Eric’s Code Shack

Sunday, I went on what will likely be my last organized ride for this year (regular readers are rejoicing right now).

Unlike some of the other rides I’ve done, this ride has a theme. As noted on the details page, this ride is based loosely on the salmon spawning cycle. You start next to Puget Sound in Myrtle Edwards Park (also hosting a “miles of fence and lots of big construction equipment” event at the same time), travel upstream to the Locks. That’s the “Chum run”, clocking in at 14 miles. Next up is the “Fit for a King” (as in “King Salmon”) loop at 33 miles, where you ride to Seward parks on Lake Washington, on to the locks, and then out to Puget sound, recreating the trip that a young salmon would take on its first journey to the sea.

New this year is the “Copper River Special” (named after seafood company in Alaska). This loop takes you around to West Seattle to Alki point, which is important to the salmon because it’s 11 miles in length (fun history fact – the Denny party landed at Alki Point in West Seattle in 1851. Arthur Denny, in a move to make his mark on the city, later named one of Seattle’s most prominent hills after himself. Disgruntled townfolk had it removed, and Arthur went on to found a hugely successfully 24-hour dining chain).

The copper river loop started at 44 miles on the website, morphed to 50 miles on the maps, and turned out to be 53 miles covering some of the worst pavement to be found in Seattle.

After winding along the picturesque Seattle waterfront parallel to the picturesque Alaskan Way viaduct (*that’s* why it’s “Copper river”!) (acting as a semi-permanent eyesore along Seattle’s waterfront), we headed across the bridge to West Seattle. I hooked up with a racer and his ex-racer friend (both wearing local team colors) for the trip around Alki, which was fast, bumpy, and a bit wimpy. We then headed back to downtown, up the hill, through the I-90 bike tunnel , and then down to Seward Park, the first food stop.

Following the “spawning cycle” theme, I had worked really hard getting from Puget Sound to Lake Washington, and then died after getting there. Unsure whether salmon get dehydrated, I decided to cover that front “just in case”.

In a rare nod to non-motorized transportation, the city of Seattle closes portions of Lake Washington Blvd for Bicycle Saturday and Sundays. Flat road, great scenery, no cars.

After skirting around Capital Hill (known for… well, you can search yourself if you want to know what it’s known for), the ride joined the Burke-Gilman trail, and led to Gas Works Parks, which has peerless views of downtown Seattle (over Lake Union), and some big ole’ rusty industrial equipment left over from when it’s use as a coal gassification plant.

At this point, things get a little hazy, but I managed to make it to the next food stop at the aforementioned Locks. I had reached the “just get this done” phase, and after a short rest, I headed out and up the steepest hills of the ride into Discovery park. There used to be a Navy base there, and it’s very eerie to ride through overgrown roads and tall fields of grass, with the occaisional perfectly painted and maintained structure in the middle of a field. Weird.

After finding our way out (markings were a bit vague), we headed on Magnolia Blvd, and then back along the trail to the starting point.

And therein lies the rub. To avoid the killer climb, the 14 mile loop goes the other direction on that same route, which means you have a mix of fast and slow riders going one direction and slow to very slow riders going the other direction. At one point there’s a small curved bridge. There were people walking their bikes, so I followed a slow group on the left, which ran into a group of walkers coming the other way and walkers trying to remount at the top. I decided to add to the confusion by getting off balance and falling off my bike, which sort of punctuated the experience. In my mind, it’s unacceptable for Cascade to let that sort of thing happen – if you’re going to use that route, you have to have people on both side make sure everybody dismounts for that bridge.

After my horizontal excursion, I headed back to the park for the end of the ride.

Rant #2 – why is finish line food so bad for you? I mean, I don’t mind a little indulgence, but when the only thing you can get is a burger on a white bread bun or some suspicious salmon (ah, the salmon theme again), it’s not the best of all worlds.

Recommended? Well, I don’t know. It’s bumpy, could be windy, and you have lots of inexperienced cyclists to watch out for (worse than Flying Wheels).

The year was 1979. Or maybe it was 1980. I’d been programming for a couple of years, but didn’t have my own computer. *Nobody* had their own computer. But I did have enough for a magazine subscription.

There were only a few serious choices. BYTE was one choice, but it was – even in those years – not terribly exciting. Another option would have been Dr Dobbs (Full Name – “Dr Dobbs Journal of Computer Calisthenics and Orthodontia“), if I’d know that it existed.

The third option was a publication known as “Creative Computing”. IIRC, I forked out the princely sum of $15.98 for a two year subscription, and never regretted it. Creative had a unique mix of information, entertainment, and irreverence. I kept a few articles over the years, but the majority were tossed out.

Today I came across an archive of computer books of the late 70’s and early 80’s at AtariArchives.org, and among those are 3 “Best of” volumes from Creative Computing.

If you’ve been waiting for a good ASCII art version of Snoopy and Charlie Brown, you can find one. Or, if you need a review of Wumpus 2, you’re in luck.  

Now, help grandad back to his rocking chair, will you?

Author’s Note: I’ve provided some links to help make my case, but I suggest you read through without them first…

It wasn’t at all like Archimedes – it didn’t happen all at once. It started with a gnawing at the back of the skull, an itch that you can’t scratch, and then as the days pass, it worms its way into your conscious mind.

Through a quirk of chance, we’d crossed paths before. That time he was hustling to get a new magazine going, something devoted to “the latest thing“. My contacts told me that he’d made some dough running that scam in the past, but this one didn’t pan out. He melted away, and I forgot about him for a few years.

Then one day, I came across his name again. I had to give him credit this time. Blogs had been hot for years, and with the Texans’s seventh win, cycling was in the news. Put those two together, and you’ve got a hook. Add a bit of human interest, and it’s foolproof, especially when you have a friend who specializes in anatomical prosthetics.

I’ve got to admit that his writing’s good. Great, even. Some might say he has a gift for comedy. He had me fooled, and he could have gotten away with it for a long time, but he’d gotten what he wanted, and made it to the top. And, like some many of his ilk, he got careless.

He even admitted it in his blog, when he wrote, “There is no single entry in this blog that is entirely honest.”

But I don’t think he’s going to come clean, and since I have eyewitness proof, I think I’m going to have to force his hand.

Some are fat. Some are cyclists. But like that story of so many years ago, I’ll have to be the small child here, and be the first to point out the truth.

The Fat Cyclist has insufficient weight. 167.2 pounds does not a compelling story make.

A few weeks ago, Bret, one of my PM friends (well, I call people like Bret friends since they’re people that tolerate my presence), told me he was looking at my bicycle climb site and and saw a climb named “The Zoo”. One day, he said, “I think I’d like to climb the zoo – let’s set up a time and go up it together”.

I should perhaps step back a bit and explain a bit. The Fat Cyclist has written at length (and at more length) about how to size up cycling competition. While such guides are useful if one wants to avoid human interaction, if the rider in question lives on the Eastside of Seattle, you can get all the information you need with a single question:

“Have you ever done the Zoo?”

There are three answers you get:

• What’s the zoo?
  This rider really isn’t worth your time. Even if they can drop you on the flats, they haven’t suffered sufficiently, and therefore any of their achievements can never rise to your level.
• No
  This rider is no competition to you. No matter what happens on the ride, you have tried and triumphed, and therefore possess an inner strength that they are lacking. This is great consolation when they ride away from you on their big chainring.
• Yes. It’s pretty steep.
  Beware this rider. Not only have they tried and triumphed, they are playing mind games with you. The zoo is “pretty steep” in the same sense that on Oxy-Acetylene torch is “pretty hot”, or Everest is “pretty tall”.

Cyclists have this weird thing about shared suffering. Hard climbs are always better when somebody else is suffering along with you, and if you can sucker in an unsuspecting rider who doesn’t really know what they’re in for, all the better.

So I was happy to set up a time to ride the Zoo with Bret. Happy… No, that’s not it, what’s that word again? Ah, that’s it. Disturbed. I was disturbed about it. But there’s nothing to be done about it – if you’ve ridden the zoo, you can’t wimp out when somebody else wants to try it.

The weather this morning was perfect. About 60 degrees, and sunny. On the ride there, I toyed briefly with saying that it had been a little cold when I rode up it early this morning, but I decided that that would be too cruel. Okay, that’s not really truthful. I just didn’t think I could pull it off.

The ride was about as good my first trip up it last year. In other words, 25 minutes of suffering, but not as bad as before. Bret suffered well and made it to the top, all 1200 feet of it.

Oh, and we had a surprise companion with us. More on that later…

A post over at the Fat Cyclist (entitled “I Fear My Bathroom Scale“) got me thinking.

I first started cycling seriously a few years ago, when 9 months of being a PM and not working out had added about 20 pounds on my frame. The weight came off fairly easily, but I was hungry a fair bit, and it took me quite a while to come up with a nutrition plan that worked, both when I’m training hard and when I’m not.

The basic problem is that if you are a recreational athlete, you need two different diet approaches. Both have the aim of keeping your blood sugar at a consistent level, but the way that you do that during (and after) exercise is very different from how you do it the rest of the time. You also need to realize that an approach that works for mostly sedentary people may be the wrong thing for you as an athlete, with Atkins being the prototypical example of this.

There are two good books that I know that can help a lot. The first is Chris Carmichael’s “Food for Fitness“. Chris’ hypothesis is that you should match what you eat to the period of training that you’re in. That conceptually makes a lot of sense if you’re on a fairly serious training regimen, but it probably over the top for many recreational athletes. That doesn’t mean that this book isn’t valuable, however – it has a lot of great basic nutritional information and covers fairly well how your diet needs are different than those of the sedentary part of the population.

The second book is “The South Beach Diet”. In general, most diet books aren’t very useful, but there’s a lot of good science – and clinical research – behind the South Beach approach. To sum up, each fewer processed foods, more natural foods, and you’ll keep your blood sugar more constant, and therefore not be hungry all the time. I know several people who have lost good amounts of weight while not spending a lot of time hungry. There are some sacrifices here – I don’t eat as much pasta as I used to, nor rice, and when I do, they’re the whole-wheat varieties. Same with bread. But it’s something that’s sustainable.

So, for me, I’m “South Beach” on most days, trying to eat things that will give me sustained energy. That often means eating a little more fat that you would on low-fat diets, which is a good thing in my book. There are a bunch of “south beach” brand foods in the supermarket, but the ones I’ve tried have been pretty poor, so I’d suggest staying with the natural food.

I then modify on days when I work out. During workouts, my goal is to get enough glucose into my system on a consistent basis so I can burn fat efficiently. For me, this means a snack about an hour before (banana or clif bar, something like that), then Accelerade to drink now and then plus something else to munch on during stops (sometimes Clif bars, sometimes newtons). If I get it right, I’ll have a nice constant stream of glucose so that I can get most of my energy from my fat stores. If I do this right, I don’t get that “I’ve got to eat and eat and eat” feeling that Mr. Fat Cyclist (can I can you “Fat”?) speaks about in his post.

On the first day of RSVP, I rode about 6 hours on Accelerade, a couple of clif bars, some beef jerky (sodium), and a few other assorted nibbles. That’s not a lot of food, which means the bulk of my energy came from my fat stores. That’s good – not only does it help with weight loss, it means that I can have plenty of energy without trying to each a lot, which is bad – you can only expect to get a limited number of calories from eating without getting too much food in your stomach.

I should also probably note that you may need to back off a bit if you’re in a sport for weight loss. The goal is to get your fat-burning metabolism working well and to use that for the bulk of your ride – that means you need to spend most of your time in a comfortable aerobic range. If you can find a good group ride that isn’t too gonzo for your fitness level, you can stay comfortably aerobic on the flats and then push yourself (if you want) on the hills. If you push too hard, you won’t establish the aerobic engine that you need. Carmichael talks about this in “The ultimate ride“, also a good book.

Oh, and I use my scale, but mostly to weight myself before and after workouts to see how I’m doing on hydration.

I joined somewhere around 900 other riders on RSVP this past weekend, for my second time in as many years, and I’m now recuperating in sunny Walnut Creek, CA.

I had intended to write a general ride report, something like, I did last year. Though restricting myself to topics that people find interesting has never been one of my guidelines in writing blog entries – a fact that should be painfully obvious thus far – I’ve decided not to tell you that I had one flat, and consumed 132 oz of Blueberry Accelerade. Nor will I tell you my maximum heart rate (163), the total number of miles (around 195), or other minutiae.

Instead, I’m not going to write that at all. In fact, I started doing a “trip report lite” (30% less boring), but just deleted 250 words of it.

Instead, I’d like to talk about nicknames.

The first – and arguably lamest  – example really wasn’t a nickname, but a description. “Yellow Jersey Women” describes a women who I pulled through one unexpectedly windy section of the first day, but who disappeared before we could learn her way. Yellow Jersey (not her real name) also rode with us the second day and was a nice addition to the group on the second day, when she held up her end by riding in another yellow jersey, though there was an unconfirmed report of an early morning sighting of a white jersey. Tamara was a good addition to the group.

The second was coming up with a nickname for Jeff, which was an undertaking of the utmost importance. I tried out “Georgie” a few times on Saturday morning. Jeff was at the front, doing his best imitation of George Hincapie, spending extended time at the front of the group, while I did my best imitation of a tour team leader – hanging back and not doing any work. “Georgie” stuck okay until we made a stop at a store near Lynden to get some hot food. Jeff stopped for some mac & cheese, decided to add a piece of chicken, and then walked out of the store with an entire roast chicken. So, “Chicken boy” was awarded, though I’m unsure if it will remain sticky over time. Jeff confounded the whole thing by wearing his “Sponge Bob” jersey the second day, which provided some unfortunate competition with “chicken boy” (hmm. Perhaps “Mr. Chicken” or even “Señor Pollo” would be better…), and was certainly a crowd favorite.

There was no obvious choice for Gustavo on the first day. “Guy who can outride me pretty much anywhere” was a bit ungainly, and “somewhat unattentive son-in-law”, while a fair description, lacked the necessary panache. Gustavo solved things the second day by showing up in white calf-height socks, and “sock boy” was awarded at the appropriate time. Through a rather bizarre juxtaposition of the addition of another Microsoft rider, a discussion of the difficiencies of nutrition bars, a 15-minute ferry wait, a felicitously positioned pickup-load of potatoes, and a lack of free time on Jeff and my part to form a band using a specific name, he was temporarily awarded the appelation “groin potatoes”, which is one of the least sticky nicknames I’ve heard of.

Last week I bought and set up hosting for BicycleClimbs.com. Thanks to all that recommended hosting services – I ended up at webhost4life, and it’s been pretty painless so fair, with good tech support when I’ve needed it.

The site is a slightly-improved version of my original site – the display now includes a list of climbs (expanded), and I’ve added an RSS feed that lists the climbs, so you can find out when new ones are added.

I plan on doing dynamic generation of the pages in the future, when I get some free time to figure things out. How do you generate an XML file from within ASP.NET, anyway?

I’ve also looked at Virtual Earth, but haven’t seen an API show up yet.

Our vacation was, to put it succinctly, fabulous. Bicycle Adventures did a great job, our guides were great, and we had lots of fun. While some of their other tours require more bicycling ability, you could do the Columbia Gorge Family Tour even if you aren’t in great bike shape, as the low end is around 80 miles for the week (actually, the low end is zero miles – you can ride in the van the whole time if you’d like, but that kindof defeats the purpose of the vacation).

This is a multi-sport vacation – while you do ride 4 out of 5 days, we also got in a morning of white-water rafting, an afternoon of windsurfing, and a night of stargazing. In this tour, you stay in real accomodations (ie no camping), and eat well. This was the inaugural edition of this tour as a family tour (there’s an “adult” version with more mileage), and we were about split between adults and children, with the youngest kid being 5, and the oldest being 17. One family is from Seattle, one from Southern California, one from Houston, and another from back east.

I took my Trek, and my wife and daughter took their Burley Duet tandem. Though they took really good care of my bike, I’d consider my rain bike if I did it again, as having your pretty new bike go up and down on top of the van multiple times tends to increase your anxiety level a bit.

We drove down to Portland on Sunday and stayed at McMenamins Edgefield in Troutdale, east of Portland. This hotel was originally a poor farm, and now features European-style rooms (ie there’s no bathrooom “en suite”, as they say on the continent (well, technically, I’ve never heard them say that)), and a 8 pounds of funkiness stuffed into a 5 pound bag, in the form of pubs, wine tasting, and lots of artwork.

Monday, we got picked up by the BA van, loaded some other passengers, and headed over to Washington to climb Beacon Rock. Well, to be fair, “walk up” is a better term for how we assaulted this 600 foot monster – “climb” should be reserved for those who climb the rock. Great views. We ate lunch at a nearby campground (sandwiches), and then vanned over to our first drop-off point for our ride for the day. This set up a typical pattern – ride in the van someplace, get out the bikes, ride to somewhere else, often for lunch, but not always. The ride was mostly downhill (as most of the rides were), and about 14 miles in length.  Our destination was the Flying L Ranch, our home for the next few days. After securing spousal approval, I rabbited off the front and rode most of the way to the ranch, realized that Kim and Sam would not be happy with the headwind, turned around, and went back and pulled them into town. Here’s a typical example of the views that you are subjected to on this ride:

That’s Mount Adams, one of the nicer Cascade volcanos. It used to be overshadowed by its neighbor to the west because of the startling symmetry of the neighbor, now it is still overshadowed because of the neighbor’s fiery reputation.

Adams is one of my favorite mountains. Not as big as Rainier, but very nice to look at. If you turned around at this point, you might be able to see the tip of Mount Hood peeking over the hills, if you managed not to be blown off your bicycle at that point.

The Flying L is a great place to stay – except for a couple of other guests, we had the whole ranch to ourselves, and were able to hang out, get to know each other, and relax while looking at the mountain.

That night the local astronomy club brought by two of their nice scopes, and we did some stargazing. The conditions unfortunately weren’t great – we could see Jupiter and the Galilean moons, but they were a bit fuzzy. I did see the Ring Nebula for the first time, helped out by the on-board index of deep sky objects built into the scope.

Tuesday morning, we vanned to Zoller’s Outdoor Odysseys for our rafting trip down the White Salmon River (which, due to a dam, is unfortunately devoid of its namesake), a class 3-4 river (a detail which I include to sound impressive). Zoller’s is located on the banks above the gorge, so after getting wet-suited, helmeted, and some brief instructions, we headed down about 100 steep steps to the boat. I’d never been rafting before – I swim very well, but haven’t wanted to risk losing my contacts and/or deal with the hassle of dealing with my very thick glasses – so I was wondering how things would go. After 5 minutes of instruction from our guide, we pushed off, and were in the rapids. While the forward momentum that you provide by paddling is important to the guide, the real reason that you do it is to keep your mind off of what you’re about to do. This trip does not disappoint – lots of rapids, and we lost one child overboard for about 35 seconds. Near the bottom of the run, you have the option of going over a 15′ waterfall if you’re an adult. We shuffled kids to get rafts full of adults, and headed out. You paddle hard for a few seconds, the guide says, “down and hold on”, you sit in the bottom of the raft, go over the waterfall and…

Well, things get a bit hazy at that point, but the result ends up with an enormous amount of water in the still-right-side-up boat. I’m in the middle on the left side in the pictures.

After the waterfall, there were a few more small rapids, where our guide Casey tried to toss the two fathers out of the boat (I teetered on the edge as I heard the other father fall in), and then a boring but tranquil float to the pull-out point. Highly recommended.

This brings us to one of the great features of this tour. When we’ve gone to vacation in Hawaii, after we got there, you have to decide what activities you want to do, and then pay for them individually. On this tour, however, the activities are paid for up front, so the cost doesn’t intrude into the experience. I’ve noticed the same effect with a ski pass – it hurts to pay up front, but when you actually go up, the cost doesn’t detract from the experience.

Wednesday is a transit day – we headed across the Columbia into Oregon, and on a short ride to the east to the Columbia Gorge Discovery Center. The ride is about 15 miles, with a few reasonable climbs, and a tail wind. That’s fine, until you hit it as a 20MPH sidewind. The tandem does fine, but the Trek gets really squirrely, and I need to slow down quite a bit through that section. After lunch, we head back to the hotel – the Hood River Inn – for the optional wind surfing lesson. Kim begs off because her back has been bothering her, but Sam and I go in for the three hour lesson. You start with a simulation session on the land, then you learn to do a 180 turn on the water, then you get your own rig.

At least, that’s the theory. What really happens is you do the simulator part, you do one 180 turn, and then you spend a couple of hours flirting with competence while not actually ever reaching it. This was complicated by the 20 MPH wind with gusts that differed across the course, but it’s mostly due to my lack of skills. I did, however, get really good at pulling up the sail. After a couple of hours, my shins were bruised and I lacked the motor control to go much further, though I was still quite good at the falling off part.

Lots of fun… But… I need another hobby like I need a hole in the head.

Thursday took us up onto the northern flanks of Mount Hood, for about a 20 mile ride down to lunch. After a few climbs – on an optional loop – I started the descent, with about 20 minutes at over 25MPH, and 10 minutes over 30MPH. A nice descent, but the valley we rode into was about 90 degrees, so it was a little tiring to get into lunch. And, due to unforeseen circumstances, the pool at the park was closed, so instead of playing in the pool, the kids got to ride another 20 miles. Fine for me, but everybody else was a bit toasted.

That night, the kids went with two of the guides for pizza and ice cream, and the adults to a nice restaurant in Hood river for adult food.

Friday found us up on Mount Hood for one last ride, this time a bit to the West. Another nice descent, plus an ugly (and optional) loop with about a 12% climb in it, and then lunch in the park. Afterwards, a quick stop at Multnomah falls, and then home.

I’m taking next week off, going on a cycling tour along the Columbia River Gorge in Oregon (well, between Oregon and Washington).

We had considered going back to Maui – which I love – but decided to go for something different this year. This is one of those “ease into it” cycling tours – the riding is really pretty minimal (15 miles/day) and you don’t camp. This does make it quite a bit pricier than versions where you camp, but considering what airfare, lodging and food cost in Hawaii, I’m sure it will be cheaper in the long run.

My wife and daughter will be on their Burley Tandem, for their first big ride of the year (they would have done the 25 mile Flying Wheels route, but softball got in the way).

Jim posted a comment on my century ride, talking about what I ate. He totalled up what I ate during that time period, and remarked on how small it was. I agree, though I get a number that’s even smaller than the one he got:

Input:
330 calories in Clif Bars
520 calories in Accelerade
250 calories bagel
55 calories Newton
250 calories pretzels
____
1400 ingested

That takes us onto the calories that I expended. The only good way to measure this is with something like a PowerTap, which is a wheel hub that measures how much force you’re putting into your back wheel. Integrate that over time, and you get power, and you can make a good estimate of how much energy you expended.

Without that – and I don’t think I’m likely to spend the money for a PowerTap or other power-measuring system, at least in the near future – you’re stuck with estimates, which suck. The number of calories you expend vary depending on the speed you’re riding, whether you’re riding in a group, whether it’s hilly, etc. I’m going to choose 500 cal/hour as a ballpark estimate. That means that for 5.5 hours, I spent:

5.5 * 500 = 2750 expended.

That doesn’t seem so different from what I ingested, though I didn’t eat my regular meals during that time (I ate less for breakfast and didn’t eat lunch), which adds something like 900 calories.

2750 + 900 = 3650 expended.

for a net of:

3650 – 1400 = 2250.

So, where did the extra come from? It came from my fat stores. I’ve been doing some reading on this – Chris Carmichael’s “Food for Fitness” (very good, by the way) and a few research studies – and it turns out that fat transport can supply a lot of calories over a long period, under two conditions.

The first is that the system is trained. The second is that there’s sufficient glucose available to keep things going. To simplify, you need a constant supply of glucose to keep your metabolism going and your brain happy – if you get low on glucose, your brain will hoard it and you performance will tank, with the dreaded “Bonk”.

Making another assumption – that I was getting approximately 80% of my energy from fat and 20% from carbohydrate, you’d expect that of the 3650 calories, 2920 came from fat and 730 from carbohydrates (okay, there’s some in there from protein, but not a large proportion).

With the exception of the Clif bars, most of what I ate is at least 75% carbohydrate, so there’s plenty of carbs to keep me going, assumming that it can get into the bloodstream quickly enough. That’s where the Accelerade helps.

At this point, I should note that I’m not an expert at these things *and* that I’ve made a ton of simplifications along the way. For example, the brain uses a fair amount of carbohydrate, but that use can be supplied by conversion from fat to carbohydrate, so the carbs that I took in didn’t need to support that part of my base metabolism, and were therefore free to be used towards the exercise.