Category: cycling

Barry-Roubaix: The Clothing

Published March 24, 2013

Rob’s post on Barry-Roubaix which included a description of the clothing worn made me want to note the same thing. Not for any reason of style, but because I find dressing for longer cold weather rides to be a bit confusing for some (they sure were for me!), so I hope these notes can help others in a similar situation. (It’s also an excuse to post this photo of Roger, Nick, and I just after starting the race.)

Saturday’s weather in Hastings was right around freezing. My bike computer recorded an average temperature of 32.5°F during the race, and the temperature when I last checked the weather before leaving for the start was 28°F. There wasn’t much wind, but being a road race I had to be ready for 10-20 MPH headwinds throughout the day, plus more while riding down some hills.

Here’s what I wore, which is fairly typical for me in these conditions:

Pearl Izumi Barrier GTX Shoes
Generic Kirkland (Costco) Tall Wool Socks
Voler Thermal Bib Knickers (Trail’s Edge logo from team order)
Under Armor Thermal Base Layer (usually a generic Costco one, but this was a gift and is more form fitting)
Voler Short Sleeve Jersey (Club-Cut, Full Zip, Big Ring Coffee from team order)
Voler Wind Jacket (Trail’s Edge, also from team order)
Descente Coldout Beanie
Giro Xar Helmet
Pearl Izumi Gavia Gloves

For other rides around this temperature or colder I’ll often use Trail’s Edge Moose Mitts with springtime-weight gloves. I really like these for keeping my hands warm and bike controls accessible, but on warmer days like this when I’ll be trying to push myself (such as a race) they can get too warm. Thus, just as during Iceman, I opted for simple gloves. Regardless of what I chose for keeping my hands warm they always seem to get painfully cold within the first 5 or 10 miles, then suddenly warm up and be fine for the rest of the ride. I guess that must when I warm up and my internal thermostat decides that there’s sufficient heat that some can be spent on warming extremities.

I’ll also tend to refrain from shaving my head or face for 4 or 5 days before an event like this. The bit of scruffy facial hair does a great job of keeping the cold away.

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2013 Barry-Roubaix on a Fatbike

Published March 23, 2013

Today was the 2013 Barry-Roubaix dirt road race, and I participated riding my 2012 Salsa Mukluk 2 fatbike. I ended up with an official time of 2:39:09 and 14.2 MPH average, placing 33rd of 58 in the 36 Mile Fatbike category (results here). I would have liked to have finished in a quicker time than I did last year (2:21:42 / 15.2 MPH average), but as this year’s course was a mix of frozen dirt roads and ice with some rutted mud and I was on a heavier and slower rolling bike, I’m happy. There were many hills that I would have normally pedaled down, but this year’s ice found me (and many other folks) gingerly coasting down them, not braking or changing course. Had conditions been like they were last year times probably would have been faster across the board.

Earlier forecasts looked like the roads would be greasy, peanut-buttery mud, so I set out ready to stop and fix my bike a number of times, but this wasn’t needed. Even with the ice I didn’t fall or step off my bike once, and my bike was almost as clean at the finish as it was at the start. From what I could see my dripping nose added more filth to the bike than the course did.

Differing from previous years the race started and finished in the beautiful town of Hastings, Michigan. In the past it had started at Yankee Springs with the easternmost point near Hastings, but this time the western-most point was near the old start. This worked wonderfully, as the entire town was set up for the race with businesses open early and staffed up for the almost-3000 participants and family members, with the start and finish lines right downtown. Most intersections had police directing traffic, there was a blocked-off street post-race party area, and it all felt like a whole-town event. This venue change was an excellent move.

On the suggestion of our friends Nick and Marty we booked a room at the Parkview Motel, which was a great choice. Not only were a bunch of other friends and acquaintances staying there as well, but it was four blocks from the start/finish area. All I had to do for the start of the race was dress, put my stuff in the car, to check out, and ride to the start. It wasn’t even far enough to be considered the remotest of a warmup! After I left the room at about 10am Danielle continued to sleep, then being in a downtown-ish area she wandered into some shops then sat in a coffee shop until it was time for me to finish. This all worked out very well, and I hope to stay here again. While the place was a bit old, it seemed reasonably well cared for and everything was very clean. At ~$66 total for the night’s stay it was a great choice.

There was one scary part to today’s ride, but thankfully I didn’t see much of it. At the top of one of the most sustained climbs in the course a rider apparently fell off his bike and wasn’t breathing. An acquaintance of mine was one of the folks giving him chest compressions (for a total of 18 minutes) right in the road before the EMTs arrived and got to work on the guy. From what I’d heard and read a few places online he had a pulse when he left in the ambulance, was airlifted away, and is still in the hospital. I really hope he’s all right. (More info starting here in the MMBA Forum.)

This sort of event is scary, but one could have a heart attack doing stuff around the house or just sitting and watching TV. So long as one doesn’t overdo it, the benefits to strenuous exercise (particularly if it is fun) likely outweighs the potential risks.

The Strava page showing my statistics from today’s race can be found here. Official results from the 36 mile race can be found here.

(That photo above is Roger Class’ Pugsley, Rob Tranter’s 2012 Mukluk 3 (which he’d purchased from Nick Shue), and my 2012 Mukluk 2 with different tires and chainrings from stock, all propped against a wall outside of the motel rooms. The three of us, along with Nick and Marty, and Rob Ritzenhein all entered the fatbike class. Erik and Kristi rode their normal 29ers.)

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Mukluk Lights: Removed

Published March 19, 2013

This evening I removed the front and rear lights from the Mukluk 2 and washed it in preparation for Barry-Roubaix. With the longer-than-hoped-for winter and the predictions of snowy and icy roads during the race I figured it’d be best to bring a bike with big, fat tires. I think it’ll be fun, too.

Built up at the very end of 2011 this light has worked out extremely well for night time and winter riding. I won’t need it during the race, the days are rapidly getting longer, and after the race I’m anticipating most of my riding happening on a different bike, so I don’t think it’ll be needed much more for now.

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Elegant Cadence Sensor Magnet

Published March 15, 2013

My friend Jeremy lost his Garmin cadence sensor magnet so he replaced it with a simple neodymium magnet. After hearing about how well that worked for him I picked up some similarly sized ones from eBay and put one on the crankset for my new bike. I opted for a 8mm thick (10mm diameter) magnet where he’d gone with the 6mm thick version. I picked this based on how far out from the crank arm the normal Garmin sensor sits, although with the additional strength of the larger magnet this may not have been necessary.

The magnet sticks solidly to the end of the pedal spindle, nestled inside of the 10mm hole in the Race Face Crank Boot. It’s a bit difficult to pry off with my finger, but easy enough to remove I can’t help but wonder if I should have opted for a thinner version instead, so I just purchased some 3mm thick magnets on eBay and will give those a go as well. Whichever I end up using it’s a very elegant solution that I expect to work out quite well, as long as it doesn’t come out and become stuck in my drivetrain or something terrible. It also looks much nicer (and is much easier to fit) than the normal Garmin magnet, as it doesn’t use adhesive nor require a cable tie around the crank arm.

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Chilly Evening MOT Ride

Published March 14, 2013

This evening I headed home from work early enough to get a ride in, and found myself parked at Onyx and ready to go at about 5:15pm. Being in the 40s I was fairly comfortable in a jersey + wind jacket, knickers, and autumn-weight gloves at the beginning, but by the end of the ride it wasn’t enough. With the sun setting temperatures were dropping, making it cold enough that I was shivering in the car on the drive home and needing a long, hot shower before I could feel my toes.

The route ended up taking me to Armada and back, and on the way out I got to experience my first serious leg cramp after trying to push myself hard for ~10 miles straight. Just as I stepped on to my pedal to cross 32 Mile Road my right calf clenched, and I had to stop for a few minutes afterward to let it loosen up. It felt odd throughout the entire rest of the ride, but thankfully never got as bad as when it’d locked up.

Not long after turning back in Armada I crossed paths with Tom Payne, with us seeing each long enough to say hi and hit hands (or whatever that thing you do when passing people where it’s sort of like a high five, but not up high and not with a full hand). I kept pushing on back towards the car, keeping an eye on the setting sun, when not long after passing through Romeo I received a call from Danielle asking for help while she was in a spinning class. It seems that the cleat had come off of her shoe becoming stuck in the pedal, and she was looking for suggestions for how to get it back out. I was cold enough at this point that I had difficulty holding the phone, but a few minutes of rest did help warm my hands again.

Just as I was taking off from the phone call someone a guy named Chris rode up behind me, and he and I ended up finishing up my ride together. He does mostly road riding and thus was pushing along at 19-20 MPH for most of the route. I was able to keep up riding side by side for most of it, but as we got near the end I tucked in behind him and drafted for a bit. 30-ish miles of road-ish riding is a fair bit for me, and not being accustomed to that kind of sustained output I really needed the help.

This ended up being a very nice ride. While I was cold it was great to see someone I knew, get to ride with someone else, and just to get out and about. The photo above was taken at my turnaround point near the grain elevator in Armada. The Strava data for the ride can be seen here, showing what seems like a weirdly straight route. That’s how it goes this time of the year, though.

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Replacement 1UP USA Hitch Bar

Published March 13, 2013

One day after cleaning salt off my 1UP USA bike rack I found that the ball on it was no longer retracting easily, making it hard to get the rack in and out of my hitch. I emailed 1UP USA asking for a few pointers on disassembling the retention mechanism and fixing it, but instead of that they sent a whole new hitch bar.

This evening I disassembled my rack to replace this piece, but then when cleaning the individual parts I found and was able to fix the problem. There is a plastic cap located in the part of the hitch bar that goes furthest towards the front of the vehicle and appears intended to keep from reaching the ball-moving mechanism. If this gets pushed towards the rear of the vehicle it can settle in behind the ball, preventing it from retracting. This was the problem that I had.

With the rack apart I decided to spend time washing the salt off of it, so now it’s sitting in the basement drying. I’ll get some blue marine grease (same as the rack originally used), put it back together, then get back to using it. I really do like the design of this rack. It does a great job of holding bikes in place and it makes it really easy to adjust two bikes to fit nicely while still keeping them centered on the vehicle.

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The New MMBA Trail Guide

Published March 6, 2013

I’ve been working on much of the behind-the-scenes stuff for the Michigan Mountain Biking Association (MMBA) website for a few years now. This started with a group of us moving from a broken phpBB2-based site to a Joomla site and a phpBB3 forum. After a couple of years the Joomla site was replaced with the more manageable and updatable WordPress.

Back when on Joomla there was a decent page that presented a Trail Guide that Rob Ritzenhein had built for Joomla which was a searchable list of mountain biking trails within the state along with a ZIP code-based proximity search. With the move to WordPress I had to drop this searchable trail guide and replaced it with a basic, text-based list that had been generated off of the old trail data. After two mis-starts and incomplete attempts to find a replacement during 2012, I was a bit concerned that I wasn’t going to have much luck finding someone who was able to write such a guide.

Out of the blue in late January 2013 I received email from a guy named Jeff Lau who said (in much more polite words) that our existing guide sucks and that he’d like to have a go at making something better. He was very right, and after he showed a very promising proof of concept I was really impressed, so he and I met up and things got rolling. Fast forward a couple weeks and he had software nearly ready to go. I was able to help out with some graphics stuff (made my first sprite sheet) and get the old trail data adapted to the new format and loaded into the site, and get a bunch of interested volunteers to proof and submit updates to the data. Following a few rounds of testing and small tweaks it was ready to release.

Last night Jeff and I were able to launch the site publicly, and thus far it’s been very well received. The guide is no longer an impenetrable wall of text, but instead a dynamic, flowing, zoomable Google-based map paired with a list of trails and their details which simply feels nice to use. Updates are easy, done by putting data in an OpenOffice.org Base database and running an SQL query which generates the CSVs, then uploading them to the trail guide’s data directory. Everything seen by the user is client-side JavaScript with the actual data stored in simple CSV files, so it all runs in the user’s browser and requires nothing special on the server.

I’m really impressed with the work that Jeff did in writing the Trail Guide software. He said he wanted to do something, did it, and turned it around very quickly, just in time for spring. The weather is just starting to warm here in Michigan, and getting this kind of guide ready before people look for it is key. I believe that this guide is one of the most important publicly accessible Michigan mountain bike trail advocacy tools that has been put forward in a while.

I strongly believe that one of the best ways to ensure trails remain good for and open to biking is to keep people using them. Once they reach a critical mass they become self-maintaining (users remove much of the deadfall themselves), and the chance of them becoming closed to bikes diminishes because they are well-used and known cycling areas. Giving people a guide to help them find trails increases usage by increasing accessibility.

This cost of this guide came in at a cost of about 120 hours of Jeff’s time, and 40-50 of mine. (While he kept detailed records I did not, but I did have a few 6 hour evenings of researching trails details for accuracy and entering them in the database one at a time.)

The official announcement of the new trail guide can be found here on the MMBA website, and the trail guide itself can be found here: http://mmba.org/trail-guide

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Heel Rub Protection for SRAM X0 Crankset

Published February 17, 2013

I recently came across a great deal on a 2011 SRAM X0 2×10 crankset; something which should be a drop-in replacement for the X7 crankset that’s slated to come on the bike that I’ve got on order. Being carbon fiber and looking very nice I want to keep them in great shape, so I decided to apply some protective tape to cut down on heel rub^† and some plastic caps to keep then ends from chipping when hitting rocks.

Race Face’s Crank Boots took care of the end of the crank arms, but for heel rub I turned to my favorite rub protection material, UHMW polyethylene tape. After a few minutes with some masking tape, a marker, and some drawing software I’d made this template which was easily transfered to the tape. As I used some thin (.0045″) tape it was a bit of a hassle to get in place, but hopefully my cleaning routine (glass cleaner followed up with isopropyl alcohol) got the cranks clean enough that the tape won’t begin peeling before I want to remove it.

The applied tape looks a bit milky, but I think that once in place on a bike it’ll be fine. The photo above is worst-case for appearance, as the angled lighting shows all of the slight surface imperfections in the tape. Just as when used for cable rub protection I feel that this super-slippery, strong tape will do a better job of preserving the cranks than the crystal clear polyurethane films that are normally used.

With the peel-off backing still in place the tape only weighed 1g, and with the Crank Boots coming in at 15g for the pair this bit of extra protection won’t add much to the overall weight of the bike. This photo shows the boots and pedals installed, and I’m pretty happy with how it all looks.

Since this crankset is a pretty common style and SRAM doesn’t appear to have changed the molds for their carbon fiber cranksets much recently I hope that quite a few others find this PDF template useful: SRAM XO Crank Arm Protector Template, Designed for 175mm 2011 2×10 X0 GXP Crankset, part number 00.6115.422.070.

^† Heel rub is when one’s shoe rubs against a bike’s crank arm, wearing off the finish.

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Marty’s Orange 9:ZERO:7 Susitna

Published February 9, 2013

This evening, amongst a bunch of other stuff, I had the opportunity to put together most of my friend Marty’s new bike, an orange 9:ZERO:7 Susitna. Named after Alaska’s only area code, 9:ZERO:7 is one of the premier fatbike brands, and one of the few (or only?) mass-availability models that aren’t sold by QBP.

Marty’s bike is mostly stock, but with SRAM XX Grip Shifters and the Gore Ride-On cables they came with, Ergon GP1 grips, a Ritchey carbon bar, Planet Bike bottle cages, some flat pedals that I had laying around, 45NRTH Escalator tires, and some peace sign rim tape that Nick (her husband) set up on the wheels for her. I also added the usual compliment of UHMW tape for cable rub protection to help the frame look nice for a long time to come. (Disclaimer: I didn’t put the wheels/tires together, so the not-aligned logos and valve stem are not my doing. Yes, I acknowledge that is a very pedantic detail.)

As shown it comes in at 32.62 pounds, which is quite respectable for a fatbike where weight wasn’t the priority in the build.

With the orange frame and peace signs the look of this bike just screams Marty, and it should work out very nicely for her. I had a bunch of fun building this, and I hope it serves her well. It’s a really, really great looking bike.

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2013 LOHS Winter Race

Published February 2, 2013

This morning I took part in the sixth annual Lake Orion High School Winter Race; a cross country (XC) race around the school’s grounds and mountain bike trails. The trail conditions were perfect for all kinds of bikes, and my fatbike definitely wasn’t necessary. It sure didn’t hurt, though, and made for a fun ride. Per usual I didn’t have to brake much, as the increased rolling resistance (the front tire is 4 PSI, rear was 6 PSI) allowed me to stop pedaling before most corners, roll through, then keep going.

Being the only person on a fatbike I won the Fatbike category by default. Had I raced in my appropriate Sport class I would have taken third out of four. (Official results here.)

I really liked the route, as it avoided many of the hard/slick climbs that can be found on the school grounds and instead opted for a nice rolling route. My only complaint would be the overall length of the race, as doing three laps I was only riding for ~46 minutes. I think we could easily have gone to four or five laps and still been sane for a winter race.

GPS data of my ride today can found here on Strava. It seems that for the last third my HRM acted up again, radically under-recording things.

On the way home I noticed that there is now a Great Lakes Coffee location along M-24 / Lapeer Rd. and stopped for some coffee. It seems to be almost colocated with a Kensington Church location so I braced myself for a bit of proselytizing, but I was pleasantly surprised to instead encounter some nice folks who made me a good cup of coffee.

The photo above is one of the first actual-use images taken with my new camera, a Fujifilm FinePix XP50 ruggedized camera. I bought this to replace my aging Olympus Stylus 850SW as my carry-everywhere camera. The Olympus served me very well, but I was wanting something with better low light performance, a more capable movie mode, and SD cards. Finding a good deal on the XP50 I figured I’d give it a go. Its ~20g heavier than the Olympus and lacks the nice auto-retracting metal cover for the primary lens, but I think it’ll work out well. I’ll know for sure at the end of summer.

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