Sunday, July 29, 2007

Danville Railroad Loop (45 miles)

I woke up on Saturday feeling a bit lethargic, so I decided to just do an easy ride over to Danville and then take BART home from Lafayette. This ride is flat for the most part, with the only significant hill coming at the beginning, with the climb up Spruce Ave. into Tilden park.

From Moraga to Danville there are multi-use trails that parallel the roads. I usually stick to the road to avoid the crowded trails, but the heat on Saturday must have kept the pedestrians and joggers away. Both the Lafayette/Moraga trail and the Iron Horse trail were practically empty.

Distance: about 45 miles
Elevation gain: 2800 feet
Time in the saddle: 4 hours
Route map:


Sunday, July 22, 2007

Woodside via Canada Road (50 miles)

This morning I drove over to Burlingame on the Peninsula to do a 50 mile ride from the Velogirl's library, called "Woodside via Canada with Alpine/Edgewood loop". The peninsula isn't really my favorite riding locale, but they do have lots of rolling hills, which I thought would be good practice for the upcoming coastal ride.

The ride starts and ends in downtown Burlingame, which is actually quite quaint. Who knew? It then retraces some of the same roads as the Giro di Peninsula metric, but avoids the biggish climb up Page Mill.

Canada Road (miles 8-15) is closed to car traffic on Sundays. It's great to have the whole road reserved for cyclists, runners, and rollerbladers. A couple of miles down Canada I spotted a Greek temple out of the corner of my eye.



Naturally I stopped to investigate and it turns out that this is the Pulgas Water Temple, built in the '30s to celebrate the terminus of the Hetch Hetchy aquaduct that brings water from the Sierras to the bay area. Until 2004, water flowed through this temple into the Crystal Springs reservoir.

Further on, the route takes a little detour through historic Woodside and passes by the Woodside Store, a restored 19th century building once used by a Dr. Tripp.


According to the historical marker, the store was "built in 1854 among sawmills and redwood groves by Dr. R. O. Tripp and M. A. Parkhurst: operated by Dr. Tripp in person (who also served as dentist, librarian, postmaster, and community leader) until his death in 1909."

Animules: lots of horses
Distance: 50 miles
Time in the Saddle: 4 hours 45 minutes
Elevation Gain: 2850 ft
Route map: Woodside via Canada

Sunday, July 15, 2007

East Bay Hills Ramble - Lite

I'm still recovering from a summertime cold I caught last week, so I decided to take it easy today and just do a 30 mile jaunt up and around the hills. This route is very similar to the Oakland Hills Ramble route, but at mile 20, you turn right on Pinehurst Road instead of left. This short 1 mile climb up Pinehurst drops you onto Skyline Blvd. From there it's a quick descent back down into north Oakland.

Although Pinehurst is a really lovely road that meanders through redwood forest, I always avoid it because of the steepness of the final quarter mile. Today I kept waiting to hit that point in the road where it becomes too steep for me to handle, but that point never came. I struggled a bit the last 200 feet, but it wasn't as bad as I remember. I guess that means I'm getting better at this climbing thing.

Distance: 34 miles
Time in the Saddle: 3.5 hours
Elevation gain: 3500 feet
Route map (on Bikely.com): East Bay Hills Ramble

Sunday, July 8, 2007

Cool Tool for Bike Routes

Unfortunately I came down with a nasty little summer cold on Friday morning, so no riding for me this weekend. I decided to put the down-time to good use by mapping the route for my upcoming 5 day ride from San Francisco to San Luis Obispo. I ended up finding, using, and loving a (new to me) online app called Bikely.com.

Bikely.com lets you draw routes online, similar to the Gmap-Pedometer app that I've been using for a while. But Bikely offers additional features and is really geared towards cyclists (obviously) rather than runners, as is the case with Gmap-Ped.

For one thing, Bikely offers much slicker elevation profiles, and you plot route points with a single click of the mouse, rather than a double-click. This may not seem that big of a deal, but when a single route can contain 300 points, there's a carpel tunnel difference between single and double mouse clicks. Also, Bikely gives you the ability to add descriptions, search tags, and to share the route or keep it private. Once you share the route, it becomes part of the library available to other cyclists, which is great.

Anyway, here are the routes for the 5 day SF-SLO ride:

Day 1, Montara (south of SF) to Santa Cruz

Day 2, Santa Cruz to Monterey

Day 3, Monterey to Big Sur

Day 4, Big Sur to San Simeon

Day 5, San Simeon to SLO

Wednesday, July 4, 2007

Stinson Beach-Muir Woods Loop (42 miles)

Every once in a while I pick some random route, from a book or website, that is described as "moderately hilly". But I consult my map and think, Oh well that doesn't look so bad. Three or four thousand feet later I'm greeting every switchback and rise with "Oh, fuck me". So it went on this Independence Day, on a little ride we'll call the Stinson Beach-Muir Woods loop.

Altnerate title: Yes, you are riding halfway up Mount Tam, stupid.

I started at the Ferry building in San Francisco and rode the standard route over the Golden Gate bridge and into Sausalito. In Mill Valley, the route takes you up through some really beautiful wooded neighborhoods and then drops you onto Panoramic Highway. This highway is indeed very pictureseque and offers some lovely panoramas, but it's unevenly graded with some pretty steep sections. At the ranger station at 1500 feet, I realized that I was basically about half way up to Mount Tamalpais; at the station I could have taken a right to continue another 1000-1500 feet to the summit. But I didn't. I continued on Panoramic highway, which descends right down to Stinson Beach.


Naturally the beach was packed and there was a backup of cars for at least a mile in both directions. The drivers (or temporary parkers) were quite chatty, asking me questions as I rode by or cheering me on. Friendly, silly people, thinking that they will find parking at the beach at 1pm on July 4th.

At Stinson Beach, the route meets up with Highway 1 going south. This stretch offered some spectacular views of the coast, a prelude, I'm sure, to our upcoming ride down Highway 1 in August.



The last stretch of the loop takes you along Muir Woods Road, to the Muir Woods Park area, then up, up, up again to intersect Panoramic Highway and head back to Sausalito.

According to my Topo! map, the route has a total elevation gain of 6200 feet. Now I think that the Topo software ends up tacking on extra feet depending on how you draw the map, so the total climbing is probably more in the neighbordhood of 4500-5500 feet. Although this is more climbing than I normally enjoy, it was really a spectacular route.

Update 7/15: I ended up plotting this route on Bikely.com and I came up with total elevation gain of about 5200 feet.

Distance: 42 miles
Time in the Saddle: 5 hours

Sunday, July 1, 2007

June mileage stats

Somehow I managed to log over 400 miles again last month.. the fourth month in a row where I've reached that milestone. Year-to-date total thus far is 2223 miles.

June mileage: 405
June Time in the Saddle: 35.7 hours