July 20, 2010

The Three Bears

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After rising up from the desert heat that surrounds it, riding through the high country of the Southern Sierra Nevada Mountains is simply stunning. With thick groves of ponderosa and sequoia trees, there are times when you feel like you are riding a speeder bike on Endor, except that the little people wearing Ewok suits are replaced by real-life bears.

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While the prospect of running across an ornery bear on the trail is a little unsettling, there is also something deeply satisfying about getting out into areas where you are not the top predator. I suppose it’s an integral part of “forest therapy.”

In late July, a riding buddy and I spent a weekend exploring some trails in the Southern Sierras, ranging from technical downhills with log rides and other features, to smooth alpine singletrack. We camped under the stars, and took showers under a freezing high-mountain waterfall. We also donated at least a pint of blood to the local mosquitoes, all of which must have been imported from Alaska. Good stuff.

On our last ride of the weekend, my riding buddy was dreading the climb back up to the car on his single speed, and turned back before the trail finish to get an early start. As it was getting toward sunset and I found myself doing a large part of the climb back by myself, the thought occurred to me that riding alone on the trail through bear country at this time of day might not be the best idea.

Continuing my solo climb, my mind started playing tricks on me as various shadows and hunks of wood took the shape of bears lying in wait. After about an hour of climbing, I finally caught up to and passed my buddy, grumbling something about it not being a good idea to ride alone.

IMG_2135Bear cave-womb? I think Georgia O’Keefe would have liked it.

About half a mile later, the trail overlooked a meadow and I stopped to stare at two curious shapes that looked like bears. As I looked more carefully, it turns out they weren’t bears at all, but just pieces rotting wood. Just as I was laughing at my bear paranoia,  a real life bear sitting not too far away from the two hunks of wood sprinted away across the meadow. I didn’t get my camera out in time. Feeling vindicated for my bear paranoia at least, we continued, hoping not to get a closer look at any bears.

About five minutes later, however, we both approached another meadow and spotted two more bears! This time I was able to get the camera out and take a photos before the bears sprinted off. Glad they were as scared of us as we of them. Either that, or the they were satiated because they had already eaten Goldilocks. There are actually two of them in this picture:

bear 2Checking out the bikers.

Three Bears stories aside, here’s a few other photos we took in the course of the weekend:

IMG_2071Railing a banked turn on Just Outstanding.

barcy 5Overlooking Isabella Lake. Photo by Barcy.

IMG_2108One of the most photographed Sequoias ever?

barcy 3One of several log crossings. This one at least had a rope to help with balance.

IMG_2133Barcy was rocking the log rides! I wasn’t.

barcy 6They might be giants. Photo by Barcy

IMG_2120Lovely alpine meadow. Beware the bears though.

IMG_2106Sometimes Barcy’s awesome speed cannot be captured by the camera.

barcy 9This particular trail sucked.  Luckily, the views didn’t. Photo by Barcy.

barcy 4Nice cycling tan! The waterfall shower was definitely a highlight of the trip.  Photo by Barcy.

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Full photo set can be found here.

 

July 13, 2010

Riding in the Wasatch Mountains

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In trashing Bob Dylan’s 1970 album “Self Portrait,” Rolling Stone opened its review with the now famous question: “What is this shit?” That was pretty much my reaction when I first moved to San Diego and started riding the rocky desert trails. Having grown up in Utah and Colorado, I guess I was spoiled by easy access to miles and miles of buff and flowing alpine singletrack.

If Utah was The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, SoCal was the Dylan of the late 70s and 80s:  some real gems, but gravelly and uneven in quality.  Since then I’ve learned to love SoCal too, but there’s still nothing quite like the high country to remind you why you became a mountain biker in the first place.

When most people think of mountain biking in Utah, they think of the great destinations in southern Utah like slick rock and gooseberry mesa. Those places are hard to beat, but northern Utah offers some fantastic trails too, particularly in the Wasatch mountains between Salt Lake and Park City. You could easily design routes in this area that would give you 50+ miles of almost pure singletrack.

In the last week or so, I’ve racked up about 100 miles of singletrack in the area, and just about all of it between 7000 and 9800 feet. The altitude has definitely been humbling, but the views have more than made up for it. I even saw a couple of moose on the trail, which was a highlight.

Photos below are taken from a combination of trails including Dog Lake, Wasatch Crest, Glenwild, Mid Mountain, and Spiro. Thanks to my good friend Steve Parrish for playing tour guide on a couple of days.

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Nothing like riding through the aspens:

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Full photo sets here, here, and here.

 

June 1, 2010

The Dangers of Long-Distance Cycling?

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This will not be news to those who follow other Paleo blogs, but it might be new for a lot of cycling types out there. According to one story recently reported, marathon running may not be as heart healthy as Americans have come to think in the last 40 years:

ATLANTA — A group of elite long-distance runners had less body fat, better lipid profiles, and better heart rates than people being tested for cardiac disease, but, paradoxically, the runners had more calcified plaque in their heart arteries, according to a study reported here.

In other words, marathoners look like the picture of health:  skinny, low cholesterol, low resting heart rate. But cutting against the grain of conventional dietary wisdom, they have more artery clogging plaque than more more sedentary types. Whether this is due to the actual stress associated with marathon running, or the high-carb diet that is typical of marathon runners, is unclear.

This comes on the heels of a german study that indicated that marathon runners are more likely to have heart problems than their otherwise low weight and “good” lipid profiles would suggest. You can find a much more detailed discussion of these studies over on Kurt Harris’s PaNu Blog here and here. Kurt is an MD, and does a much better job outlining them than I could.

The point is that there seems to be an increasing amount of evidence (at least for this layperson) to suggest that our bodies consider “ultra” and long-distance cardio activities to be stressful and traumatic events (and not in the good way that all exercise stresses the body). At the least, excessive cardio is not making you healthier. At worst, these long-distance activities might actually do damage over the long term.

That might be obvious to some–moderation almost always seems like the way to go in health matters–but it’s a bitter bill to swallow for exercise junkies who have been trying to go stronger and longer in their quest for fitness, personal challenge, etc.

The good news is that there is also an increasing amount of evidence to suggest that when it comes to fitness gains, quality/intensity may be more important than quantity. Sprinting, intervals, and shorter periods of ass kicking have many of the same (positive) physiological effects on your body as doing the long miles, as per this admittedly limited study.

Applying this to cycling, it would suggest we should all do a lot more casual riding at a mellow, fat-burning pace (say under 75% of max heart rate). The human body was designed to move slowly over long distances with little harm, and this sort of riding is the equivalent of a brisk walk. The everyday, practical sort of riding being promoted by the good folks at Rivendell comes to mind.

When you want to kick it up a notch, hill work, intervals, and other intense forms of training for briefer periods will keep you in top form. But for many, “intervals” have all the regimented appeal of going to boot camp. Biking is supposed to be fun, right?

Well, there is a form of biking that incorporates a lot of these principles while still being exciting: it’s called mountain biking. It involves short bursts of power and sprints to clean hills and other obstacles, often followed by downhills and periods of rest. Call them “intervals” or “hill work” if you like, but most of us just call it fun.

To be sure, you can overdo it in mountain biking just like anything else: 24 hour events and hardcore XC race training come to mind. But in the long run, the kind of mellow mountain biking that most of us do on the local trails every weekend is probably more heart healthy than long-distance road cycling, or a 4-hour club ride done at 90% of maximum heart rate.

The other advantage to mountain biking– getting yourself “out there” and into places like this:

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That’s me doing the Palm Canyon epic outside of palm springs.

 

May 17, 2010

Rough Riding in Burkina Faso

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Burkina Faso is a semi-arid, landlocked country in the dead center of the bulge of West Africa. It’s located in the buffer zone (known as the Sahel) between the Sahara desert to the north, and the more tropical, coastal areas to the south. As you might expect given this geography and the lack of many natural resources, Burkina is one of the poorest countries in the world, typically in the bottom five on the UN’s development index.

While it has known relative stability in recent years, Burkina’s early post-colonial history was punctuated with multiple coups d’etat. Burkina’s most colorful leader was Thomas Sankara, the Che Guevara of West Africa.

Before being assassinated by one of his closest friends in 1987 (by the current president of Burkina Faso, Blaise Compaore), Sankara did much to popularize the use of bicycles. As anyone who has walked the streets of Burkina’s cities can attest, bikes and mopeds still outnumber cars by 10 to 1.

The Model-T of Burkina bicycles reflects the country’s colonial heritage, looking very much like an old French city bike, 650B wheels and all. While generally cheap and falling apart, these bikes see a lot of miles, and there were plenty of young guys on these who could keep up with me at over 20mph, at least for a good stretch!

Classic Burkina Bike

Burkina also has the unique honor of hosting the only UCI legal bike race in Sub-Saharan Africa, the Tour de Faso. During my time in Burkina, I had the chance to see it pass through my town twice:

tour de faso poster

tour de faso in Bobo

Before moving to San Diego in 2008, my wife and I spent two years living in Burkina’s second biggest city, Bobo Dioulasso. Since I was working out of my home and had some flexibility in my schedule, there were many opportunities to explore the countryside by bike. The main limitation was the 100+ degree heat, which typically required starting my rides at sunrise in order to return home before a complete meltdown.

Given the paucity of paved roads in the country, riding in Burkina means mixed surface rough riding, as the only way to make a loop is to combine stretches of pavement and dirt road. This is no place for 700×23 road tires! The bike I first brought over with me was a Surly Cross-Check with 700×40 tires, set up as a single speed:

Surly Cross Check

For the most part, the bike did very well on the backroads of Bobo Dioulasso:

me on bike

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Many of the roads I explored took me out through different fields and plantations:

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As I was pretty much the only white guy in those parts riding a bicycle, I drew some pretty interesting stares from the folks in villages that I rode through, and the few times that I had to change a flat created sizable crowds (of course, just about any white person in a small village is an event, whether biking or not).

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In general, the scenery in the countryside of Burkina Faso doesn’t exactly make it destination-cycling worthy, but occasionally you do get a nice shot or two:

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mosque

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Though much of Burkina is flattish, after my first year there on a single speed Surly Cross-Check my knee started to bother me a bit. So, I did the only sensible thing you could do and designed a Titanium S&S coupled, Rohloff-equipped adventure bike, which is still my main rough riding bike today. The bike was built by Black Sheep bikes in Fort Collins, Colorado, and I picked it up when I was back in the states for vacation one year:

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You’ll also see young Zayzay in this photo, the Burkina dog that we brought back with us to the United States.

Heat aside, biking in Burkina was a lot of fun, and was the perfect way to get out of town and explore the countryside and small villages off the main roads. I miss being able to be “in the bush” after only 25 min or so of riding. I also miss being able to do so much mixed surface rough riding right from my front door. Here in San Diego, you have to work a bit harder if you want to enjoy low to no traffic dirt roads.

 

May 17, 2010

Is Perpetuem Paleo?

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For those not into distance events, “Perpeteum” is a powder you can mix up with a little water and, in theory, it can serve as your only fuel for long-distance events. In essence, you can get your 250-300 calories per hour from the water you drink. It’s quite convenient, even though it can be a strange feeling not to take in any solid fuel.

I’ve used the stuff for a number of long-distance rides, including double centuries, and it works quite well. It’s basically a carb-based fuel so you can sustain aerobic outputs for long periods of time, but unlike junk like Gatorade, it includes a little fat and protein. Fat is important fuel for long-distance efforts that involve time spent in the sub-aerobic zone. Protein is essential to endurance events unless you like cannibalizing your own muscle tissue.

So what could be more paleo than slurping a sugary cocktail for hours on end while performing chronic cardio? That’s a joke, folks.

But it does raise the question: Can the Paleo diet and fitness principles be reconciled with moderate to high amounts of high-octane aerobic exercise?

Well, not 100%. But for those of us who can’t give up longer rides, there are a few principles we can follow:

(1) Even for substantial amounts of cardio, athletes really don’t need the insane amounts of carbs that many eat. Buckets of pasta just aren’t necessary to train for and do well in something like a double century bike ride. This can be a conceptual hurdle for athletes accustomed to constantly porking out on carbs, but try cutting back and see how you do.

(2) For moderate training rides, I find that sticking to the normal paleo diet and adding a banana or two works just fine. You don’t need to add gels or other sports products.

(3) On the day before a big event, eating a sizable portion of potatoes or sweet potatoes seems to work wonders. If you are eating low-carb much of the time, your body absorbs glycogen at a faster rate when it experiences a potato bomb. You will gain weight since your body stores water with each gram of glycogen, but this goes away after the big event if you go back to a paleo diet. You can read more about this in the Paleo Diet for Athletes.

(4) On the day of a big event, all bets are off. My thinking is that if you are doing aerobic activity for 10 hours, you can eat a steady diet of sugar because you are burning it all off. Thus, you don’t have to worry about insulin spikes, weight gain, and all the other insidious effects of a high-carb diet. If I’m riding a century, Perpetuem is on the menu for that day. But if I am riding at an event where I can choose things like bananas and potatoes at rest stops, I’ll take them over Perpetuem and gels.

(5) Right after a big event, try to take in some carbs and protein within 30 minutes of finishing. You have a short window in which your body is especially receptive to replenishing its glycogen stores. Eat a baked potato in this window and you’ll feel a lot less depleted the next day.

(6) Let experience be your guide. If you are on the Paleo diet, doing a lot of training, and finding yourself feeling lethargic and depleted all the time, add some potatoes/sweet potatoes and a little more fruit into your diet. You’ll find the balance required for the level of training your are doing. But get over the habit of thinking that you need to suck down a few gels every time you do a 1-2 hour workout.

 

May 14, 2010

Haleakalā Sunrise

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In general, the islands of Hawaii are anything but a road biking paradise. The roads are narrow, shoulders small if they exist at all, and traffic can be surprisingly bad. Given the spectacular scenery and year-round perfect weather, this is unfortunate.

Because of this, I rarely think to bring a bike with me when I visit, even though I do have an S&S coupled travel bike. Between snorkeling, hiking, and swimming, there are just too many other amazing outdoor adventures in Hawaii for me to bother trying to road bike during the brief time I have here.

But if you are going to do some riding here, why not ride down a volcano? Paleo Velo in action.

Haleakalā is a massive shield volcano on Maui. The road to the Haleakala summit holds the world record for climbing to the highest elevation in the shortest distance (38 miles). I would love to have a road bike here one day and actually ride up the 25+ hairpin turns from sea level to its 10,023 foot summit. But you’d have to get up pretty early if you wanted to ride up to the top in time to see the sunrise, which is one of the most spectacular things I’ve witnessed.

Fortunately, there are tour companies that specialize in taking people to the top for the sunrise, and giving them a bike for the ride back down. The two AM wake-up call necessary to get to the bike shop and then up top in time for the sunrise was brutal, but the payoff was worth it.

You’ll find below a few pics of the sunrise, and the ride back down aboard a craptastic Gary Fisher singlespeed mountain bike. (If you are listening bike tour companies of the world, the bike you give someone for a 2 hr ride down a paved road should not have big honking knobbies!).

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sunrise 1

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Me watching sunrise

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sunrise 5

craptastic bike

watch for bikers

sun through clouds

hairpin turn

Looking back up

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If you are ever on Maui and are thinking about doing this, do not hesitate! It’s worth the 2AM wake-up call.

 

May 7, 2010

Whacked!

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By a car that is. For the first time ever, I had a run in with a car on my way home tonight. Luckily, both of us were going slow, and neither I nor my bike was hurt/damaged. Guy turned right without checking and whamo! I didn’t go down, caught myself with one foot, but may have some bruising on me left leg where he hit me.

It’s a good lesson to be more vigilant in my commuting. I’m just thankful I was able to learn that lesson without getting hurt.

 

May 6, 2010

Enough Paleo. Time for some Velo.

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For those of us lucky enough to own multiple bikes, one school of thought says that you should pick the right tool for the job.  If the route involves rough dirt, go with a “mountain bike.”  If it’s smooth road, go with a “road bike.” Horses for courses.

While this approach makes a lot of sense, sometimes there is a lot to be said for picking the wrong tool for the job. Not only are many “road bikes” capable of doing a lot more than we give them credit for, it can be a lot of fun to take a skinny tired bike off road. It makes tame trails challenging again.

Other times, there is no right tool for the job to begin with. Mixed surface routes can require riding over paved road, dirt road, fire road, and trail–all on the same bike. Fat knobbies will slow you on the paved sections, but skinny road tires will be a bit jarring off road. It’s all about compromise.

Some people trying to popularize this style of riding call it “under biking.” Others call it “Rough Riding.” The rest of us just call it plain fun.

On May 1, I led a group determined to show its solidarity by engaging in 42 miles and 5600 vertical feet of mixed surface heaven about an hour east of San Diego.  The ride began in the small hamlet of Descanso, CA and did a loop around Cuyamaca Peak.  The mixed surface route combined a bit of everything from pavement to singletrack.

The ride begins on the pavement of Boulder Creek Road, which soon turns to dirt. You can see the ribbon of road we followed carved into the hillside:

Up Boulder Creek

climbing boulder creek

At the top of the pass, we stopped for a short break.

Esteban drinking

And looked back at how far we had just come:
looking down climb

The rolling dirt road has a series of great climbs and descents, forcing you to dump all the elevation you just gained before working hard to earn it back. At the bottom of the one of the steepest elevation dumps, there is a great stream crossing. This is a lot of water to see in this parched region of the planet:

water crossing

The climbing continued, with Sky of Velo Cult bike shop and Chris Kostman of Adventure Corps & Rough Riders fame leading the charge:

sky and chris kostman

At the top of Boulder Creek Road, we settled for a bit under the shade of a huge tree while waiting for some of the slower climbers. This gave plenty of time for glamor shots of all the different bikes being used on the course. Everything from a Rivendell Roadeo with 33mm Jack Brown tires, to a single speed 29er mountain bike with 2.5″ tires. You run what you brung. That’s the spirit of rough riding!

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After a steep paved climb up Engineers Road, we made it to Lake Cuyamaca and the small general store there. In this picture, I’m chugging a positively non-Paleo Red Bull energy drink.

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As we turned south for the second half of the ride, the route got a lot rougher, involving the Cuyamaca fire roads. There was a huge fire some years back in the park, and every time it rains you get a lot of dead fall across the trails due to the rotting burnt out husks of trees. This was a good chance to practice our cyclocross skills:

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As the ride neared its end, we hit some fabulous stretches of single track, before a final series of fire road climbs. We were all getting pretty tired. Here’s a pic of Sky cresting one of the final fireroad climbs on his Nobilette:

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All in all, it was a glorious day in the sun. I can’t recommend this loop or this style of riding highly enough.

Here are the Garmin stats and map.

 

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