea, just had a seizure, let him rest. But not Kevin's Dad, who has this weird concept that epilepsy shouldn't be allowed to control one's life, and a second seizure in one day is almost unheard of (for him). So I get him going out the door again, up the hill, meet with a pretty large group this morning and off we go.

Thankfully, the guys were in low-testosterone mode this morning. Don't know why. But they went the "long" way up the hill (through the park) and then rode at a moderate pace the rest of the way, finishing just a few minutes ahead of us (and were nice enough to wait). For the run along Skyline and down 84 to East-side Old LaHonda, Kevin hung in there nicely, drafting in a reasonably-safe fashion, and I actually did my normal thing, taking my place towards the front of the group instead of always riding next to him. But yeah, I'll admit I was looking back quite a bit, making sure he was still there, and hoping I didn't hear any bikes-meeting-pavement sounds from behind.

It turned out to be a spectacularly-beautiful morning to ride, once we got above the mild haze/fog at about 800 feet. Nice scattering of high clouds, mostly-dry pavement, and great people to ride with. Big group, as I mentioned- looking at the photo I see Eric, Chris, Kevin (pilot), Kevin (son), Steve, Todd, Jim (a friend of Kevin the pilot) and George. And Kevin suffered no ill effects from the earlier seizure, which (in my mind) helps keep the feeling that epilepsy is in control of what you do at bay. So maybe there's some chance I'm a good parent?

As much as I talk about my wintertime asthmatic breathing, I really don't have much to complain about. Broken bones twice, virtually no back issues ever, rarely get very sick, and I always feel better moving than resting. Yeah, I've got a "weight problem" but it's within the relatively-narrow confines of my winter/summer 7-pound swing (I long ago gave up on the idea of getting down to an ideal riding weight, but decided there was no way I was going to let my weight start creeping up again... the plan was and is to maintain the weight on my 1990 driver's license, nothing more). But in a way, it does come at a price, and that price has been sticking to the regime, no matter what. People often ask why I ride on Tuesdays & Thursdays, not matter what. Simple. Because it works.

And "because it works" is a darned good reason for keeping up at something. Even when that something seems difficult at times, or repetitive, or tedious. There is a reward for doing something "because it works."

01/03/10- YOU CAN GET A LOT OF THINKING DONE ON A BIKE RIDE. Last night I asked Kevin where he'd like to ride today and got one of those indifferent "I don't know" shrugs which means "Gee Dad, a bike ride, what a surprise, can't I just stay home and do something with my friends instead?" This isn't unusual; actually getting him out on the bike can be a pain, but what's also unusual is that pretty much without exception, after he's been out for an hour or so he's really enjoying himself.

So I figure fine, if he doesn't want to come up with something, we'll do something different, and make it "ugly." I've talked about "ugly" bike rides before- rides where you approach a hill from a direction that just isn't as much fun as it is the other way. Of course, you dress it up a bit by tossing in some fun elements too. Today's ride went up Old LaHonda (fun), down the other side and back up West Alpine (fun), then south on Skyline to Highway 9 (really not fun in that direction!), down 9 & Redwood Gulch to Foothill (ok) then north back to Redwood City on the flats (generally not much fun).

Somewhere in the middle of the ride Kevin mentioned how his mind clears when he's out on a bike and he wished he could ride with a laptop and just stop someplace and do his school work or whatever. I know exactly where he's coming from on that; it's been one of the things I've enjoyed about cycling for years.

But back to the ride- Kevin took a while to get warmed up today; his Old LaHonda time was petty mediocre, but he kicked into gear pretty strongly where it counted, on West Alpine. And he appreciated that we were stopped, shortly before the top, by a cute young woman cyclist, asking where Old LaHonda was. Probably a Stanford student new to the area. But probably in her early-to-mid 20s, something a 17 year old can certainly appreciate, but also remain frustrated by the fact that you just don't see many 17 year old girls out riding. Maybe that made the subsequent run south on Skyline, the "ugly" part of the ride, even worse. Frustration replaced by "junk" climbs mere minutes apart.

That long flat run at the end, from Los Altos to Redwood City? I tossed that in because that was where I was really going to get a workout, motoring north on Foothill, with Kevin glued to my rear wheel. Not fun, but definitely needed! Well I'm lying a bit, because it was fun, seeing how hard I could push myself and making sure Kevin stayed on my wheel (while at the same time taking some enjoyment from the fact that others would try and hang on at times and not be able to keep up).

01/01/10- BURT & STEPHEN (and anyone else who thought it was going to rain), YOU MISSED A GREAT DAY TO RIDE! It's time to treat the weather forecast as what it is- entertainment. The more they threaten with "bad" weather, the more people pay attention. And anybody paying too much attention and thinking this morning wasn't going to be a good time to ride up Mt. Hamilton (or anywhere else in the Bay Area) missed out! Sure, we got a little bit of drizzle for the first few miles, but from then on up the hill it was a comfortable 51-55 degrees, dry, with very a very light breeze. We saw some familiar faces today; Todd, Brian K, Kevin (the Pilot), Leslie (the Pilot's friend), Jeff K, Roger from our Redwood City store and a few other familiar faces whose names escape me. But overall we saw maybe 50 or so people on the climb, and at the top, maybe 8. A far cry from those years when the top was literally crowded with cyclists!

My son (one of the several Kevins) started out a bit, well, casual, but worked his way into it. We knew that Todd and Brian were behind us, and were expecting them to catch us pretty quickly, but surprisingly, we didn't see them until stopping at the porta potty at the top of the last little descent before the final assault (about 10 miles to go). We left ahead of them and kept looking behind, wondering how soon, they must be around that last bend, etc. Finally we saw Todd emerge with Brian close behind, but soon Todd started pulling away and got up to us pretty quickly. That's when something surprising happened. Kevin apparently had an invisible virtual bungee cord that he must have attached to Todd's bike because he was keeping up with him and I was running into a bit of distress! This is probably the first time that's happened on a climb, and I came very, very close to waving him on and telling him that I'd meet up with them at the top. But I didn't do that, first because of pride, and second, well, I know my son fairly well and there was just no way he could maintain a pace like that forever... in other words, he was going to crack. And crack he finally did, albeit fairly gracefully, slowing down but not completely blowing up.

The reference to Burt & Stephen? Both decided not to ride based on the weather forecast (plus Burt was getting over a cold). But there will be other days to ride up Mt. Hamilton. The big hill's going nowhere.

12/31/09- NOW THAT I KNOW, WHAT WILL I DO WHEN FOOTBALL SEASON IS OVER? Interesting ride this morning. It almost didn't happen at all; due to an alarm-clock mishap, instead of waking up at 7:05am, I noticed my secondary alarm beeping on my watch at 7:20. Uh-oh. The ride leaves at 7:45, it takes 10 minutes to ride there, that leaves 15 minutes to shake myself conscious, get my clothes on (hopefully rightside-out), pump up the tires & go. And go I did! But it's not as if it felt very good; makes me wonder how the firefighters wake up and instantly get going without leaving half of their brains behind.

It seemed like quite a few out there this morning, although that could have just been my foggy brain seeing double. Karl, Karen, Kevin, Billy, John, Todd... and later on we were joined by Kevin's friend Leslie. I was just barely hanging on (actually I might have been hanging on in my dreams; in real life I was off the back). We split into two groups at west-side Old LaHonda, with Billy, Todd & John joining me on the regular run back, while the rest headed on down the hill to a date with West Alpine. But here's where football comes in. Bill, Todd & John were more interested in talking about college football than turning the pedals in anger, and y'know, that suited me just fine! So in the future I'm going to figure out how to seed the conversation a bit, head it towards college football, in hopes that it will moderate the pace a bit.