200k dash to Centralia

Obviously I have not been blogging regularly since returning from sabbatical. I am not sure I will pick it up again ... it's not like I have nothing else to do ... but perhaps I should start putting some ride reports up. So ...

September 18 (Saturday) I participated in my first team randonnée, a 200k dart from Westport OR to Centrala WA via Raymond (up highway 4, then 101, then across highway 6). "Dart" is a funny name, because it sounds like it should be a sprint, but in fact it's a sort of dawdle ... you can't get behind the time window (13.5 hours for 200k), but you're also not allowed to finish early, so you just mosey along and use up any extra time at controls. I was riding with Burt and Ken, pleasant company whom I had never met before the ride.

When I meet Cyndi at the end of a ride, she invariably asks me to tell her about the ride. And invariably, at first I can't think of much of anything to tell. We rode. I felt pretty good. The weather was cool at first, then warmer, then the rain started as we turned east at Raymond. What more is there to describe about a bicycle ride?

There is always more to tell, but it doesn't come out all at once.

First, pace. The odd thing about team events is the nature of the time limits. arrow and fleche are 24 hour events, and the shorter darts have a time limit based on distance, which for this 200k event was 13.5 hours. But that doesn't just mean "done within 13.5 hours" (easy), it means "done at pretty darn close to 13.5 hours". It is "not in the spirit of the event" to finish as quickly as possible, and in any case you can't beat the end time by more than two hours because you are required to be at a checkpoint at least 25km away two hours before the deadline. Arrows and fleches further prohibit stopping for two hours or more at any point. The two-hour-stop rule does not apply to darts, but who would want to be still for two hours (other than sleeping) and then start riding again? So it's a mosey, trying to stay just a little ahead of the clock but not too much, with fairly leisurely stops for refreshment.

Second, dependence on the team. You must finish together. A team may be 3-5 people (mine was 3), and the team is disqualified unless at least 3 finish together at the final control. In theory you could ride separately until the penultimate control, then ride just the last leg into the destination together, but in practice a randonnée team rides together pretty much from beginning to end. They may spread out a little (we did), but they rejoin at each control. It helps to have companionable companions.

Burt and Ken and I got along pretty well. I like hills a bit more than they do, but it wasn't a problem because we were all on the same schedule. I have a standard triple but don't use the smallest ring except as a last resort, so in practice my climbing gear is a 39-25; that makes me want to stand up and climb a little faster than someone on a compact double or other low gearing. (If "39-25" means nothing to you, translate to "a gear ratio that would make sense on a racing bike, but is not really as low as one would like on a randonneuring bike"). But no problem, I just stop at the top of the rise to rejoin the group, and I don't mind waiting because there is no point in arriving early to the next control.

We were pretty lucky weather-wise. It was cool but not frigid as we began. I wore a long-sleeve synthetic base layer (Craft), a standard short-sleeve jersey, short-sleeve wind-breaker, and leg warmers with my bib shorts. I had wool socks but didn't put on my rain booties. Burt and Ken were in rain jackets, and I considered whether I should be, but my outfit was just fine, even a bit too warm sometimes. There was some fog but no rain in the first 70 or so miles, to South Bend WA.

I felt the first light drops of rain in South Bend or Raymond, and within a few miles of Raymond it was clearly starting to rain. Off with the windbreaker, on with the Showers Pass rain jacket (Elite 2), and my new Pearl booties. The Showers Pass jacket seemed like a splurge last December ... well really it was a splurge, $230 for a rain jacket is a lot ... but boy is it great. Not only did it keep me dry, but the venting regulated temperature well enough that I didn't end up getting soaked from the inside, as I surely would have with a lesser jacket. I don't know how much of that to attribute to the e-vent fabric. Pit zips help, and the back vent, but oddly I think the most critical control of venting for this jacket is the sleeves. When the cuffs are fully open, air flows up the arms and out the pit zips or the back vent. When the cuffs are partly or fully closed (fastened with good quality velcro), the air flow is slowed or stopped, and the jacket becomes somewhat or very warm.

My 400k ride in August revealed foot pain and butt pain as two factors likely to limit my ability to push out to greater distances, so I am trying to make adjustments in saddle and in cleat position. On this ride I gave my new Fizik Arione saddle its first long test. I had tried a versus and did not find it any improvement over the Bontrager saddle I am replacing. The Arione didn't exactly disappear, but it did encourage and enable me to shift positions and avoid getting really sore. I think it's a keeper, even though I definitely do not fit Fizik's profile of the very flexible racer the Arione is designed for.

Moving my cleats farther back also seems to be working to reduce foot pain. It's hard to be certain, because this was only 125 miles, and because the pace was so relaxed, but I really had no foot pain at all.

So there was more to tell. Probably boring as hell unless you are another crazy randonneur trying to work out a similar set of problems, or considering your first team randonnée. I guess I'll never get blog entries written if I worry too much about whether anyone could possibly be interested in reading them.

A summer of centuries

I did very little "event" riding in 2009, but had a season of consistent century rides: One 100-mile ride in each weekend* of June, July, and August 2009. Most of these were my Sweet Home loop (which is starting to get a bit old), but there were a few variations, including the Covered Bridges century in Albany (the only "event" ride in those three months), at least one ride to the Roseburg area, leading a Gears ride over Wolf Creek and on to Cottage Grove, and pre-riding the bRamble route with Bob Zumwault. (I couldn't ride the bRamble as an event ride because I was driving sag.)

I capped off the series at the end of August by riding Aufderheide from Blue River to Westfir and back with Ian Fuller (116 miles), then broke the streak the next weekend by riding around Crater Lake (only 47 miles including the Pinnacles spur).

Overall it was a good summer ... but now I feel I've had enough of consistency, and next year I want to push more on the outer limits of my endurance. I want to do a 300k (186 mile) brevet for sure, and might consider 400k depending on conditions and schedule. The Davis Double would be great, but I might have to put it off yet one more year if the data conflicts with ICSE. (So far my only double century has been Seattle to Portland, a few years back.)

---
*Defining "weekend" broadly to include a Friday or Monday of a three-day weekend.

Bicycle maintenance

I don't seem to be disciplined enough to log everything promptly, but from partial records I can see that the chain on my Trek 5200 lasted from April to September, approximately 2400 miles. This seems to be roughly typical for Ultegra chains, although there is wide variation depending on conditions. I ride this bike in good weather, but I like to climb (and do a lot of grindy climbs on training rides), so I shouldn't be disappointed. Chain before that one was late July of the year before, so I guess I'm looking at a bit less than two chains per year on this bike.

The chain on my Salsa was replaced in March, and seems to have lasted about half a year (based on the bike being built in October 2008). That's a rain and winter bike, so it won't be surprising if I go through chains a little faster, even though I put less total miles on the bike. In March I also got a new cassette on the Salsa, but that was replacing a cassette that came from my earlier Trek 5200 destroyed by a car in 2006.

When bike maintenance starts seeming expensive, I remind myself how much more expensive it would be to maintain a car (we get by on one car for the family).

Ride: Greenhill loop

Rode parts with Cyndi, but forked off to climb Willow Creek by myself, as well as the last leg home.

Willow Creek in 10:00 (very good if not my best time)
McLean in 3:41 (PR?)

The namespace problem

After extended, silly perseveration (look it up) over a blog name, I finally chose "melange" to indicate that this one is a miscellany with no single topic or theme. Setting the title is no problem, but then one needs a URL ... and as one would expect, the namespace of *.blogspot.com is cluttered with abandoned blogs, among them melange.blogspot.com and mymelange.blogspot.com. insalata-mista and insalatamista (mixed salad) are taken also, but at least one of them seems to be an actual living blog (with recipes, in Italian).

Clutter is an inherent problem in popular namespaces. Any popular email service soon forces users to choose handles like JaneDoe232. Since Facebook recently started allocating non-arbitrary names, it will soon face the same problem. Hierarchy helps some, but only some ... the internet domain name system didn't avoid huge conflicts in the .com and .org portions of the space. Likewise, making the namespace large (by making names potentially long) helps only a little, because the set of names people find mnemonic and meaningful is a tiny portion of the syntactic namespace.

Is there any fundamental solution to namespace clutter? As far as I can tell, one can have a system of meaningful names, or a system of unique names, but never both. The inevitable compromise is to pair meaningful names with arbitrary (and inherently non-mnemonic) names.