running up the score

I went for a fifteen mile run up the Arroyo Seco past the Rose Bowl and Devil’s Gate Dam to Johnson’s Rock/Field - one more mile to go to hit 800 for the year. It’s a little warmer here today than it’s been – 65-69 and sunny today – so it was nice to get out into it. It feels a little silly, though, to be pointlessly trying to get to a specific number of miles. When you convert 800 miles to kilometers you get 1287.2 – not a very exciting mark to shoot for, but just the same amount of running and time out under the sky. Still, it feels good to have (almost) made it to a goal that I’ve been focused on for a few months.

Fifteen was a good distance for me today. I considered going for eighteen. I think that would have pushed me just a little too far. Fifteen let me push at my limits just enough to notice without pushing over the edge. My pace was a little faster than it has been for my recent longer runs – hopefully that speed will continue into next year. I’m beginning to realize that fatigue is perhaps more closely related to elapsed time than to speed/pace, so to run a given distance, it should be easier to run it faster.

Found a coke in the fridge when I got back from the run (we’ve had some parties here) – awesome little recovery/pick-me-up – I may have to use that again.

Brown Ice

Rode up Brown this morning. Saw some interesting soil formations on the trail in a shady section toward the top. The surface of the dirt had taken on a sponge-like shape – or maybe more like the inside of an English muffin. I was trying to figure out what would cause that kind of surface on the trail. My first thought was that they’d had some equipment up there grading the road. But that didn’t quite explain it. Then I remembered that I’d seen something like that before - along the side of roads in cold climates. And then I realized it was ice reforming the trail. A second later I actually saw ice on the trail – only a tiny amount on the surface but enough under the surface to make the trail hard and crunchy. It only lasted for several feet through that one section that apparently gets very little or no sun at this time of year. But, it was fun to see and feel it.

to 800 or not...

I haven’t kept up with my long runs too well lately. My last 18-miler was on Nov 9th and I ran 10 miles about a month ago. I’ve been doing mostly 3s and 4s and 5s. At the beginning of this week, with ten days left in the year, I had 42 miles left to make it to 800 miles for the year. It wasn’t looking very promising. Of course, it would have been easy to break it up into 4s every day, but with holiday gatherings and some rain here and there, I just wasn’t sure I could make it. I’d already coasted into 3rd place all time for annual running miles after passing 2005s mark of 755 last Sunday and didn’t really see the point in trying to go for 800. Tuesday night, though, having completed my good American gift buying duties I went out for a run. It was a cool evening (48 degrees and starry) and I suddenly wanted to try to get to 800. It felt pretty good through 8 miles and then I started getting pretty tired. I still had 4 miles to get home, though, so I kept at it and made it home okay, although a little dehydrated (same old story) and then forgot to drink water as I got home because I got a phone call from a friend who was coming to stay with us and then he arrived and it wasn’t till an hour later or so when my body was like, “Dude! I’m thirsty, here!” It may be the season of giving, but you still need to take care of yourself, too. Anyway, I snapped back from the threshold of “an episode” with the help of some gator-aide and some dinner. Went out again this morning for a 4-mile recovery run through town with Hilary (about 48 degrees again and cloudy). So, that puts me at -26 miles with seven days to go and I think I can pull it off now – I’m hoping to anyway and I’ll give it some effort.

ring around the rosie

For some strange reason, I was contemplating a century ride this morning. I’ll break the suspense right here and tell you that I didn’t make it. But I did get a pretty good ride in – 65 miles - possibly my biggest ride ever. Earlier this year I rode 68 miles, but half of those were coming down the mountain I had just pedaled up – I’m not sure how to calibrate a mountain road ride with a town ride – I feel just about as tired today as I did after that earlier Mt Wilson ride, so maybe no calibration is needed. A mile is a mile – unless, of course it’s all down hill – then it’s called sledding.

Today’s route was very boring. That was intentional. Since I don’t have much experience with long distance riding I wanted to stay relatively close to home throughout the ride rather than find out that I can’t ride a hundred miles and still be who knows how far away.

So I rode up to the Rose Bowl (4.5 miles) then took a loop around it (3 miles more) then did that loop again 12 more times. If you like watching golf it’s not a bad loop to ride – it circles a golf course. And there are a lot of other walkers/runners/bikers to keep you entertained. Still, it’s pretty brutal because you end up counting laps and having that constant reminder of the countdown in your head just makes it harder.

During that time my feet were fairly cold, but manageable – I wore liner socks and wool socks and had the mesh on my shoes sealed with duct tape.

I did the first 50 with two bottles of water so I needed fuel. So I rode back home again and ate some leftover fajitas and some hummus on bread – probably not a very good choice of fuel, but I was pretty sure I wasn’t actually going to be able to leave the house again after lunch. I was happy to end the ride then at lunch.

But, after all that food and the low temp inside the house, I was cold. I figured I could either spend the rest of the afternoon being cold at home or being cold trying to ride a century. I managed to get back out on the bike and head back to the Rose Bowl. I was moving a lot slower at that point. I took a couple laps and started feeling a little nauseous which could have been from no food throughout the morning segment of the ride followed by a bunch of heavyish food at lunch or dehydration or electrolyte imbalance or the fact that I’d just ridden a pretty long way or most likely, as usual, a combination of factors. Plus my legs were in pain and producing no power so I headed home.

I’m glad I got out there for one last push, though. I guess it’s best to slowly work up to 100 miles – like I didn’t know that…

Now I’m craving cherry tomatoes – luckily I have a bunch so I’m happy.

a month in the desert

So, how do I feel after a month without water? Well… thirsty, of course… no, just kidding… sort of… And it’s not like I’ve cut myself off from water completely but I have been drinking drastically less. I do feel like it has helped me to need less, though, so I guess it’s been successful, been a good thing - a good experiment that I will continue. Although, I’ve found that I really need to chug one pint of water at some point during the day – usually in the afternoon or evening – the rest of the day is just sipity-sip-sip.

Of course this has nothing to do with coffee or tea or beer...

what to do on cold evenings

Multi-Grain Acorn Muffins. These may be a tad on the psychedelic side since the acorn wort is from last fall – very few acorns dropping this year…

no snow on Brown

I was really hoping to see some snow on Brown this morning – from a distance, of course. It was 40 degrees at home (at 580 feet elevation) this morning at 8am. I went on a quick, cold ride up around the Rose Bowl to get a good view of Brown and the surrounding mountains - no snow on Brown - I was a bit surprised by that. We got 2.5 inches of rain here yesterday and the peak of Brown is nearly 4000 feet higher in elevation. There was, however, snow on a lot of the surrounding peaks, Wilson, Baldy, etc. Snow level was probably down to about 4500 feet or lower. The peak of Brown is at 4466 (compared to about 3000 feet at the top of the Brown Mtn. Fire Road that I ride) so it was probably getting some snow last night or the night before which melted with the return of the sun this morning. There’s more cold rain forecast for tonight so maybe there’s still a chance for snow on Brown, although the chances of an actual snow ride are always very, very, very low here – it’s never happened for me, but maybe one day…

Blue Sky, Brown Mountain, Golden Pacific

This may sound ridiculous too anyone reading this from outside of Southern California, but it’s getting pretty cold around here. It’s even cold inside. We haven’t turned on our heater yet this season (I like to play a little game called “Can You Stand It”). This morning it was 49 degrees inside our house.

It was a beautiful, sunny, blue-sky Sunday. It finally cracked 55 degrees outside at around noon so I headed out for a ride to Brown. From the top I could see the Golden Pacific Ocean reflecting the low afternoon sun – about 25 miles to the coast and way out to sea.

55 degrees and sunny is actually a bit tricky to dress appropriately for. If you’re in the sun and riding hard you will quickly heat up, but if you enter a shady area or head downhill you’ll get cold again. You can’t bundle up and you can’t go with single layers. So, my ride went through various stages of hot and cold. I’ve been home for about an hour now and my toes are just starting to regain their feeling.

The forecast for the next few days calls for dropping temperatures and rain. There’s a good chance Brown will get some snow!

And don’t worry, I turned the heater on this afternoon - cranked it way up to 58… can you stand it…

new bike path

I rode a new bike path this morning and evening - new to me, anyway - and pretty new to Los Angeles – it’s a few years old, I guess. It’s very short – maybe only 1.5 miles or so, and it follows along the freeway the whole time, but it is also surprisingly awesome – especially this morning as the sun was just warming things up after a cold night (45ish). The path is built into the cemented river channel of the Arroyo Seco from the southwest corner of South Pasadena to Debs Park. It seems rather pointless that “they” went to the effort to build such a short bike path. Hopefully it’s just a test run of what could potentially travel the length of the entire Arroyo Seco and all the other river channels in the area. For my needs today, though, it was perfect - I live in SoPas and I had an all day meeting at Debs Park for CICLE. The channel is lined with native sycamores and a lot of parks and there was actually a nice clean flow of water running down the center this morning (we’ve finally had a little rain.)

One of the nice things about this bike path and its future potential is its historical location. Sometime around the turn of the twentieth century there was an elevated wooden bikeway that ran from Pasadena to Downtown Los Angeles. The car industry and culture and its friends put a fairly quick end to that romantic era - after which the Pasadena Freeway was built along its route… or something like that.

The ride home was really nice, too. It was dark (and that meeting was finally over!) and I rode with a couple of friends back up along the Arroyo. I don’t think I’d ride down there at night by myself as there are no lights an few escape routes but it was fun to get a chance this once to ride along the river under the stars.

squeak squeal squeak

For the life of me I can’t get the brakes on Mindful Mule to stop squealing. I’ve tried toeing in and adjusting in several different ways. I’ve tried rubbing the contact surface of the brake pad against concrete to roughen up its surface. I’ve tried riding down hills with the brakes slightly on to wear them in. Nothing seems to work. Luckily, they only squeak under hard braking so I can still get around town just fine and if I have to slam on the brakes then I get the added bonus of an ear-piercing squeal to warn of impending danger. The new rims seem to have a slight film on them that was there when I got them – maybe some part of the production process. Maybe I need to get that off of there. Dan the Man said something about cleaning the rims with toothpaste. I guess that makes some sense and probably wouldn’t hurt. Any other suggestions out there before I try new (softer) brake pads?

a tale of two helmets

I have two bike helmets. One is blue - it is about 2 years old. I wear the blue helmet to Brown and rides with Dan the Man. Dan has the same blue helmet so we are like some sort of blue-helmeted team. My other helmet is white – well, it used to be white and now it is sort of a gold color – I guess it got a tan from all the sun. The gold helmet is about 5 years old. The gold helmet is my crappy helmet that I wear when I’ll be parking my bike somewhere and leaving my helmet on it. I don’t care if it gets stolen. Who would steal a helmet anyway? (I’ve actually had a helmet stolen before but I don’t think it was stealing exactly – I think some drunken frat-boy type was stumbling along and picked it off my bike for no particular reason and probably ended up throwing it off a bridge or something. Who knows?) For the last several months the padding inside the gold helmet has been starting to roll up and fall out so that every time I put my helmet on I have to hold the padding in place as I put the helmet on my head and then the weight of the helmet on top of the padding and against my head hold it in place until I take it off again. But because the padding was also rolling up and I couldn’t really do anything about that I would end up with a big crease on my forehead when I took my helmet off and it looked like a had a scar. Finally, today, I got smart (from wearing my helmet so much) and I ripped the padding out of the helmet. Now there is no more special holding of the padding in place when I put on my helmet, no cold sweat soaked padding, and the helmet fits a little looser and more comfortably.