The weather has been a bit cool for this time of the year in California, but we really wanted to do the club ride that starts in Santa Cruz and goes over to Monterey, then return.  We got up early since it would take an hour to drive to the ride start, which was at 8 am.  As we went over Hecker Pass, the temperatures were dropping down to 36, but by the time we reached Santa Cruz it was up to 40 degrees.  Since there was no wind, it didn’t seem too cold to ride, especially since we had brought plenty of warm clothes.

For a total of 108 miles, it would be the longest ride this year for Anne so we decided to take the tandem.  Several others were taking their tandems also and there ended up with 6 tandems on the ride.

The route started on the north end of Santa Cruz and headed south, along the ocean side of the town,  Then through the Elkhorn Slough to Castroville.  From there to Monterey, much of the route was on bike paths.

You would think that it would be all flat, but there was considerable up and down climbing along the route so we ended up with 4800 feet of climbing by the end of the ride.  We were lucky to have sunshine in the morning so the temperatures warmed up rather rapidly. The last part of the ride went around Monterey Bay.

It was pleasant enough by the time we arrive in Monterey for a stop at Fisherman’s Wharf and a bowl of clam chowder in a bread bowl.

Then it was 54 miles back, retracing most of the path we had taken.  As we neared the end, we were biking along Cliff Drive in Santa Cruz, with a spectacular view of the ocean.  The waves were very large so after finishing the ride we drove back to take a few pictures.

It was a fun day but a long ride.  We were so hungry at the finish, that we decided to drive home via San Jose so we could stop and eat dinner at the Olive Garden.

Categories: Cycling
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Normally at this time of the year people would be glad to be biking with temperatures approaching 60 degrees. But after the warm spell, it seems darn right cold.  But then my brother, in Utah, just reported that on a bike ride it started to snow.  We really do have it great here.  A few photos from recent rides.  If you view for awhile, the photos will change.

Categories: Cycling
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It’s my party, and I will cry if I want to. You would cry too, if you were sixty-two!

I suppose for some people turning 62 is enough to make a grown man cry, but for me each year is exciting because I am blessed with good health.  I have a tradition of biking my age in miles.  We decided to do the birthday ride yesterday.  Anne had already let me open my birthday gift, a new Garmin Edge 500 cycling gps/computer.  It not only lets me know our speed, distance, but also you can download the the files after and see where you went.

The hardest aspect is not biking 62 miles, but figuring out what route to take so we end up with exactly 62.0 miles.  The prior week we scoped out a ride and realized we could do a slight modification to get what we wanted.

Three Lakes and a Free Lunch

We came up with a route where we could actually view three different lakes, stop for lunch and end up close to 62 miles.   We started out in the morning and headed to do the Canada/Roop Road Loop.  We took the side road out Coyote Lake, the first lake on our journey.  After descending down back to the valley, it was into a stiff head wind to Morgan Hill for a climb up Thomas Grade, then down far enough to view Anderson Lake.  We were getting hungry by now so we headed back down to the valley and biked over to one of our favorite spots for lunch, Erik’s Deli in Morgan Hill.  I just happen to have filled my card with 10 stamps so we were able to get a free lunch.

After lunch we did a loop around the Reservoir and stopped for a picture along our third lake, Chesbro.  This map shows our route and stops along the way.

After the last picture stop, we headed back up Blue Bell, then down Mantelli and back home.  We pulled into the driveway with exactly 62.0 miles on the odomoter.

Tri-Sport Birthday and Dinner (but not free)

With the 62 mile birthday ride already finished yesterday, what were we to do today, on my birthday?  How about doing 3 sports?

We headed out in the morning for a 6 mile run.  The air was a bit cool but still plenty warm enough to run in shorts.  In the late morning we took our road bikes  out for a nice 25 mile ride.  I really wanted to set some new record today but breaking my PRs is getting tough.  I found a website for using my new Garmin Edge 500. When you upload files there, it sees where you went, and checks your time over certain climbs.  It then ranks you with other riders.  Oh, that would be perfect so I found one climb on the route we were taking.  I checked out the best time so far on that short, but steep climb up Mantelli. It was 4:55.  I thought I could beat that time.  As you can see, I claimed the King of the Mountain spot after uploading my data to the Strava site.

After testing my 62 year old heart on that fast climb, we headed up to Morgan Hill for lunch, again at our favorite spot.  After biking home, that was enough sports for one day for Anne.  But I wanted to do one more sport, so I went mountain biking with a group of about 6 buddies.

Using my new Garmin GPS, I was able to see on a map where we mountain biked.

After doing all those sports, I was starved.  I cut the mountain bike ride a bit short and before 7 pm we were off to have a nice dinner, which capped off a great birthday.

Categories: Birthdays, Cycling, Running
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I have been creating a family calendar for several years now, giving it to each of our kids at Christmas.  Each year I pick some pictures from the past year and include them.  I started out with a do it yourself approach where I would have actually printed the pages on my home printer, then take them down to the office supply store to have their wire bound.

Although I am a big user of Adobe Lightroom, and rarely use the iPhoto program that comes with the Mac, I gave it a shot last year in producing the family calendar.  That turned out to be a great process and much easier than some of the online services I had tried.  Right from within iPhoto, I am not only able to create the calendar but click a button to have it printed and mailed to me.  In past years the calendar was only 8.5 x 11 in sheets, but this new one is much larger format and the quality is very professional.

I didn’t have to give it an second thought to use iPhoto once again to create the calendar but since two of my kids have digital SLR cameras and my daughter takes far more and much better photos of her family than I ever was able to do, I added a new approach.  I created a photo gallery on Mobile Me for staging of all the photos.  I had a title slide for each month, not to be included in the final product, but to help me sort the photos so I would have several candidates for each month.  With our children living all around the country, I needed a method for them to easily give me their photos.

Then any in the family could use this gallery to upload their photos directly.  Then using iPhoto 09, it was easy to drag the photos around inside the web gallery to get them sorted by month.

Between Anne and I, our four kids and our eight grand kids, we have birthdays on most all of the months of the year.  I grouped the images so those who had a birthday in a particular month could see the pictures of themselves on that month.

Next step was to use iPhoto to create the calendar.  I just selected the Mobile Me gallery and clicked the create calendar button.  I did not even have to download the photos to my local hard drive.  I selected the Picture Calendar format to use, which has a photo page on the top sheet and a calendar on the bottom.  ON screen I could work which each month and all the images from the Mobile Me Gallery on the left side.  I started out with the cover page and picked an image to include and changed the title.

Then for each month, I would first enter any birthdays on the calendar portion (I had it insert the US holidays when I first started).  Then for the top picture portion, I would first select a layout, from 1 to 7 images.  Then it was a simple matter of dragging the photo from the left bar into one of the image placeholders.  If I wanted to try some other photo, I just dragged it over and it replaced my first attempt.  Once inside the placeholder you can zoom and pan the image if you wish.

When Anne and I were happy with the final results, I clicked the Buy Calendar button at the bottom.  The cost was about $20 per calendar, plus shipping.  I will get them in time to hand out to the kids at Christmas time.

Categories: Photography
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Anne reminded me that it was my turn to write the annual Christmas Card letter.  I replied that I wrote it last year.  No, no, Anne insisted she did.  How can you argue with someone who has such a good memory.

It is hard to be original in writing these each year and it is not like we have a lot of things changing in our life like as when we were younger.  This afternoon we received the Christmas card from our son, John.  He had used Shutterfly to make the cards, that included some photos.  Great I thought, and in less than 20 minutes I had ordered our Christmas cards.  Hope they come before Christmas so we can mail them out.  For the truly lazy people they will even do the mailing for you if yo upload a contact list.  But I am not yet that lazy.

The front of the card looks like this.

Want to see the inside?  Well, you will just have to wait until you get the card.

Categories: Holidays
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Cycling

This past week Anne reached a new milestone, having bike over 7,000 miles so far this year, quite a few more than the total for 2008.

Franz has reached 10,000 miles so far this year, but that is more than 1,000 miles less than last year at this time.

Running

This has not been much of a year for running, although Anne is much closer to her 2008 level of total running miles than Franz is.  We decided to run the Salt Lake City Half Marathon in April, so we have been taking our miles up.  You can see from this chart that  that Anne continues to out-run Franz.

Categories: Cycling, Running
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Early in the day I change the gearing on Ann’s bike so she would some lower gears.  That evening we did a test ride up South Fork.

At the end of the ride we stopped for a sandwich. It was getting late in the day as we were biking back home.

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Great roads, great weather, and friendly riders again 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 last year, we decided to eat at the Olive Garden, which was much better.  We returned to the motel to get an good nights sleep, although Franz didn’t think he slept that well.

Right at 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 7:40 am, along with two Utah Velo riders we knew.  Last year we had damaged the rim on the front wheel of our tandem while we were in a pace line because the rider in front of us didn’t signal, but did manage to escape it himself.  Riding a tandem is more difficult than a single bike because you can not try to bunny hop over such a hole.  So this year we decided to not do much drafting.  It would be fine if other riders wanted to ride behind us, but we didn’t want to get into a large pace line nearly as much.

We rode mostly solo, or with one or two other riders behind us for the first 35 miles where 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 with a plan to stop at mile 69 for lunch.  About five miles before the lunch stop, a very long train passed us and we decided to get into the line, being a bit weary of taking the headwinds all alone. That group was going very fast, 23-25 mph.  We had to join near the rear and some of those riders were erratic, so we made our way up to the front and ended up taking a 1 mile pull.  So the four miles of drafting was about it for the ride and after lunch we went back to solo riding.

We rolled into the finish averaging 19.2 mph, a total of about 5.25 hours riding time, and about 35 minutes of stopping time. It was a lot of fun. When comparing it with last year, the solo riding did end up taking another 13 minutes to finish and reduced our overall speed by about 1 mph.  But it was much easier than being on constant guard trying to ride a tandem in a pace line.

Here are the stats for the past two years.  It is interesting that Franz’s average heart rate was exactly the same.

Categories: Cycling
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We are headed out to do the Cache Valley Century tomorrow so Anne is taking a day off from exercise.  Franz decided to get in a 5 mile run.  He felt like a slug and the pace over the 5 miles was only 9:35.  Even though both Franz and Anne are biking at a great level, Franz has not been doing much running this year.  With the summer coming to an end it is time to get back into running form because it is easier to run on cold rainy days than to bike.

This chart clearly shows that this year Franz has been out run by Anne.

Categories: Running
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For the third year in a row, we completed the Ulcer Century, around Utah Lake.  Once again we rode our tandem.  We were joined this year by my brother, Mike and his friend, Steve.  The four of us stayed together for the entire event.  One of their friends also started with and another friend was on a tandem, with his 14 year old son and rode much of the ride with us.

My Brother Mike

Whereas the weather was hot the last two years, this year was cool.  There was even a forecast of rain so we carried rain jackets along, but fortunately we never needed them.  The cool weather really helped because we were not overheating. We started out with arm warmers and a vest but for most of the ride we were in short sleeves.   We made our first stop at 26 miles because some of the other riders in our group were off the back.  Our average speed to that point was 21.2 mph.   After waiting for them to arrive at the rest stop, one decided to switch to the 60 mile route, so we headed back.

This year they changed the lunch stop to mile 47, right off the shore of Utah Lake.  But we did not expect a lunch stop so early in the ride and flew right by it.  Consulting the route sheet indicated there was no food until mile 68, so we plugged on.  Before we reached that rest stop the winds started to pick up and it looked like we might have a headwind.  Our speed started to slow slightly but we continued to make good time.  When we finally reached mile 68, our overall average speed had dropped to 20.3 mph.

It was not like the lunch stop last year where they had sandwiches we could enjoy sitting on the lawn of a park.  It was more the typical rest stop stuck on some corner in the gravel.  But we were running low on fuel and needed to eat what they had on hand.  The other tandem arrived before we departed and joined again with us.  We didn’t want to stick around too long so after about 14 minutes we headed out at 11:18 am.

It was now only about 40 miles to the finish, not bad I thought.  We should be able to finish that in 2 hours and certainly come in before 1:30 pm.  But as we started to bike we realized the turn we had made now had us heading into a headwind.   The last two years that 40 mile stretch was a tailwind and we were thinking something was not right because we had not enjoyed any tailwind on the way there.  We started to realize that it was one of the rides where it feels like a headwind the entire loop.

Driving into a headwind was made worse by a long series of rollers that went on the far side of Utah Lake.  The combination made it seem to go on forever.  After about 20 miles we made another quick stop, mainly just to get some relief from driving into the wind.  Our average speed for that 20 mile segment was 18 mph, still not too bad.

Even though our stop was only 7 minutes, it seemed like someone had turned the wind fan up another notch.  I wish we had some way to measure the wind speed.   The last 20 miles were our slowest, averaging only 16 mph.  So that last 40 miles took us quite a bit longer than the past two years when we had a tail wind on that section.

We don’t have a picture of us, so here is the one from last year.  Notice how it was sunny in 2008!  Also this year we wore our Keen cycling sandals for the whole ride instead of cycling shoes.

Franz’s average heart rate of 150 was slightly higher than last year.  Looking at the segments is more revealing.  For the first 68 miles to our first stop for food, the average heart rate was 152, and we averaged 20.3 mph.  The next 20 miles into the wind the average heart rate had increased to 155 and our speed dropped to 18.3 mph.  For the last twenty miles fatigue was setting in and Franz’s average heart rate was now down to 144 and the speed showed a corresponding drop to 16 mph.

This table shows a comparison with the last two years.  Overall we were very happy with how we did, especially considering the headwinds at the end.

Categories: Cycling
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