#883 - the Mount Diablo Challenge

This weekend marks the first time I've ever participated in any kind of organized cycling event - the 2007 Mount Diablo Challenge, a fundraiser for Save Mount Diablo.  The Mount Diablo Challenge is a bicycle race up 10.8 miles of paved road, climbing 3249 feet (so they say) with an average grade of 5.7% or so; here's a good graph of the elevation profile.  I parked at Monte Vista High School and rode the 3 miles or so over to The Athenian School early Sunday morning; the overnight low had been chilly, but the skies were very clear and the morning was sunny - it was perfect.  Sunny, with an air temperature in the mid-50s, warm in the sun.  Perfect.

My old friends Bob and Joe and I started in wave 4, about 200 riders at the tail-end of a total of 1000.  As an aside, Bob, Joe and I first met while working at Locus Computing Corporation 20 years ago; are we really that old now?  Our heart-rate monitors were giving pretty similar numbers, so it was easy to maintain a fairly matched pace, and we rolled-up on the South Gate ranger station almost before I knew it, followed by the Rollers in Rock City.  We rolled past the Junction ranger station about 36 minutes after the start, a very decent time for me (in training rides, I've been happy to reach the Junction in 38 minutes).  Normally, I'd stop at the Junction and eat a gel, refill my water bottle, but this time I'd loaded the water bottle with Gatorade instead of water, thus obviating the need for a gel - or a stop at all.  That was the big thing for me on this ride - I was pacing myself to avoid stopping at all, since my training rides always had 10 minutes or so of stops on the way up.

After the Junction, the ride remained moderate for about a mile and a half, but notched up into a steeper climb as we passed picnic spots named Blue Oak, Oak Knoll and Grapevine - it eased off temporarily passing Juniper and the large Diablo Valley Overlook.  Bob had broken away from us by now, and poor Joe was asking me if I would still give him a ride afterwards if he wet his spandex shorts - the toilet at Juniper was a welcome sight, and we burned about a minute there.  From previous rides, I knew my hardest section was next, riding from Juniper up to Devil's Elbow, a sharp hairpin turn about 1 mile from the summit, and it was really important to keep a good pace and not burn out and stop before passing the Elbow - because the climb flattens out (by now, Joe had realized "flat" on the hill means "less than 3% grade") and there's plenty of rolling recovery there before The Wall.  All I had to do was roll past the Elbow and I'd be set to finish the ride.

We passed a remarkable pair of riders on the way to the elbow, Jens and Peter Hillen.  Peter is 6 years old and was pedalling very seriously on a tag-along attached to Jens' bicycle.  I tried to make a joke with young Peter, asking "is your dad carrying his weight?" and Peter answered with something like "he's doing the best he can" with a very serious expression.  The sincerity was almost tear-jerking.

Shortly afterwards, I passed another rider, and he called out "Hey! Myers!".  It was Ed; we'd met on the hill one morning in September and realized that our bib numbers for the Challenge were sequential (me #883, Ed #884).  Fun stuff.

After passing the Elbow (and being snapped for posterity sake), I soon shifted-up a couple of gears and enjoyed the "level" ride, and started to get psychologically ready for The Wall - a 16+ percent grade leading to the finish line. Summit Road splits into an "up" lane and a "down" lane at the base of The Wall; only for the Challenge, the "down" lane becomes the up lane - and I'd never done it that way before.  It turns out that the grade is slightly easier at first and peaks right before the finish line.  So I paced Joe until a few meters before the finish line, then sprinted. My effort was good enough to secure a 400mS lead!  1:17:08.3 represents my best time ever up the hill, and it rewarded me for nailing a pace that let me avoid stopping.  Also, narrating the ride for Joe helped me remember where the hard work and the recovery was, so I planned better and rode better.

Bob had beat us to the top about 2 minutes earlier, and we did a little sight-seeing from the summit before heading down to the "lower summit" parking lot where a big party was already in progress.  We spent about an hour there, meeting up with yet another old Locus friend, Marty Heyman of the Mount Diablo Amateur Radio Club, a volunteer for the event, enjoying a handful of Mother's frosted animal cookies and a Jamba Juice smoothie.

The Contra Costa County Sheriff's Office was running an escort for cyclists down the hill; we had to wait in waves again, but our escort was running a very pleasant clip, basically as fast as I would normally ride down the hill.  It was icing on the cake, really - riding down the hill, working the turns in a pack of cyclists.  It took me straight back 20 years to my motorcycle road-racing days on the tracks and in the canyons of Southern California.  Once we were nearly at the bottom, in the Tire Poppers, I managed to trail-brake into a soft patch and break loose into a good rear-end slide.  My only real worry was that I'd tag a cyclist next to me, which didn't happen (it would have been Bob!).  I did manage to remember to shout out "I meant to do that! I do that every time I ride here" as if it were true after recovering a little less gracefully than I'd prefer.

We rode back to the Monte Vista High School parking lot, even though Bob and Joe started griping about something, loaded the bikes onto the Thule rack, and headed out for lunch with family at Primo's Pizza in Danville.  This was one of the most enjoyable weekends I've had in a long time - old friends, a great day and a great ride really clicked together.

How I got ready for the Mount Diablo Challenge 2007

Way back in 1979, when Jimmy Carter was U.S. President, I used to bicycle a lot, on a sturdy Grand Auto 10-speed.  One summer day,with a handful of friends, we started up Mount Diablo. I ended up making it to the base of "The Wall", about 600 feet from the summit proper, up a very steep 18% incline.  It would be another 28 years before I returned for a second shot at the summit.

In the last few days of 2006, my doctor explained that my cholesterol levels were borderline and that I really needed to do something about it.  He suggested diet changes, exercise, weight loss and prescribed a mild dose of cholesterol medication.  I must have been ready, because I implemented those changes starting that day.  At the time, I was around 245 pounds and basically sedentary, other than 3-4 mile hikes a couple of times a month to go geocaching.  I started walking daily, hiking more on the weekends, and bought a mountain bike.  In late May, I was down to 185 pounds and didn't need the cholesterol meds any longer (frankly, I think my doctor figured that I would be like every other patient and perhaps lose 5 pounds; he was pretty surprised when I came back 6 weeks later, 26  pounds lighter).

Still, I didn't do a lot of cycling, until my old friend Bob said "Hey, I'll be in town next week, let's go for a nice, easy ride up Mount Diablo".  The morning of June 3, 2007, Bob very patiently led me up to the summit that I'd failed to reach 28 years earlier.  It took me something like 2 hours and 45 minutes on that tank-like mountain bike, but the hook was in my cheek.  On the way up, Bob mentioned the annual Mount Diablo Challenge race to the summit, and how much he enjoyed it, enough to drive up from Los Angeles to do it.  He suggested I should enter this year, but the idea was pure fancy as far as I could tell.  Surely, no one took nearly three hours to make the climb from The Athenian School like I did.

A few weeks later, I had to ride back up that mountain, I just knew I could do better; I'd started riding 8 miles most every day around my house.  This time, I had a very pleasant 2 hour, 25 minute ride to the summit.  A couple of weeks later, I made the same ride in 1h 59 minutes.  I'd upgraded the mountain bike to street tires and SPD pedals, but it was clearly time to start shopping for a road bike (and, since I weighed 175 pounds now, I wasn't worried about breaking spokes any longer).

Ultimately, I selected a 2007 Cannondale Synapse 1 Triple, at a very reasonable clearance-sale price at REI (I know, I know, it's a triple, I'm such a recreational cyclist...).  I rode the new bike up Mount Diablo for the first time on September 1 - measuring 1 hour, 42 minutes, but I sure had to work harder this time - I'd become reliant on those really low granny gears on the mountain bike.  At this point, the Mount Diablo Challenge didn't sound like such a flight of fancy, so I signed-up.

I spent the next week doing daily sessions of repeated runs up a local hill, shifting up gears until I had to stand in the saddle, and I returned to Mount Diablo at the end of the week - and did the climb in 1 hour, 32 minutes. On September 30th, feeling a little tired, I made it up Mount Diablo in 1 hour, 26 minutes.  The next ride up would be with 1000 other cyclists on October 7.

American River Parkway, 23 Sep 2007

I've been craving a longer ride for a couple of weeks; every weekend I've been riding up Mount Diablo, in preparation for the Mount Diablo Challenge, and that usually uses up my budget of riding time for the weekend. So I planned ahead for this weekend that I'd do Diablo on Saturday (as usual) and then ride the American River Parkway on Sunday.

Essentially, the American River Parkway has a paved bike path that runs 32 miles from downtown Sacramento to Folsom Lake. The path crosses maybe 3 actual roads; the rest of the crossings are basically driveways.

At the beginning of August, before I'd bought the road bike, I rode my MTB (with slicks) up the Parkway. It took about 6h 45m total to ride up and down the path, and that includes the 5-mile detour I took off the path into downtown Sacramento (I had no idea there were two identical-looking bike paths starting in Discovery Park...) and the long amount of time I lazed around at Folsom Lake. Total ride was about 69 miles, and I was definitely dragging on the way back.

Now that I'd been riding the road bike for a while, I kept thinking I wanted to go ride the Parkway again. As luck would have it, the weather was a bit gloomy Saturday morning and I ended-up not riding on Saturday, doing family-stuff instead. On Sunday, I sucked-down a gel
and hit the American River Parkway path at Discovery Park around 1130 under partly-overcast skies, temperatures on the low-side of seasonal around 73F. I stopped once for a few minutes to suck down another gel and refill my water bottle at one of the many parks along the way, but was surprised to arrive at the end of the path after 1h 45m - averaging 18.3MPH for 32 miles and about 850 feet of total climb.

One interesting moment came when I passed a large mass of bicyclists at one park; they were about to launch the Third-Annual Mustard Seed Spin and there were 400+ young cyclists ready to go; I admit I was happy to be ahead of the massive bunch, but it was great to see so many enthusiastic youngsters on bikes.

The end of the path at Folsom Lake is at a normally popular beach called Beals Point; since the lake is unusually low right now, the beach is dry and the only people I saw there were other cyclists, including an interesting couple on a tandem. I scarfed a Clif Bar and spent longer chatting with the tandem couple than I'd planned to rest; I started back down the bike path around 1340.

About half-way back, I stopped at a park to have one more gel and met a few of the Sacramento Bike Hikers that were sweeping the Mustard Seed Spin. In a pleasant small-world moment, I mentioned that I drove SAG for the Breast Cancer Fund's Bike Against the Odds last weekend, and they said “oh yeah, we rode that!”. As I spent a few minutes at this stop, the last of the Mustard Seed riders arrived, and, after I took off, I started encountering groups of them. Again, it was pretty impressive to see these youngsters spinning along on a wide variety of bikes completing at least a 13-mile ride. At the Mustard Seed start/finish, they had a balloon arch, kids with horns, cheerleaders (!) and many parents, and they cheered me on as I passed, even though I wasn't a participant.

After I passed Sac State, I picked-up the pace a bit and was averaging around 20MPH for much of the remainder of the ride; I rolled-up to my car in Discovery Park 3h 58m from when I rolled away, averaging just over 16MPH for the entire ride and about 18.7MPH while rolling. My recovery snack was a Balance Bar washed down with Costco's version of Gatorade.

Compared with my previous ride at the beginning of August, I felt considerably better this time, and spent far less time on rest stops. Apparently, Trails.com voted the American River Parkway the “best bike path of 2006”, and it is easy to understand why. It is very pretty, well-maintained, easy-to-access and has water and restrooms in many places, really quite a gem.