Strava poaching

On my commute from SF to nVidia, there are nine (maybe ten now) Strava Segments.
None of these are particularly interesting pieces of road, they just happen to be on
a route that dozens of people ride multiple times per week on their commute, specifically a lot of SF2G riders who are Stravans.

Examples:
SF2G Airport Sprint - a half mile chunk of pavement a jersey barrier away from US 101
Wailing Wall - pothole ridden strip of asphalt in between a trailer park and a sound barrier.

I can't think of any of these I would ride without a good reason. Commuting to work is a fairly good reason. So since we ride this crapola a lot, we have our fun seeing our times on the various parts of our humdrum suburban commute.

Recently it was noticed that a new name landed on the leaderboard of pretty much all of these random crappy segments.

Re: evil lucas

Scott Crosby wrote:

heh, so it appears Lucas P. is doing repeats of the strava sections to own
the leaderboard, that scoundrel. For the lagoon (theo) sprint for example:

3 Lucas Pereira Sat, Feb 20, 2010 17.6 143 108 (PM)
4 Lucas Pereira Sat, Feb 20, 2010 11.3 155 93 (PM)
5 Lucas Pereira Sat, Feb 20, 2010 19.9 146 158 (PM)

so he's going on weekends to attack all the records, pretty funny.

we came pretty close to getting that one today, but will have to step it
up a bit more:

1 Lucas Pereira Sat, Feb 06, 2010 32.3 177 478 (PM) 1:09
2 Scott Crosby about 4 hours ago 29.0 175 425 1:17
3 Christon DeWan about 4 hours ago 27.9 179 441 1:20

Poaching segments is hereby considered Bullshit, and we must now destroy
all these Lucas records.

-sc

As a new father who hasn't ridden on a weekend in months, I have to say I am pretty disgusted that someone would take their weekend and do sprint repeats past the parking lots and hotels next to the airport where the Anza Lagoon Sprint section is. Not to mention he rides the rest of our crappy commute to get there to do the repeats in the first place (at least he doesn't appear to drive), when he lives close to some of the best riding in the world.

As new segments get added, Lucas goes off to do his repeats on the new segment. There is a house of ill repute in East Palo Alto where unsavory folks tend to hang out. Perhaps we will add a new strava segment there and force Lucas to do endless repeats on the mean streets of EPA. Of course, there is always the less savory tactic of going out with a car and beating all of his sprint times by a second, forcing him to go back and try to re-earn them - this is considered cheating and will not stand.

Zipp CSC dead on arrival - spoke pulls through rim

Tonight's events.

I rode from work to the train, 7 miles in 19:30. Pretty fast. If my rear wheel was in this condition at that point, I would not have ridden that fast...



One of the rear spokes has pulled through the rim.

After the ride, I took the train to SF. Certainly on the Caltrain there is some bumping, but my bike was pretty isolated on a rack with other "nice bikes". I rode
from the train station to meet my wife in Potrero Hill and didn't notice anything, nor did I notice the wheel ramming the brake while walking the bike to put it into the car. The bike was in the back of the Pilot sort of haphazardly. I just wonder, if you whack a spoke could it result in something like this? I'd be more accustomed to a spoke breaking, not pulling through the rim. Not that I haven't had a spoke pull through a rim before. Perhaps just par for the course for putting in a lot of miles at 210 lbs.

Aside from the curiousity of trying to figure out what happened, the next question is "what now?". I had this same thing happen to a machine built Mavic open pro built on an Ultegra Hub with double butted spokes. A rebuild would cost more than a new wheel (if you can buy a rim and build a wheel it's about 1/2 the cost of a wheel). But this is a $500 wheel. Where's the value? Hub? Spokes? Rim? Do I try to get this thing rebuilt? Or am I shopping for a new wheel? And if so, what wheel might avoid this issue? Don't bother saying Ksyriums - on my old Ksyriums I broke 5-6 spokes and with the last break I decided to throw in the towel. I rode to PA bikes, bought the Zipps, told the store to repair the rear Ksyrium so I could sell the wheelset to a flyweight. They called me the next day and said "The nipple has pulled through the rim..."

Sucked into the Strava vortex...

After a year or so of resistance, I have been sucked into the vortex that is Strava

A data analysis service for Garmin users, the most interesting part of Strava is that you can produce "segments" or "KOMs", and every Strava user who has ridden that same stretch of road will now be compared on that segment.

For example, this little known climb

Two years ago my wife bought me a Garmin 705 and I told her to return it - I am a map geek and didn't need a GPS computer. I hadn't really noted that it was useful for tracking your rides, but until Strava became prevalent even the tracking didn't have that killer app feature that sucked me in. I picked up the new Garmin Edge 500 from Mike's Bikes ($40 off coupon in the "Green Zebra" coupon book) and away we rolled.

So now all my embarrassing efforts are up there for all to see.

Murph on Strava

You know you're a cyclist when...

On the train today I was talking to the conductor about his beloved New England Patriots. He wasn't too optimistic - Welker is out, the Ravens are tough, they should have beaten the Texans so they could draw the Jets first, etc...

So we are getting off the train and he says "What do you think about this thing where they are talking about legalizing dope???". My eyes popped wide open - what! The NFL is just going to open the doors wide open on steroids! Holy Pantani!

He said - "Yeah, there's a guy over there with a petition, they're going to try and put it on the ballot!"

I looked over and saw a guy with a sandwich board saying "LEGALIZE MARIJUANA NOW"

Not DFL at San Bruno

The results are in

29 0 John Murphy SAN FRANCISCO,CA 00:23:32.00 196340 123 Webcor/alto Velo

4 guys even less fit than me decided to enter. Had I done the smart thing and entered the 4's, I would have been 21/22, unless I managed to outsprint the guy who finished in 23:30.

Amusingly, my thought is that I went out "too fast", something I would not have thought was possible. When the pack started at a pace that wasn't completely leaving me behind, I moved up quickly to try to suss out a reasonable wheel to get on for the flatter section. Then I immediately cracked - before it got flat. Several riders passed me, and when it got flat the 2nd group was just 15 yards in front of me, but I couldn't close the gap (and provided a good bridge for someone who was on my wheel). If I had just settled in and calmly got to the flat section with the third group I might have gotten a better ride to the top, as it was I rode alone for a lot of the flat section and then got a ride from the guy who finished 27th (who put a minute into me on Radio Road).

The steep section of Radio Road showed my current weight level. 10 pounds lighter (and probably stronger) I would really muscle through that section, as it was I really suffered and they had to urge me to sprint through the line as I was being caught by one of the later groups. It was rough. But I got out there, and like I said, not DFL.

I celebrated with a nice present which I'll discuss next...

A little encouragement now and then is good...

From: Daniel Hobe
To: Michael Gaiman, John Murphy

I equaled my best time on the Bayway supersprint. Today it was behind
Murph the whole way so I think we are tied as the leaders for that
section :)

http://strava.com/rides/55443/segment_efforts/450767

Mt San Bruno Hillclimb

The Mt San Bruno Hillclimb is January 1, I actually re-upped my USCF license and entered the race. I made a minor error in entering the Masters 35's which will include Chris Phipps, instead of the Open 4's which will not, but I guess it only matters if I would have placed, given it's a mass start. I'm not in the best shape despite getting a few more rides in as Liam has been sleeping better and we've established a rhythm where my wife takes the middle of the night shifts, and I wake up with Liam, which is often 5:30 AM, I deal with him until ~6:30 and then slip off to get a bit of a ride in if I can.

I've always wanted to do this race, but Jan 1 is never the best time. We'll see.