Paleo Vélo

People dis on it due to the red-neck factor, but it’s pretty darn nice having riding like this accessible from the front door. This is one of the views from Skyline Truck Trail on a descent back in to San Diego.

And don’t get me started on the fact that it was 65 degrees in January. It’s a hardship post, no doubt about it.

One of my last home cooked paleo breakfasts before I depart for a 16-day work trip to Guinea and Liberia: three eggs with mushrooms cooked in pasture butter, and 3/4 of a sweet potato on the side. There is a heap of sour cream inside the folded over omelette you can’t see.

Not looking forward to the crappy food I am often subjected to when traveling, especially on the 30-hour plane trip each way. Needless to say, there will be a bit of a slump in blog posting for the next two weeks.

It’s that time of year. But with a new baby and a new house that needs a lot of work, I need to be realistic about cycling goals this year. At the same time, without a few goals, it’ll be too easy to fall into nothing but child care and chores, so here goes:

(1) Do a few S24Os. With the new baby and a troublesome knee, I doubt I’ll be doing any extended touring or bike packing. The S24O, or sub-24hr overnighter, is a great compromise (and thanks to Grant Peterson at Rivendell for popularizing the concept). The idea is to load up your bike, head for the hills, spend a night under the stars, and come back the next day. It’s a great way to clear your head out, and I hope to work more of them into 2011.

(2) Do a few MTB events. I need some kind of goal to keep motivated, and signing up for a longish-event really helps focus the mind. I’m thinking of going for the Julian Death March to start.

(3) Commute to work 3X per week. My commute is 31 miles round trip, and a great way to maintain cycling fitness even if I do nothing else. If I do daycare pickup and two days per week in the car, that should leave me three days for the bike commute.

(4) Do some trail and advocacy work. As mentioned in my last post, I really need to step up and contribute a bit to the local scene now that it looks like we’re setting down here in San Diego long term.

(5) I’m not sure how realistic it is, but I’d like to shoot for an Randonneurs USA R-12 award, which means that you do a least one sanctioned 200K (around 120 miles) per month for twelve consecutive months. I’ll need to start in February though as I’ll be traveling to West Africa for the rest of January.

(6) Do more paleo-style cross-training, including sprinting, jumping, upper body and core work. I feel better for it, and I think I ride better for it.

(7) Finally, I want to buy less bike stuff, surf less bike porn, and ride more. Enough with the e-biking! (says the guy writing a biking blog).

Without doubt, one or more of those goals will be OBE (overtaken by events) in the course of the year. Gotta start somewhere though!

This, from today’s LA Times: Mountain bikers are still unwelcome on many L.A. trails
A comprehensive update of the city’s bicycle plan still gives precedence to hikers and equestrians.

The LA Times article is focused on trails in Los Angeles, but is representative of a much wider access issue across California, where in too many instances trails that are perfectly sound from an environmental perspective are closed to bikes.

As someone who hikes and bikes and grew up riding horses, I understand the frustration that different trail user groups can have with each other. And I like having trails all to myself just like anyone else. But for the most part, I think excluding user groups from trails, and especially “wilderness” areas, is short sighted.

Having multi-user trails (horse, hike, bike) should in theory mean that there are that many more advocacy groups to: (1) defend our ability to get out into wild spaces and (2) fight for policies that preserve them. Instead, we’ve split what should be a strong wilderness and outdoors constituency, and guys like me who live for the outdoors refuse to give to groups like the Sierra Club because they are anti-bike in far too many instances. In the end, that’s a loss to all user groups. The anti-wilderness and pro-development forces on the other side can only be too happy.

The reasons often used cited as pretext to keep trails closed to bikers are mentioned in the LA times article: the potential to scare other user groups, and damage the trails.

In the long run, decisions to exclude bikes from trails because of the potential to scare other trail users create a sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Here in San Diego, because so much of the good single track is closed to bikers, the few trails that are truly multi-user become magnets for all of the bikers in the area. As a result, hikers and equestrians feel overwhelmed, and even more sure in their conviction that other areas should remain closed. But in the end, there are just too many examples across the country of well managed trail systems that welcome all three user groups to think that exclusion is the answer. It can and does work.

If a user group does have to be excluded, then it should be done on the basis of good science and sound land management principles. And yet we have groups like the Pacific Crest Trail Association who claim that “The damage caused by a mountain biker is much greater than that caused by a hiker or horse because, with a bike, the soil is impacted continuously along the trail, while a hiker’s or horse’s feet hit the soil only at intervals.” Anyone who has ridden a trail frequented by horses knows this is not true. The PCTA’s position, and the decision to exclude bikes from the entirety of the Pacific Crest Trail, are about as scientific as creationism.

I don’t mean for this to come off as anti-horse. Again, more user groups fighting together for the same trails could be a win-win. But I can’t accept closing trails to bikers, but keeping them open to horses under the pretext that bikers do more damage to trails. In most instances, decisions to allow horses but not bikes are based more on the romance and history of horses than science and sound land management principles. Horses were here long before bikes, right?

But perhaps more importantly, equestrians have money and attend important land management meetings. And that’s where I and others like me need to step up, since I’ve mostly neglected my chances to make my voice heard at different trail advocacy and land management meetings since moving to San Diego. It’s one of my goals in 2011 to get more active on that front, and to help more with trail work.