449 km

There is a hook that catches us all, and pulls us into randonneuring. It isn't just being on the bike. There are many things that pull me toward riding brevets, and there are many things that have delivered rewards for having joined the paceline. I certainly love pushing myself to complete longer distances, or to overcome a headwind, or to defeat a hilly course in a time I only dreamed of a year or more ago. Of all these things, however, the biggest draw, the surest hook, is the camaraderie I've found between the start and finish controls. On the 2009 Davis Gold Rush Randonnee, I had been riding alone for a bit more than 50 miles. The water stop at mile 50 was busy in a way that the road leading to it had not been. I wondered where all the riders had been and how it worked that I couldn't gain on them and they could not gain on me. I left the water stop alone and in just a mile or two noticed a rattle that was more than annoying. After fixing a problem that verged on bu...

(Note: I started this blog entry nearly two months ago. One thing that makes it ok that I waited to actually finish it, is that well, what I was trying to say is pretty much true for me.) As I approach two decades of living in the Bay Area, I've seen enough of the change of the seasons to have a working, rough idea of what each season means, and sort of when to expect it to arrive. The transition from summer to fall to winter here is nothing like what I knew back east, and there can be years when you never know if is truly fall or if the fall season happened overnight, and within less than 24 hours summer has morphed into winter. Winter living within the California version of a Mediterranean climate of course means not drastically colder temperatures but still colder temps. More obviously though, there is a greater possibility of rain. Rain is something a Bay Area local just does not think about from sometime in May until sometime late in October. After October of course, rain ...