It's a bike party!

Went for the long ride this morning

GG Park to the Great Highway and the Lake Merced loop (thanks Beth!) then up Foerster/Teresita, across Twin Peaks, then bombing down 7th back at the park

Then .... skidding to a stop at 7th and something because hey! It's Bike to Work day! Woohoo - there's maybe 20 people clustered around a table with free bagels, coffee, water, bags, and scones.

Cyclists are whizzing around everywhere on their way to work, dropping in like hummingbirds for vittles. I'm a scone-a-holic so I grabbed one of those.

Then I pedaled off through the park, headed out Arguello and out to the Presidio, bombed down towards Crissy Field and .... stopped short at a *huge* bike to work party in the Presidio.

Maybe 50 folks and people are laying around taking it easier here - there's supposed to be a BBQ later, apparently but some of us do actually have to get to work at some point :-). So I grabbed an apple and waded out of the crowd back to the commute

Saw about double the bike traffic, all told - honestly I see quite a few bikes normally, so this meant that at any given point there were about 5-10 people on bikes cycling to work. That's a lot of people! A good showing

And all that hippie treehugger crap aside (because it's all about me, really) how cool is it when you're normal commute to work all the sudden has *feed zones*?? Very cool.

Apparently I get a free ride on the ferry tonight, and maybe another canvas tote bag. I have been warned that it is mayhem trying to get all the bikes *on* the ferry though with all the extra riders. We'll see :-)

At my office we had Gil, Dennis, Jon Belew (plus his daughter to school!), Nick and me. Go Tacit Knowledge

Hope everyone else riding around today has a good ride

Lion-based recovery day art

The early cat catches the...snake, I think

But what if the cat foolishly chose to eat nothing but a lot of heavily-frosted chocolate cake for breakfast?


outlook not so good

Perhaps a healthy choice of oatmeal or similar would have resulted in the strength of an Assyrian emperor instead



And then there's this



I'm really not sure what's going on here. I'm getting mixed signals.

On the data junkie side, I'll say that the port ride was fast last night, but not as fast as it first appeared. Rumors of 30mph averages were exaggerated. The fastest lap I could pull out of the data was 28.8mph. Now, that's quick, but we'll just have to all collectively do some intervals and work harder to hit a 30mph lap. Get to it, folks!

In other news, this post is brought to you by the number 285, which would be significantly larger than 255, and represents the 20-minute power I kicked out in my most recent test (Friday). The legs are coming around, just in time for some racing

Which makes me think...maybe this weekend it's time to give the P/1/2 field a shot, in beautiful Modesto. We'll see...

Teresa's b-day strikes back

so, we went to Chez Gilbert last night to watch the Istanbul F1 race for our usual formulagrub group, and we're unloading our cinco de mayo leftovers on everyone.

Turns out the cake we brought over still had candles and you can't *not* sing feliz cumpleanos when that happens, can you?

I do think 7 days of birthday celebration is either pushing it or something to shoot for though - can't decide which ;-)

Why I didn't ride my bike on Sunday

This was just how the party *started*

(Karen, you're a beautiful Frida)

Isn't this a cycling blog? Where's the damned cycling?

Where's all the cycling babble? Good question!

The missus and I had a blowout 40th birthday party / Cinco de Mayo festival at our house last night (complete with bartendress and a banquet of made-to-order food, sweet!), so that's a large part of the story.

I also up and went to Texas a couple weekends ago which knocked a few days out of the schedule and took out a race weekend.

Believe it or not I do things other than ride (like, you know, running a small consulting business with my wife, and helping run a medium-sized one with a bunch of other friends) so missing a few days meant the following weekend after that was almost completely spent on catching up



Then last week, during the week, we took off for the North Bay to spend a couple days with Teresa's dad (pictured above) who is dealing with some serious health issues and just needs a hand. Lots of driving and gutter cleaning and lawn mowing and stuff later, we dropped back in to town to play catch up furiously for a couple days before afore-mentioned birthday bash

So it's been a few weeks of Real Life Stuff but not much cycling and definitely no racing, and that's okay. I always manage to take the early part of the summer off from racing for some reason or another and I think it makes me better in August. This year looks like it's no different

I do miss the weekly Tuesday World Championships down at the POO, and hanging with everyone at Los Cantaros though - hopefully I get back in the groove and make it out next week.

Until then I hope everyone else is having a good time and tearing the racing circuit up. Speaking of which - I have to give a quick shout to Maury (upgraded!), Mel and Kieran (Cat's Hill podium folks) for their recent success. Also a quick shout to Alice to get better quickly. I'll see everyone out there soon enough.

Cheers

International Teresa's Birthday Week

I can't tell what's brighter, the candle, your smile, or that mischievous twinkle in your eye

I've always loved that twinkle though...

Happy birthday

(I'll be back to bike-related babbling soon, I promise but priorities are priorities after all :-) )

long morning rides / old house

Been "experimenting" with longer rides in the morning. In quotes because I know hat the result will be - going from 15 hours week to 20 will make me a stronger rider, but the question is whether I can actually get up at 5 every day.

No way I could do it if Teresa wasn't also on this crazy dawn patrol with me (she's doing boot camp @ the Oakland Y)

It does pose a challenge though. Where do you go in San Francisco when you have 2 hours to kill? The polo fields are just too monotonous for that duration. Today I went out to the zoo then by our old house in SF (pictured). They still have the Dr.Suess trees looking good but I forgot how steep those Miraloma Park roads were. No wonder I hated riding when I lived there.

Headed up twin peaks for the view, then hooked up the polo fields for the usual route.

I'm definitely going to have to bust the maps out and get some loops going though or I'm going to go nuts with boredom...