SF Randonneurs Summer Populaire

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...

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...

Cycling mileage spreadsheet (using google docs)

Several years back I was looking for a good way to keep track of my annual cycling mileage and a little Googling resulted in finding this website and it's link to a downloadabe Excel spreadsheet for keeping track of cycling mileage. Mark Pankin, who created that Excel doc annually updates the document and makes it available to the public. I think the document is great and I've used it for several years. One issue I did have with it though was gaining access to the document remotely. I kept it on my computer at home but sometimes I wanted to update it when I was not at home or just pull data from it, again when I wasn't at home. I had had some email exchanges with Mark to ask about certain features of his document and this led to a discussion about porting the document over to Google Docs. Mark was not a Google Docs user but he didn't mind at all if I created a document using his Excel spreadsheet as a model. While there is some ability to import and export Excel format...

449 km

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