Today we decided to ride the tandem on the weekly club ride “Metcalf Mauler”.  We started in Morgan Hill and rode up the bike trail to San Jose.  Metcalf is a hill that we often time ourselves on and today we set a new record for how fast we could climb the hill on a tandem.  We took 11 seconds off our previous best time.  That might not sound like a lot but when you are pushing up against your limits, seconds mean all the difference.  The data for weight and heart rate are for Franz only.  Ann was really pushing hard, otherwise we could not have climbed so fast.  We beat lot of guys on single bikes up the hill.

This graph shows we climbed at a constant rate. Franz took his heart rate into the “red zone” very early and kept it there for the entire climb (click graph to enlarge).  Ann’s heart rate was also in her “red zone”.

We took a little easy on the backside, to the second regroup at the top of San Felipe.  From there we lead the large train of riders down, reaching speeds over 40 mph.  After we started to level out we kept the speed up so much than no one came around to take a pull.  Usually there is a sprint finish before the stop to turn on Farnsworth, but we were moving so fast no one tried to sprint around us, so we ended up wining the sprint finish, even after pulling all the way.  This curve shows our speed as we descended.

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This morning we got up to stormy weather. We had heard the rain all night in our Utah home and figured we would not be able to get in any running or cycling. Later in the morning the rain stopped so we decided to go out for a 6 mile run on the Provo canyon trail. It was unseasonally cold since even with jackets on we were feeling a bit cool. Up on the mountains we could see some SNOW from the storm!

Later in the afternoon the sun finally came out so Franz headed out on for a bike ride. He was fooled into riding with only short sleeved jersey and cycling shorts. But it was now 60 degrees so it seemed okay. He had intended to ride up Squaw Peak, but having done that four times in the last two days, he decided to go further and ride up the Alpine Loop. That road goes to over 8,000 feet so he figured he would be riding up by the snow we could see from the valley floor.

As he continued to climb, the temperatures kept dropping. heI finally reached the summit and noticed the temperature was now down to 49 degrees. He had tried to do a good time up the climb and had set a new record.

He still felt warm enough due to the climb but the descent down the Alpine Loop was COLD. HeI should have brought a jacket. He did make one stop to warm up a bit and take this photo with his iPhone to send to Ann. You can see a little snow in the distance on the hill top.

Being Labor Day, there was a lot more traffic than we usually find on this rode. This was especially true from Sundance down where Franz had many cars behind so he descended down quickly to not be in their way. That made me even more cold. In fact he was cold all the way back home. Quite an unusal ride for this time of the year.

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Ann and Franz just completed the Utah Velo Century.  That makes four century rides done together on the tandem this year, and the third in the past four weeks. Ann reached a new milestone with this ride.  She has now biked 5,000 miles so far in 2008.  This is remarkable for her first full year of serious road cycling.

Utah Velo is a bike club in Utah we bike with and they put on an century ride just for their members.  I think about 35 riders showed up.

We stayed with the lead group of about 8 riders through the ride, which proved a challenge at times.  This group was made up of mostly young and fast riders.  We heard one fellow mention to another one he was trying to turn Pro!  At the last water stop we checked and had averaged 21.6 mph over 75 miles.

We were lucky to get our tandem front wheel rebuilt yesterday, in time for today’s ride.  The local bike shop had ordered a new rim and rebuilt it for us in an afternoon.  The wheel had been damaged on last Saturday’s century ride.

We had a great time on the ride.

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Great roads, great weather, and friendly riders sum up our experience with riding the Cache Valley Century. On Friday we drove up to Logan Utah to stay the night. After a lousy experience at an expensive Italian restaurant in the town, we returned to the motel to get an good nights sleep.

Before 6 am, we got up to get ready. The Best Western motel we were staying at had a great breakfast buffet so we fueled up before heading up the 12 miles to Richmond for the start.

We started at 7:30 am, along with two other tandem riders we knew. We rode with them for maybe 15 miles until we had a long gradual climb, where we pulled ahead. Since we had to get back home for a party that day we decided to proceed without them.

We were zooming along and would continue to pickup riders as they would join the long train of riders that were following us. At times we would take a break and move back in the pack. At mile 40 we made a stop at the second rest stop (we skipped the first one). After a short stop we were back on the bike, skipping the 3rd rest stop, and stopped at mile 71 for the lunch stop. They had a great lunch for us.

After lunch we started to form long pace lines again. We were doing much of the pulling, but did move to the back of the pack to get some recovery. About 10 miles from the finish, the rider in front of us did not have time to signal a bad pot hole. Although he was able to miss it himself, without any warning we hit it straight on. It was a real jolt. One of our water bottles flew out. As we came to a stop we saw we had flatted on the front.

After changing the tube we were off again. But when I had to touch the brakes the first time I felt some grabbing, realizing that that pot hole had done some damage to the rim on our front wheel.

We rolled into the finish averaging 20.2 mph, a total of about 5 hours riding time, and about 40 minutes of stopping time. It was a lot of fun. Except for the flat, which could happen on any ride, it was a very enjoyable century and one we would like to do again in the future.

Here are the stats:

When you can compare this with how we did on the recent Ulcer Century, you can see we averaged almost the same overall speed, but my average heart rate was significantly lower.  Must be the clean air up in Cache Valley.

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We got up early to make a climb up Squaw Peak before the warm temperatures arrived. It was rather cool with a head wind as we made our way up Provo Canyon. We exited from the bike trail over to the busy highway about a half of a mile before the entrance to the Squaw Peak road. Franz had made the climb earlier in the week with a time of 31:51 so we wanted to see how long it would take on the tandem. Our tandem time last year, when we first made the climb, was 47:03. We were sure we could beat that.

We pushed hard all the way up but did hold back some since we have a fast paced ride with the Utah Velo club this evening. We finished in under 40 minutes, for a new best time for us. The climb up Squaw Peak is 4.3 miles with a 7.4% grade. It is similar to the backside of Mt. Hamilton where the grade is close to 7.9% and the miles of the climb are a bit further.

We felt so good about our climb that when we got home we signed up for another century ride in a couple of weeks.

The weight and heart rate numbers in the table below are for Franz only.

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We finished the 111 mile Ulcer Century today.  The teams that were doing the team time trial went off at 7:20 AM and we left soon after that.  Unlike last year, this year we saw a lot of riders go down.  One rider was down at mile 5 as we passed by.  He had a very bloody face standing on the side of the road surrounded by his teammates.

We initially stayed in a big pack and found it took a lot of concentration because some of the riders were less than experienced riding in a pace line than they should be for those 24 mph speeds we were going.  One of the riders to the right of us hit a cone in the road when going through a round about and swerved to the right nearly going down and taking the rider to his right down too.   It is a good thing that we left some extra distance and stayed on the side of the pack because at about mile 20, several riders went down at the front of the peleton we were in.  We heard later that the front rider thought there was a right turn but then then suddenly corrected himself to go straight and someone touched a wheel.

We had enough of that so we decided to only pull, ride by ourselves or draft with a small group.  We started to pass a lot of riders, including the teams and a large peloton formed behind us.  We kept pulling for many miles until the rollers convinced us to slow the pace down and the riders went ahead.  We saw a couple more riders who had gone down as we passed by.  A bit scary.

Our first 62 miles was faster than last year, averaging 22 mph hour up to the lunch stop.  I think we went out too fast because we had to slow the pace after lunch, but still finished with a total time of 5:52, so we met our goal of doing it under 6 hours.  We arrived at the finish line at 1:14 pm, compared with 1:37 pm last year.  Ann had some cramping starting at around mile 70, but she kept working through it.  But you can see Ann looked great at the finish!

Franz’s average heart rate of 148 was significantly lower than last year;s 155, showing that Ann had really improved.

This table shows a comparision with last year.

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We took the tandem out today for a ride from our Utah condo.  We decided to use the Utah Velo Saturday ride route and head through Provo on University the over to Sprinville for a climb up Hobble Creek.  Hobble Creek is not much of a climb and in the entire 60 mile ride we didn’t even reach 2,000 feet of total climbing.  We did check out time on the time trial course and came with a 44 minute climb, not bad on a tandem when we were not really racing.  At the top we stopped to take some pictures.

There are some beautiful homes long Hobble Creek so we stopped on the way back to take a picture of a few of them.

Later in the day I went out on my single bike to climb Squaw Peak.  After making the climb I continued up the Provo Canyon highway to Nunn’s park and then went back down on the bike trail. About half way down I had to stop because there was a moose right in the middle of the bike trail.  I wish I had my camera with me but it was back on the tandem.  I have seen many deer before while on a road bike but never a moose.

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Franz has been accused many times of never stopping to smell the roses.  We were out on a tandem ride today around the resivour and decided to go up Hecker Pass road on the way out.  Ann mentioned the flowers were out at the flower garden so Franz pulled over to demonstrate he does stop to smell the roses, or at least these flowers.

Since we took the time to stop our tandem, we took a few pictures.

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We decided to do the Metcalf Mauler today from the trail head in Morgan Hill.  That gives us about 10 miles of riding to the offical start of the ride in San Jose, and total ride of 46 miles.  All the way up we had a stiff head wind but the temperature was pleasant.

Once the ride started we were now headed south on Santa Teresa.  With the tail wind, we zipped by all the fast riders, who jumped on our wheel, as we took the speed up to 30 mph for the section to Bailey Ave.  We all took Bailey over to Malech where we once again had the headwind.  At Metcalf we turned right for the 1,000 feet climb.

There are markings at the start of the climb and at the top where we often keep track of our time to see how well we do.  Today we set a new personal tandem record, making the climb in 17 minutes and 30 seconds.  That is faster than many of the riders in today’s group.  I guess we just were inspired by all the watching of the Tour de France and wanted to go out and climb some hills.  Both of us took our heart rate up in the high 160’s for part of the climb.  Ann’s heart rate when into the high 160’s at one point.  Here is the data from Franz’ heart rate monitor.  You can see he averaged 168 bpm with a maximum of 172.  Also note the split time was 17:30.  That measured section has an average grade of 10% so it is rather steep.

Franz was clearing in the “red zone” for most of the climb (the portion between the split No. 1 and No. 2) on this graph.

Here are the same charts from two weeks earlier when Franz did the same climb on his single bike.  Then he did the climb in 14:31 and had a slightly higher average heart rate of 175, maximum of 177.

Using our combined weight, the weight of our tandem, and our time, we can calculate our combined power input:

Power required to overcome gravitational resistance: 390 watts.
Power required to overcome rolling resistance: 18 watts.
Power required to overcome aerodynamic resistance: 4 watts.
Total power required: 412 watts (about 3.5 watts per kg).

From the July 1st cimb on a single bike, we can calculate for Franz that he puts out 266 watts on that climb (4.2 watts per kg).  Accounting for the difference in heart rate between July 1st and July 15th, we can estimate he was putting out 250 watts on July 15th tandem climb.  Therefore Ann was averaging 160 watts (3 watts per kg).  Very impressive!  On her single bike she would be able to do the climb in about 20 minutes with that power input.  Of course we come back to reality when we watch the Tour de France where they have some of the professional cyclists wired and you can see how many watts they are putting out on their climbs. In any case, we claim the age group record for climbing Metcalf on a Tandem.

While descending on the backside our chain came off the crank so we had to stop and get it back on.  We were able to catch some of the riders before the next regroup.  Then it was for a fast descent down San Felipe.

After the ride we had a nice ride back to the car along the bike trail, aided with a nice tailwind.  It was a very fun ride.

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We just finished the 7 day bicycle tour Sierra to the Sea. We got an early start by doing part of a club ride that takes three days up to the start at Bear Valley. Since we needed to handle registration in San Jose on the Friday night and Saturday morning for our guests, we only rode with the group to Patterson, then biked back by ourselves on that Friday.

With one day off on Saturday, we started the 7 day tour on Sunday. Including the trip to Patterson, we ended up with 612 miles and 32,000 feet of climbing in the 9 days of biking with only one day off.

We had a great time and biked with some friends, many who were also on the staff for the tour.

Here are entries for each of the days. Our 3rd day is the first day of Sierra to the Sea.

• Day 1 and 2 - Patterson and Back
• Day 3 - Bear Valley to Jackson (Day 1 of STTS)
• Day 4 - Jackson to Ryde (Day 2 of STTS)
• Still working on the other days !!!

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