Mt Diablo - summit via North Gate (34 miles)

So I found out this week that I was selected as part of the Death Ride random lottery (yay me!) so it's going to be a lot of climbing from now until July 12. I also have a metric, a century, and a tour scheduled in between, but I'm not too worried about those. Obviously everything pales in comparison to the death ride in terms of preparation, even when you're only planning on doing 3 passes.

On all my trips up Diablo I've taken South Gate up to the junction and descended North Gate. South Gate has an average grade of 5% and I had heard that it was noticeably easier than the northern approach. Now that I've got the Death Ride on my schedule, there are no more easy outs. North Gate it is.

Also, crazy cyclist guy at work said that there was a beautiful patch of poppies along the North Gate approach, and I wanted to check those out.

North Gate definitely has some steeper sections than South Gate, and it doesn't feature the nice flat section on the other side of the mountain (through Rock City). However it does seem more lush than the south side, which has kind of an arid, rocky feel to it. And the southern approach doesn't really have any wildflowers (that I've seen) but the north side has plenty: lots of vibrant orange California poppies, yellow mustard (?), and lots of tiny purple flowers. I'm really bad at identifying specific plants (I'm more of the "pretty flowers!" observer), but I did find this one page on the internets that shows pics of California wildflowers. I'm thinking the purple and yellow ones I saw might be of the lily variety. Next trip up I'll try to take a closer look.

Speaking of analysis, crazy cyclist guy at work showed me this spreadsheet that he has for the Death Ride. It's populated with the distance and elevation gain for each leg of the ride; you enter your projected feet/min and it calculates how long it will take you to complete each pass. But how do you estimate your feet per minute? I decided (mid-ride today) to develop a similar spreadsheet to record my ride data from each ride up Diablo. The ride up North Gate then up to the summit is relatively similar to the elevation profile of the Death Ride passes (except it's all at much higher elevation of course). By recording my elapsed time on each segment of the ride, I can calculate my average mph as well as my feet/minute. Et voila, I can plug that value into the Death Ride spreadsheet and make sure I won't miss any cutoffs.

I didn't collect data for the first leg, from North Gate gate up to the junction. But from the junction to Juniper campground it took me 28 minutes to cover 2.3 miles and 740 vertical feet (Juniper is at 2940 feet). So my average speed was 4.93 mph and my feet/min was 26.43. Pretty slow, but the next leg was even worse: from Juniper up to the summit my average speed was 4 mph and my feet/min was 25.33. I need to work on doing that climb a bit faster if I'm going to be reasonably comfortable on the Sierra passes.