The SFR Golden Gate 1000km brevet

There are 17 slots left on the roster for the first San Francisco Randonneurs Golden Gate 1000km brevet.

The route begins in San Jose and goes east and up and over Mt. Hamilton, past the historic Lick Observatory and toward Livermore via the San Antonio Valley, one of the most beautiful stretches of roadway with next to no development. It is stunning how remote this area feels and yet it is so close to San Jose, Oakland and Livermore. From there the route travels toward the Carquinez Straits where riders cross over to Solano County via the Zampa Bridge. The route continues up Wooden Valley east of the Vaca Mountains and crosses over to Napa Valley via the climb over Mt. George. Riders head north up the Silverado Trail to Calistoga and then on to Cloverdale via a valley route through the Mayacamas_Mountains for an overnight control.

After a rest riders then head west and north on Highway 128, reaching the Pacific Ocean at the mouth of the Navaro River and complete an out and back to Fort Bragg. The route continues south on Highway One all the way to Jenner, CA where the Russian River valley leads riders back toward another overnight control in Cloverdale. After another rest, riders then meander through southern Sonoma County and Marin County on their way back to San Francisco via the Golden Gate Bridge.

To enter, riders must qualify by having completed a full SR series (200, 300, 400, 600km brevets) in 2011 or 2012, or a 1000km or 1200km brevet in 2011 or 2012.

Details are found on the SFR 1000km webpage

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Where is Rob?

Every four years, the Audax Club Parisien (ACP) will hold their Paris-Brest-Paris (or PBP) Randonneur event. There has been an amateur version of PBP since 1931. However, PBP has existed in some form since 1891, though back then it was a race, held about every 10 years until 1931 with a gap for the war, and then for the last time as a race in 1951. The take-away though is that PBP is no longer a race, there is no first and last place and the only metric to assess riders really is one of pass/fail. You either finish in the time limit, or you don't. Currently, PBP offers three start groups: 80 hours, 90 hours and 84 hours, in order of start. Each group will broken up into start waves with somewhere north of 200 (250?) riders in each wave. Under the direction of the ACP, Randonneurs USA (RUSA) sanctions qualifying events for PBP of 200, 300, 400 and 600km, each with a time limit. RUSA administers regions through out the US and there are five of those in Northern California, one in C...

2007 PBP, Part 1: Arrival and departure

On the Sunday before the start of the 2007 Paris-Brest-Paris (PBP) Randonnee, a large number of Northern California riders gathered after the mandatory, but this year much abbreviated, bike inspection. We sat at a cafe, indoors alas, and tried to ignore the falling rain outside. My friend Reid made a waggish remark about the experience we were about to have. He said that doing Paris-Brest-Paris in the rain could be quite easily simulated at home by standing in a cold shower in bicycling clothing while ripping up $100 bills. I thought about this remark and in the the long, dark hours of the first night's ride through the French countryside, and with the rain beginning to pelt us once more, I came to the conclusion that the analogy was inadequate. What was missing in the comment was that it failed to include any mention of first having to stand in line to get into the cold shower. Having now commented on the inadequacies of the analogy (and pausing briefly to state that I completed...

SFRs' Mendocino Coast (née Fort Bragg) 600km brevet: A history and stats (updated March, 2025)

The Mendocino Coast 600km is not the most frequently run SFR event and it isn't the one with the most participants in a given year, but as there is a notion of progressively longer events within our 'PBP Qualifiers', the Mendocino Coast 600km has some luster as a 'signature' brevet. History The route from SF to Fort Bragg and back is attributed to Daryl Skrabak though it is listed on the RUSA site as submitted by Todd Teachout who was the SFR RBA when route numbers were first assigned to existing and new routes. According to RUSA records, this route was first run in 1999 with Daryl Skrabak as RBA. Much like PBP itself, though not for the same reasons, the Mendocino Coast 600km was not run every year. Daryl ran the brevet once in 1999, and after that it was next run in 2004 under 2nd year RBA Todd Teachout. Todd listed the event again in 2005 through 2007. After a gap year in 2008, the event was again run, this time by 2nd year RBA Rob Hawks with subsequent ver...

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