A few years ago they started with the pre-ride announcements about safety and behavior around cars. It helps some with some people, I guess, but there are still those who piss off drivers and even flip them off, etc. Those guys should be asked to stay away.

The other club I ride with sometimes has none of that. They also don't have hammerheads who blow up the rides. I like riding with them but their Saturday rides are short and I really don't know any of them very well. I should just go there more often.

Actually, the ride I did today was just what I was looking for, except for the guy falling. My friends in the A group did a century, so nope.

I am confident I could break 5 hours with a group and a reasonably flat course. Doing so solo would require a tailwind or a fancy TT bike.

Same. On a mythical windless, no-traffic, 70° overcast day with someone handing up bottles and smooth tarmac I could probably do it. With lights, traffic, hills, heat, and chipseal there’s just too much to overcome, especially the times at zero and to go home and grab new bottles. I’ve wished there were a day at COTA we would have time to try, but that hill would probably sap the legs before finishing 29 laps even so. I’ve though about trying it at the Veloway, but that’s twisty enough that again, the accelerations (and one hill) would likely catch up before the end of 34 laps.

I may still try though, driving out with a car full of bottles to not need to spend any time in traffic and much faster refill.

One interesting snafu happened on yesterday’s ride. One of my friends, who is a good triathlete, started to suffer about 3 hours into the ride. He asked to stop to adjust his saddle height.

Long story short, his saddle was way too high and causing all kinds of knee problems. He said his bike had been in the LBS for servicing and he said the guy who works on his bike is taller than him and must have done a test ride and jacked up the seat.

I did not want to badmouth his shop, but if someone ****s with something like that, they should at least have the courtesy to mark the owner’s positions and return it with the owner’s fit.

Agreed, but has happened to me multiple times with different shops and Velofix. Part of the reason I’m trying to learn how to work on them myself.

Yeah, I have never actually taken my bike in for ANY servicing. The only thing I can’t do is wheel truing/broken spoke type repairs, and for those rare situations I only drop off the wheel.

Time to ride. Mrs datlas is baking homemade blueberry muffins with fresh blueberries as a preride snack. :bday:

When I started, we didn't have computers that auto-paused and century times were total time including stops. At that time, my wife and I were racing and 5 hour centuries were semi-common in groups or when we rode a tandem. In not so modern history, 2006, I did a 100 mile TT in a hair over 5 hours (100.4@5h9m) which I was very happy with since I was 55 at the time and 50# overweight. Not in the mood to ever work that hard again.

Auto-pause is a honey-tongued devil whispering sweet lies in your ear. It is immediately disabled on all my devices.

I've got some land that's flat enough and open enough, but the problem is the stops and starts in getting there and back - it becomes a choice of repeated drag race accelerations to maintain the pace, which would certainly catch up with me later, or trying to make up that lost time when I'm finally clear, which is no small task, either.

On a cool day with light wind, though, I think that I could drive out to a suitable start point and only need to stop once to refill bottles. It certainly wouldn't be easy, but I think that it's within the realm of possibility. Maybe I should start with a mixed measures metric first, though - 100km at 20mph :p

Eh, I don't know that I'd go that far - you're paying the price, one way or another. Just slowing down to zero and then getting back up to speed is enough to knock your pace significantly. The flip side is that horsing it back up to speed has a steep physiological cost.

FWIW, the auto pause on my old Wahoo was much more aggressive than on my Garmin, which is so lax that it might as well be off. Regardless, the timer that I keep on screen is elapsed, so that's what I am for (though I will pause for convenience store stops, etc).

I don't usually change saddle height, if I'm test riding a repair bike. We have enough height variation among our staff to cover most possibilities. We do sometimes need to raise the seat to get enough post to clamp in the workstand. I always mark a post, before moving it. Occasionally, a mechanic forgets to reset a post.

What is the Velo way like? Always wondered if it's worth giving a try. Now that my daughter is in Austin again, I expect to be down there more.

If I have to raise a post to give me enough room to clamp I like to turn the post at least 30 degrees so there's a visual reminder that I need to reset it when I'm done.

We did change the saddle height to test ride our customer's new Zinn e-bike. The guy's like seven feet tall.

Here's the shop manager (shortest guy in the shop) quality checking the final assembly.

https://cimg9.ibsrv.net/gimg/bikefor...2c786d10a7.jpg

It’s three miles of pretty twisty road, with one narsty right-hand dog-leg into a short, steep climb. Smooth and relatively fast, but it takes practice (or did for me) to get the corner sequences to where I could hold a good pace for lap after lap.

If you get down here and want to try, drop me a PM and if I’m free I’d be happy to do a few laps with you to show you the lay of the land.

Sure thing. Thanks!

I remember when people started subtracting their breaks from the total ride time. WTF? Someone who I knew was slower would claim a time much faster than I had. It took a minute before I found out what they were doing. I always thought if you started @ 8:00 and finished @ 3:00 the ride took 7 hours. You don't get to say you did the ride in 6 hours just because you took 1 hour in breaks.

A local ride called The Solvang Century was my second century, organized or not. It has between 4 and 5k feet of climbing, depending on route variations. The fastest I ever did it was just over 6 hours, including stopping at all the sag stops. I've never been a fast climber so I was happy with that. I don't think I ever tried for a fast time on a century, usually just try to stay with my friends or struggle to the finish alone.

My friend, pizza guy, who I ride with on Tuesdays, used to do a lot of the local double centuries. There is a small group of guys who "race" the doubles. Friend "won" some of them until they started working against him. They figured out he had the best kick at the end so they would work with him until late then they would try and get rid of him for the finish. One time they took off from the last rest while he was in the restroom. He was able to chase most of them down.

He finished a moderately hilly double in 8 hours 53 minutes!.

Being comfortable with that distance and more, is key. The physical plays into it, but the mental is there too. So many folks say they don't like to ride that far due to boredom, hitting a wall at 70 miles, stuff like that. Heck, I'll look at a ride 30 miles in and realize I have how much more to go?

A legend and a class act. Even though he was late for a meeting and didn't know me from Adam, he took a moment to say hello and pose for a photo.

RIP Coach Bowden.


https://cimg8.ibsrv.net/gimg/bikefor...854d40ff79.jpg

Can’t remember the last time I intentionally rode a century. Had one forced on me in 2009 while touring in MT. It was either do it or not get to ride Going to the Sun Road in Glacier the the next day, which was to be the highlight of the trip. After three climbs, including one of 12 miles, and some rolling terrain I made the mistake of looking at a mile marker and doing quick math. Realized we still had 54 miles to go. After that, I would purposefully look away when I noticed a marker up the road. At the end of the ride the GF couldn’t figure out why there were urinals in the women’s room at our campground until she realized her mistake.

Oh, definitely. I'm comfortable in my own head when riding, though, and I actually *need* that time to myself, at times, so no worries there. At least that's true at the kinds of distances that we're talking about; I think that I've done six centuries so far this year, four of them solo and very necessary.

Oof.

I used to feel the same way but, looking at my own rides, it was pretty plain to see that stopping has never done me any favors, neither in terms of overall time nor in terms of pace; I've never found a stop duration that was recuperative without making my legs feel leaden upon getting back to business. Maybe others are different but, for me, resting in the saddle, at low effort, is way better than a stop. Outside of some well-defined competition or training, moving time makes a lot of sense to me.

That's some pretty diesel work, whether solo or group!