Brentani’s Cycling Blog

I’ll be regularly adding pictures of little Jude to the following address:

http://picasaweb.google.com/judeowenwetters

Since I don’t ride much anymore, I’ve been reduced to commenting on new tech stuff. good god. (I was wearing my Okemo Hill Climb shirt at the pediatrician a couple days ago and Jude’s doctor asked if I was a biker…I said “I used to be!”) But anyway, here’s a new Truvativ crank that just showed up on cyclingnews. I can’t say that I’ve read this article too carefully, but it seems like this would solve many of the problems I’ve had getting very low gearing for a race like Washington:

• should eliminate the front derailleur problem, since there isn’t one. On my gazelle setup, there are lots of problems with the derailleur. the biggest is that I can’t get the derailleur quite low enough, so the chain rubs when it is in the 24 in the front and anything smaller than about the 19. That makes for a huge jump between the lowest on the 42 (42-26, or 42 gear inches) and the highest useable on the 24 (42-19, 33 gear inches).
• should provide a nicer chainline and and have useable gears in the full range in both the 24 and the 38 (and 22/36 should be possible without much difficulty as well)
• shifting from big to little is (at least advertised to be) much easier to accomplish under pressure. so if you’re riding up a 10% gradient that suddenly kicks up to 25%, you could easily shift into the 24

potential problems:

• weight seems to be the biggest problem. at 1623g, that makes this thing almost a full kilo heavier than my slk-light. It would be pretty hard to justify adding that much weight for a hill-climb race, though I’d be able to subtract a bit of weight for the front derailleur as well.
• I’m just assuming that this would work with a road system. cranks usually seem to be pretty swappable, but I guess I’m not sure based on the review.
• the cable housing might be difficult to route, but it should probably work one way or another

in any case, if this sort of system takes off, it might be a good option down the road when the get a lighter/carbon version or something.

Something always seems to keep me from doing multiple laps of my hill circuit. I often head out on a ride fully intending to do it twice, but somehow after one lap I usually lose motivation and decide once is enough. Today motivation wasn’t the problem. My plan for the day was to do one lap at a moderate pace and then go balls out for the second lap. In the long fast section between Wilbur and Whipple, I realized that I had forgotten my cell phone. Normally that’s not a big problem, but I started imagining that Carrie might be in labor, trying to get ahold of me and wondering why I’m such a bad husband/father that I would go riding without my cellphone when she’s so near her due date. I figured the chances of that scenario were slim, but I was also not too far from home at the end of the loop. Do it again and throw caution to the wind? Or go home? I decided to go home, get the cell phone and then head over to the east side for one loop of the east side hill circuit (minus meeting st., of course…I don’t do cyclo-cross, so dismounting and climbing stairs doesn’t hold much appeal for me…).

So, even though I wasn’t going at full clip, I managed to do the northern hill circuit in 56:34, beating my previous best by 26 seconds, though it’s been a while since I’ve timed myself. Lingering questions from Mount Tom had me wondering if I’ve been riding in the right gears. Today I decided to resist my normal shifting urges and stay 1-2 clicks higher on all the climbs. It seemed to work pretty well, as I think I climbed them all slightly faster and recovered quicker at the tops. There’s a school of thought that basically says: “Mount Washington is no harder than (insert easier hill of same length, or potentially even a flat road of the same length), you just ride slower in an easier gear.” I don’t really buy it. Here’s a silly analogy that popped in my head today. The cycling body is a bit like a computer. The cardiovascular system is the equivalent of a CPU (central processing unit, for those who aren’t computer literate). The CPU is capable of handling all the processing tasks and taking the full load of work done by the computer. By gearing super low (as I was for Mount Tom), I think that’s what I was doing. A more efficient computer hands off as much of the most processor-intensive tasks (graphics) as possible to the GPU. In cycling that would be the leg muscles. Of course, they aren’t going to work without the cardiovascular system, but neither will the GPU. As a result, today I reached the tops of the climbs with a nice balance between a high heart-rate and heavy breathing (but not feeling like my head was going to explode like I did on Mt Tom) and a nice burn in the legs (I really don’t remember feeling my legs at all on Mt Tom…). All of which makes me think that when I climbed Mt. Tom, it was essentially like running Photoshop on a computer with a fast CPU (or not so fast in my case) and a crap graphics card, which is to say, horribly inefficient.

still recovering from the smack down last tuesday (we’ve got to be sure to keep that up…that was fun…), on wednesday I decided to drive up to Hadley and do a loop including Mount Holyoke and Mount Tom. I started at Mount Holyoke and rode south (leaving the climb itself for the end of the ride). A combination of bad planning and construction and detours everywhere meant that what was supposed to be a 35 mile loop was probably closer to 50. Add to that, a wrong turn and considerable searching to actually find mount tom, and the total ride was probably closer to 60. After navigating my way across the 202 bridge in Holyoke, I headed north on route 5 for mount tom. I passed a road on my left that sort of looked like the mount tom access road (not the climb itself) but it wasn’t marked, so I kept going. I went down a long gradual descent, and saw a sign for Mount Tom Reservation on the left. I stopped at the bike shop across the street and asked if that was where I was supposed to go to find the summit road. They assured me it was. After riding all the way through the park, and coming to 141 on the other side, I asked someone at a coffee shop. They also said that the summit road was inside the park and I must have just missed it. Turned back. Still no sign of the road. (I was looking for a 1-mile straight shot to the summit at 16% average gradient…should be hard to miss…) Then I found someone inside the park and asked him. He seemed confused by what I meant.

“There is no summit road for Mount Tom.”
“Yes there is, I know someone who did it recently…”
“Do you mean Skinner State Park at Mt Holyoke?”
“No, that’s where my car is. I’m looking for a little road that goes to the top of Mt Tom. it used to be a cog train, and they paved it.”
“Oh, that. you can’t take a bike up there, can you?”

He all but said “the last cyclist who tried that road hasn’t been seen for 5 years.”

He gave me directions, which were to head back South on rt 5, up the hill I had just come down and turn on the road I had passed on the way. Once there, it was still a bit difficult to find, and someone else helped direct me. Basically, you follow the paved road (past a few no trespassing signs) around a few bends. when you see some power transformers, look to the left and you’ll see a small path. take it…it goes up a short steep hill and curves around to the right. Then you see it. I’m not sure how to describe this thing…I think this is the hill that haunts my darkest dreams. Imagine something as steep as Jenckes that just keeps going for 1 mile. and you can pretty much see all the way to the summit from the bottom. Completely demoralizing. It looks more intimidating even than the last mile of Lincoln Gap, mostly because you can see the whole thing, and a mile looks very far when you’re looking straight up a hill. I thought about huddling in a ball and weeping. A pick-up truck was headed down towards me, so I pulled off the road to let him pass (the path is just barely big enough for a car). I was afraid he’d send me packing since there were no trespassing signs all over this road as well. Instead, he was just completely baffled that anyone would be stupid enough to try this hill on a bike. He wished me well and drove off. I was riding the gazelle, with it’s silly 42/24 chainring combo. I started in the 24 for this climb…but it really didn’t take me long to red-line. I had to stop and rest at about the 1/2 way point. And then again 2-3 times the rest of the way up. I was kind of hopping from shaded area to shaded area. I have to say, I’m not sure I’m all that sold on the really low gear thing…since this was my first time climbing in 1:1 or lower (I spend most of the climb in 24-21,23 and 26) There’s a point when gears just aren’t going to get you up, and you need legs. (In my case, the legs didn’t feel too bad, it was my lungs and heart that weren’t up to the challenge.) I guess the key is to find the right balance between picking a gear that requires all muscle and one that requires all aerobic effort. questions for another day…I’ve also been a little out of sorts the last week…maybe due to the stress of my dad dying and the impending arrival of a new child. (I was hit by some sort of food poisoning last night that seems to be mostly better already.)

the descent was tedious. It was either that or risk death. I had to hold the brakes pretty much the whole way, since the surface was horrible, which meant I needed to stop every 100 meters or so to let the front rim cool down. Then I headed back for Mount Holyoke (complete with a massive detour around route 5, which was closed just north of the reservation). I really wasn’t in the mood to do another big climb, but I persevered. On another day, that would be a really fun hill. There’s a tough section of 12% or so near the bottom, but once you get through that you get nice swooping switchbacks to the top. The descent, especially after you get through the switchbacks is super-fun and super fast. I was coasting today, since my top gear was a 42-13, but I’d still guess I was over 40 mph through that section (no speedometer either). Great views from the top of both this one and Mount Tom.

Anyway, I sort of feel like Mount Tom is a once in a lifetime kind of hill, but if anyone is crazy enough to do it with me (Khalid?, Seth?, GeWilli?)  I wouldn’t mind another crack, hopefully with a better showing. And if you want to see a little more info on the climb and a google satellite image, check out Doug’s post from earlier in the summer.

Oddly enough, I had decided on the title of the post well before the picture arrived from my mom, which is taken from an article in the Traverse City Record Eagle on 30 August, 1977 written by my dad, explaining why he rides a bike. For me, however, there’s no real question: I ride a bike because of my dad. (Why biking and not chess, or fly-fishing, or photography? and why I’ve become obsessed with steep hill climbs? who knows…) There’s some dispute based on the fact that my dad didn’t get a bike until after he married my mom and she convinced him that they should ride together. Like just about everything in his life, it became an obsessive hobby. In any case, I very much doubt that I would have taken to cycling in the way that I have without my dad’s influence. Some of my earliest memories are of riding in the back of the buggy in that picture. They certainly don’t make them like that any more. Kids just sitting there, without protective covers and steel frames and the like? Still, I’m no worse for wear for having ridden in it, and it was probably more fun than being fully ensconced in mesh and fabric. I usually hoped that the final destination would be some sort of store where I could procure candy, and more often than not, it was, since my dad was never one to turn down a sweet. There’s also no question that my love of obsessive cataloging and documentation, to which this site is a testament, also comes from my dad. Long before this site and blogging in general, he wrote two little pamphlets with rides and information on riding in Leelanau County and the Old Mission Peninsula, even going so far as warning riders which houses had particularly aggressive dogs.

My father passed away last Saturday after living with Parkinson’s Disease for at least the last 20 years. His obituary was in the Traverse City Record Eagle. As for the other reasons why I bike, he expressed it as well as I can, and certainly better than I could at this particular moment.

In other news, I have been doing a fair amount riding, and I’ll post reports about the George St Hill Climb and Mount Tom in the next couple days.