This past weekend, Ben and I drove North for some mountain biking. We stayed at my Grandparent's lakehouse on Lake Rabun, and drove up to Tsali in North Carolina on Saturday morning. Unfortunately we didn't plan super well and the two trails there I wanted to ride (the left and right loops) are Horse-only on Saturdays, but this turned out not to be much of a mistake. We rode Mouse Branch first including the optional scenic overlook portion, and it was pretty nice. The trail was a bit crowded and some people going at a leisurely pace didn't want to let anyone pass them, but we managed to finish the 9.7 miles in under an hour which is pretty fast for us. (The woman that won the gold in Olympic mountain biking this year averaged 12mph if I remember right.) After PBJs, we did a lap on Thompson Loop which was awesome. The first part is very fast singletrack, then a lot of climbing, and then one of the longest and fastest downhill sections of singletrack I've ever ridden (elevation graph). 25mph on a mountain bike for a couple of minutes feels pretty fast! So of course, we had to ride that loop again for a total of ~25 miles for the day and as many hours on the trail as it took us to drive there.

On Sunday, we drove the 15 minutes from the lakehouse to the Stonewall Falls Loop in Clayton, GA. From reading around online, I didn't know quite what to expect. There was only one car in the gravel parking lot and no real signage, but we hopped on our bikes and set out. The first 7 miles or so seemed like they were all uphill, and for the first time in a while I actually had to walk up a few sections, but we were rewarded with the second 7 miles that were mostly downhill. I don't need to ride this again, but probably will if I'm at the lake for more than a day. Ben really liked it, so you might! It was "real" mountain biking with almost every kind of terrain: rocks and dirt, slowly recovering forest fire areas, flat trail following a stream with several stream crossings, super sketchy downhill sections on powerline cuts, banked turns, sand, narrow cuts through heavy undergrowth, steep uphills, etc. I like trails that are a little more consistent so that I can get in the appropriate "zone" for the trail, and this one kept me on my toes. My arms are a bit scratched up from all the bushes, and my shoes are still drying out, but if you're comfortable on a mountain bike and in the area this trail is worth trying. Our loop ended up being a little over 13 miles and took us about 2 hours.

These were the first mountain bike rides I've done of the length I was used to before the whole collarbone thing, and while it's nice to be back on that bike again, I still have some catching up to do in the mountains and on the track! Since Feb 1st this year, 1593 miles on road rides, 230 on casual ones, 822 on a trainer, 125 on the mountain bike, and 108 at the track.

It's that time of year again: In a few weeks, we at Faster Mustache are putting on our 4th annual 24 hour urban relay! Head on over to 24.fastermustache.org to pre-register to guarantee your spot, as this is the cycling event of the year in the south east, and the only event of it's kind in the world.

September 6th and 7th at Johnny's Pizza on North Highland. Take it easy on a 6 person team and just have a good time doing at least one lap a person (~10 miles or so), or go for the solo win which will take 300+ miles of riding! Trust me, the prizes are worth it!

Right before I left for my Europe trip, someone posted about the 20th Annual Covington Century on FM. I thought it might be a good first century (100 mile bike ride) for me to do because they claim it to be the "fastest and flattest". Prior to that posting I'd been riding 6 days a week usually between 25 and 35 miles with some longer rides on weekends, but I was going to be off the bike for 2 weeks to to Europe so eh, we'll see. I got back from Europe on Tuesday, and 25 miles on Wednesday morning felt pretty good so I signed up for the century and planned to catch a ride with Roger down there.

5:45am on Saturday we started and had exchanged money for registration packets, applied sunscreen, and eaten PowerBars by the start of the ride at 8am. The first 2 miles was a very slow start with the kids that this ride was raising money for leading the pack, but once they pulled off things started to pick up. Roger, Jase, Jenny, Chris, Anna, and I all stuck together for a while and we skipped the first rest stop 10 miles in because the crowd was still pretty big. Over the next few miles, things got a bit more spread out and at some point Roger, Jenny, Chris, and I lost Jase and Anna. We stopped at all the rest of the rest stops and I alternated eating a banana with eating a pbj sandwich and a few shot blocks. I tried to alternate my Acceleraide with Poweraide and water that was provided at the rest stops, but Acceleraide is really a lot better so it was gone pretty quickly, which turned out to be my only real mistake for the ride.

At the turnoff to do 80 miles or 100 miles, Chris and Jenny pulled off. It was 95 degrees or so and riding that far in the sun just isn't fun! Roger and I kept on going and ended up meeting up with Anna two more rest stops out (she did the 80 option so at that point we both had 20 miles left to go). We rode with her for a few miles, but my arms and shoulders were getting pretty sore at that point and I knew that I needed to speed up and finish or I wouldn't make it, so I pulled off. I kept downing Poweraide and after 5:52:23 moving time I finished the 102 mile course. (We probably took ~45 minutes of breaks.)

After riding that far, it's understandable that one would feel pretty bad, but everyone else was eating huge plates of free spaghetti and the though of food made me sick to my stomach. I dealt with it until I got home where my body "removed" about 1.5 liters of Poweraide and I felt a bit better. Acceleraide is multiple kinds of sugar, salt, protein, etc, while Poweraide is just very sugary water, and it turns out that by drinking so much Poweraide, I'd induced a sugar stomachache similar to kids on Halloween. It's now 14 hours later and I feel fine, but up until now it's been pretty rough.

All in all, I'm glad I did it, and 17.4mph moving average isn't bad for a first one! I hit 46mph at one point on a big hill, had a 155bpm average heart rate (84% of my max which is a little high), and my average cadence was 74rpm (which is about right, though I'd like that to be a little higher). Hopefully some people will post their pictures soon.

It's 7:15am on Sunday now and I'm craving some chicken fingers and fries, and I'll hopefully be back on my morning rides tomorrow or Tuesday!

I've been wanting a wide angle lens for a while, so I finally bought one so that I'll have it with me in Europe next week: the Canon EF-S 10-22mm f/3.5-4.5 USM. Previously, the widest I had was 17mm, and those last 7mm make a huge difference. A friend of mine has this same lens, and after using it in January, I realized that a wide angle lens would make a lot more sense for me to buy than a super-telephoto lens.

My first chance to use this lens was at the second Dick Lane Velodrome Festival of Speed of 2008. You can see all the pictures of the Dick Lane Velodrome Festival of Speed here. Most of them were with the 10-22mm lens, and it should be pretty obvious which ones aren't. The edge distortion isn't too bad, and I really like the effect. I'll probably use this lens more than I initially planned on!

Given the amount of training time I lost at the track due to the broken collarbone, I probably won't be riding in the last FoS of this season, but I plan on keeping up doing ~200 miles a week throughout the year so hopefully next year I'll be taking less pictures and riding around in circles more! I did go mountain biking this morning for the first time since my wreck, and while it was only 1:10 of ride time on a familiar trail, it convinced me that I'm healed enough to start doing more serious mountain biking in places I haven't been. (And by the time I'm back from Europe it'll be 4 months since I broke it which is plenty of time to heal.) Hopefully I'll be able to drag Ben out so we can get back in the habit of mountain biking every weekend and increasing the mileage each time.

I had a run in with the ground today on my road bike about 7 miles in and had to miss the rest of the 30 miles. It wasn't my fault and nothing got too damaged on the bike, but the rear derailleur hanger was badly bent and the cable housing on it was destroyed, so the drivetrain didn't really work at all and I had to get San to come pick me up. I was worried I might need a new derailleur but I went by Outback Bikes today and as usual, they took care of me. $5 later I have a new cable and housing, the hanger is straight again, and the derailleur is all in one piece and didn't need replacing. (Hoorah for free service after buying a bike from them!)

Lessons learned today:

• It turns out there is a special tool just for straightening bent derailleur hangers! For $60, you too can have this tool to fix this one type of bike problem that should almost never happen. Now I just need one of those and a tool for the crazy bottom bracket in my road bike.
• Chances are almost 100% that if your bike is not of the current model year, the bike shop that sold you the bike will not have any replacement derailluer hangers in stock, even if it's last years model.
• If you are riding with people and their quick release levers are turned in such a way that they might grab on to someone elses levers or cables, suggest to them that they adjust them instead of just not worrying about it!

I carry a GPS with me on long bike rides and pull the resulting trace into Google Earth and Garmin's MapSource software. Google Earth is nice for looking at, but doesn't provide much useful information, and MapSource is pretty awful to look at (and will only run in Windows so I have to boot up VMware) but does provide elevation maps (as well as the ability to load maps). I recently started using a bike computer with cadence, and a heart rate monitor, and the last missing piece of information was total elevation gain over a ride. This information is nowhere in MapSource or Google Earth.

I can get GPX format (The standard interchangable format for GPS information) files out of MapSource and it's just XML, so after trying several tools online and several programs I downloaded that didn't work, I wrote a quick python script to get me the info I want. Hopefully this will help someone else:

from xml.dom import minidom

file = minidom.parse('./file.gpx')

min = 1000000
max = 0
gain = 0
loss = 0
last = 0

for node in file.getElementsByTagName("ele"):
        cur = float(node.childNodes[0].data)
        if (cur > max):
                max = cur
        if (cur < min):
                min = cur
        if (last != 0):
                if (cur > last):
                        gain = gain + (cur - last)
                elif (cur < last):
                        loss = loss + (last - cur)
        last = cur

print "max: %.2fft" % (float(max * 3.2808399))
print "min: %.2fft" %  (float(min * 3.2808399))
print "gain: %.2fft" % (float(gain * 3.2808399))
print "loss: %.2fft" % (float(loss * 3.2808399))

So for my 43 mile ride on sunday:
max: 1110.63ft
min: 773.16ft
gain: 3328.98ft
loss: 3232.78ft

Getting those numbers were a lot harder than it should have been! Good ride though..

I had my last set of X-Rays yesterday and while it's very obvious where the break was, it's mostly healed and I can perhaps try some mountain biking again soon! I posted about my new road bike exactly a month ago, and in that month I've put 500 miles on it. Every morning during the week except Wednesdays I ride for ~2 hours, usually with a few other people, and on weekends I try to do ~3 hours twice. Sunday I rode out to Stone Mountain and did a lap around it before coming back, usually it's just a turnaround point, and in the mornings I've followed green arrows marked with "safari" (turned out to be ~25 mile tour to 8 parks with some hunting for the route at each one), gone on known routes such as the Outback Bikes Wednesday night ride route, and come up with a few of my own including one that is definitely going to be a regular route and put online somewhere. It's great to not be stuck inside on the trainer any more!

In related news, the Faster Mustache race team had our first organizational meeting last night. We're doing very well in lots of races: everything from 3rd place in an expert levels trials competition, to taking the vast majority of top 10 finishes in sport level mountain bike racing, to winning both our category and overall at a 24 hour mountain bike race in Conyers, GA. However, sponsorships have been very slow! If you'd like your name on our website, it only takes $25 and for $250 and up, you can have things like: your company linked to from our website, your logo on our jerseys, your logo on our tents and banners at races, etc! Please get in touch with me if you'd like to know more about sponsoring our team! Just email team@fastermustache.org! Every little bit helps because the team covers 50% of entry fees for people that commit to 10 races a season, and races cost between $20 and $100 a person to enter.

I've been participating at DP Challenge off and on for a while now, but my images have rarely finished in the top 50% of challenges. (here's my profile there) Photography is a very subjective thing and the end result of everyones votes can be surprising! I was fairly confident with my entry into the Bicycles II challenge:

but as voting went progressed, it swung around between 4.9 (more typical for me) to 6.8 (a possible first place!). Could I win for once? After the week of voting, I ended up in 15th place out of 135, which is in the top 10%! That works for me. I like first place and tenth place better than mine, but if it was up to me, I would have given myself third :)

Hopefully I'll start doing this more regularly, if only they'd offer and RSS feed of new challenges!