WombatNation

Some of wife’s and my greatest memories (and stories) come from our travels in Bolivia. Today’s NY Times has a really good article that focuses mostly on the salt flats near Uyuni and “The Death Road” from La Paz to Coroico.

The Salar de Uyuni is so bizarre that I have always found it difficult to explain well to others. Ethan Todras-Whitehill does a really nice job of capturing the essence of the Salar, though. It’s a bit overwhelming to stand on a 4,000 square mile plain of crunchy salt, with tall mountains barely visible on the horizon in most directions. The mountains look deceptively small, because the terrain is so flat and unchanging for so far that you can’t quite tell how far away they really are.

The slideshow accompanying the article has a photo of a room in one of the hotels made from salt blocks, but I prefer my photo of the dining room at Palacio de Sal.

Ethan also writes about doing a downhill bike ride on the Death Road, which a friend of a co-worker is also doing soon, though on a motorcycle. I can hardly wait to hear about her experience after she returns. I was shocked at first to hear about the ride, but then I learned that a new road for cars and trucks opened in March 2007, so the dangerous, narrow road is now shared only with a small amount of local traffic. During our trips in 1993 and 1999 on that road, the risk of collision with another car or truck was very high. I doubt my heart rate dropped much below 120 during those drives. I’m sure that it’s still a white-knuckle descent, though. Even if you’re not on a ridiculously narrow gravel road (which supported two-way car and truck traffic when we did it!), winding around hairpin turns, driving through waterfalls that wash across the road, and staring over the edge down multi-thousand feet sheer cliffs, a 12 thousand foot drop over 40 miles is pretty steep.

This photo shows the view from Coroico back to the road. The part of the road you see is probably the safest, least scary, segment. The road twists around the corner and then hugs the mountainside as it twists up and around into the clouds.

Yesterday I rode the 60-mile route of the 2008 Healdsburg Harvest Century bike tour. Some friends and I did it at a very leisurely pace, finishing in a little over 4 hours, which included 20-30 minutes hanging out at the rest stops shoving down piles of food. Or at least I was doing that. The hills were short and not steep at all, so it was a pretty easy ride. Traffic was bad only in a few spots.

I did see the aftermath of two accidents just after the rest stop at West Side school. The road there was in especially bad shape. One person crashed on the descent and got some minor cuts and bruises. While the EMTs were treating that person, someone else crashed in almost the same spot. She looked very stunned while sitting by the side of the road being treated. The EMT said her injuries were fairly minor, too. I hope they both were okay, since that is a sucky way to end a ride, which I know from experience.

The food at the rest stops was extensive and tasty (melon, oranges, grapes, bananas, pretzels, cookies, Odwalla energy bars, PB&Js on wheat, etc.). Lunch included delicious veggie pizza, pasta salad, black bean salad, sparkling juice drinks from Sonoma Sparkler, ice cream sundaes from Clover, and lots more. At first, I thought I must have put on weight due to all the food I ate, but I ended up breaking even.

Maybe this is the year I finally buy a cyclo-cross bike and experience the gut wrenching thrill of shouldering my bike up a steep, muddy hill, bouncing down trails through the trees, and then afterward drinking Belgian beers and eating grilled sausages with the people who lapped me repeatedly.

The July issue of Wired has a review of a couple of cyclo-cross bikes. The review was written by a member of Team Oakland, which I’m also a member of, and the reviewers were racers from the racing team part of our club, Kaiser Permanente/Team Oakland, including one of my friends. I think the $6,000 Moots Psychlo-X is way more bike than I need, though I do love the name.

When I think bike safety or car safety video, I mostly think about boring instructions on how to ride a bike or drive a car in the most conservative fashion. But what if the kids in the safety video had monkey faces and curly tails? That would make even the most Ritalin deprived kid pay attention, right?

This seven minute sampled video I found on Monoscope is pretty great. The first two minutes are a bit of an artsy “My Lunch with 10 Year-Old Andre”, but then a pack of kids with monkey faces and curly tails and funky hats join our young friend on their bikes. It’s weirder and better than it sounds. If my parents had shown me this when I was a kid I think I would have ridden into a lot fewer open manholes.

Monoscope, by the way, is a great site for design enthusiasts.

Just over an hour into my bike ride today while I was slogging up a steep hill, my Polar CS200 heart rate monitor rebooted. The screen went blank, a few cryptic symbols appeared on the display, and then the display filled with a union of all possible characters and symbols that it ever displays. And it stayed like that until I turned it off and on again. It forgot the ride data up to that point for the day and all the general settings, like the current time, but kept all my personal settings. I’ve gotten use to the sensor strips on the chest strap sometimes not immediately picking up a signal, but I’ve never had the software crash like that before.

And I thought it was just women in restaurants that went to the bathroom together.

via BoingBoing, photo by Roberto Bettini

Someone on my bike team sent out a link to bicyclesafe.com, which has a great article by Michael Bluejay on how not to get hit by a car when you’re biking. I found I do a lot of these things intuitively, especially when bike commuting to and from work, but there were some other good strategies I hadn’t thought of.

I’m kind of a wuss when it comes to riding when it’s dark, cold, and rainy, so I’ve taken that last couple months off from bike commuting. Next month I’ll start back up again. The new Daylight Saving Time schedule is a major boon for my bike commuting schedule. This year it starts March 9th.

I needed to go to Geyserville today to pick up a case of wine futures at Murphy-Goode and visit with some of my wife’s relatives, so I decided to fit a bike ride into our trip. Their house is close to Geysers Road, so I biked down that way from their house and started the climb. As the road started to pitch up past Red Winery Road, I kept up a pretty fast pace. I began to regret sprinting out of the saddle as the road really began to get steep. Before starting the ride, I had no idea how steep and long this climb would be. Mistake.

Not too far into the climb, the whole right side of the road had eroded away from below and dropped about eight feet from the level of the left side of the road. Farther up there were two stretches of about 100 feet of mud and gravel, but otherwise the road was in pretty good shape. There were a couple of cattle grates, but they were in good shape and were mainly a concern on the descent.

Finally, after about 4.5 continuous miles of climbing I got to a flat spot where a road went off to three ranches. Looking at the Geysers Road elevation profile on the Santa Rosa Cycling club website, I think I had done about 1900 feet of climbing at that point. That’s an 8% average gradient. Next time we go up there and I do this ride, I’m going to pace myself more sensibly so I can do the full road out and back. I’m looking forward to Pine Flat Road, too. The last two miles of that climb average just under 10.5%.

Are you surprised that a company in Texas offers a gun rack for a bike? While advertised as a “favorite of outdoorsmen and hunters”, I wonder how many bicyclists buy these to deter the drivers that might otherwise harass them. While I generally didn’t have too much trouble when I lived and biked in Austin, I did have a beer can thrown at me once and more than a few people drove close and yelled at me as they went past.

Of course, I’ve been subject to the latter in California, as well. I even had an unmarked police car swerve toward me as it passed by (or so said the biker behind me who then caught up and told me so) while riding in a rural area in the East Bay. When the police car went by, I knew that it missed me by only about a foot, but I didn’t realize the cop had gone out of his way to get that close to me.

Five freaking seconds.

Well, technically it was 5.2 seconds, but that’s all that separated me from finishing the Mount Diablo Challenge in under one hour and ten minutes. That was my most ambitious goal I thought remotely realistic, so I’m not disappointed at all with my results. I dropped about two minutes and forty seconds off my finishing time from last week, so I’ve got to be pretty pleased with that. Also, it gives me a perfect goal for starting my training for next year.

The overall results are now up at doitsports.com. I had the 433rd fastest time of the 976 official finish times (which feels better than it sounds), was mysteriously classified as being from Fresno instead of Oakland, was 191st in my age group (the largest age group by far is men 40-49), and finished in 1:10:05.2 with an average speed of 9.25 mph.

I was pretty sure I was going to be a little over 1:10 when I looked down at my bike computer while climbing the final steep pitch with about 50 meters to go. While the ride today finished up on the less steep road to the summit (the normally one-way downhill route), it’s still well over a 10% gradient. Even though I had to ride around several people who were going so slow on the final climb I thought they might fall over, while also riding by a guy near the finish line who appeared to have stopped to throw up, I couldn’t have made up the five seconds even if I were the only rider on that slope. I gave it all I had at the end.

Once again, the exertion required to climb the last bit to the summit left me thinking of other things (such as trying not to cough up my pancreas) besides looking down to see the time when I crossed the finish and stopping the timer on my bike computer. So, the riding time that got recorded was again a little longer than my actual race time. My cadence and average heart rate were pretty consistent with last week’s training ride, but this time I rode bigger gears at the same cadence during the less steep parts of the ride.

• 1:10:40 riding time
• avg heart rate 167 bpm
• max heart rate 181 bpm
• 1100 kcal
• 10.9 miles
• avg speed 9.3 mph
• max speed 23.3 mph
• avg cadence 74
• max cadence 111

Three people actually rode unicycles to the top. While the wheels on their unicycles were pretty big, that’s still totally amazing. I couldn’t ride a unicycle up my driveway.