449 km

Certain hills are forever defined by your first experience climbing them by bike. Try as you might to overcome this, each subsequent climb of that hill is (at least a little) ill flavored if that first experience did not go well. Irony is often best illustrated when the hill in question is a simple one for fresh legs but fate always provides you with a set of tired ones. Dixon Ridge, the final climb on Nicasio Valley Road, a feature of so many San Francisco Randonneurs brevet routes is a case in point. I never know if that mere bump will crush me. The Santa Rosa Cyclists brevet calendar for the last three years has featured a ride affectionately known as the 'Hubba' that is nothing if not heavy on long climbs, traversing twice the mountains that separate the Anderson Valley from the middle landscape of the Russian (nee Slavyanka) River Valley. Upon first hearing of the new route from Bob, the Santa Rosa RBA, I felt more than a little intimidated. The first two versions of th...

Photos courtesy of Patrick In the gentle landscape between the growing town of Petaluma and the coastline, there is a small, and perhaps mostly forgotten community named Two Rock, CA . Two Rock never became a commercial center, never became the western seat of finance, and in fact the road doesn't even widen as you pass through. Most people can travel along the highway here and never realize they've passed through a town, and never even notice the three rock outcroppings that gives Two Rock it's oddly singular name. An oft quoted American author once commented on the attributes of cycling and the resulting understanding of the true contours of the landscape, and should you be riding west on Petaluma-Valley Ford road in the early months of any year, you'll have time to look around at the rolling green hillsides and wonder what it must have been like 100 or 200 years ago, and if this is where the photo for the Windows XP desktop was taken. (No, but darn close .) Each...

All photos courtesy of Megan To date, the 2013-2014 winter in Northern California has been a very dry one, and with only one or two notable exceptions January was dry in a worrisome way all month. By the end of the next month, February 2014 would be saved from being the driest on record, though barely, by what has now become rare rainfall. So, what then would be the odds that the 'R' word would be in the forecast for the date when the SRCC would hold it's second 200km brevet for 2014? As the day drew nearer, the forecast (though not the weather) became clearer: Overcast, fog, with the chance of rain spiking around 3pm. So the plan now becomes: Ride, of course, but do what can be done to be near the finish not long after 3pm! Despite the irony of rain during a drought not one of us participating in this brevet, it should be pointed out, would ever begrudge the rain if it came to be. While the rest of the country dealt with prolonged cold spells, huge snowfalls and all ...

Can it be an SFR brevet if there isn't a threat of rain? Not worry this time, as there was a 20% chance of rain in the form of isolated thundershowers in the forecast for Davis and Vacaville. Like so many other SFR brevets this year and last, the rain never happened on our 230km overnight brevet. Instead however it was mild all night long, and we enjoyed mostly clear skies with little of the drop in temperature that normally comes with that at night. May is often a busy time of year for many long distance cyclists and June didn't seem to be any less busy. There was a lot of churn on the sign-up list for the 230km overnight brevet with many riders finding they had over booked themselves this weekend. A few days out from the ride, I figured with the attrition we'd end up with 15 riders when nearly 30 had signed up at some point. I was wrong though as 17 riders signed in and rolled out of the Hercules Transit Center at 8pm on June 13th. We had daylight for only a short tim...

In early 2007, I participated in a number of cycling events, of which the qualifying brevets were only some of those rides. PBP of course was a central discussion topic so many times and at those other rides I met a number of prospective PBP riders. The Grizzly Peak Cyclists , one of the clubs I ride with and an ancestor to the San Francisco Randonneurs, hosts a Tuesday Night Ride series aimed at the faster cyclist wanting to get in a mid-week training ride after work and prepare for the coming California Triple Crown Double Century series . The few times I showed up for those Tuesday Night rides, I had already done my ride for the day (I had plenty of free time from mid-November 2006 to early March 2007 when I was unemployed due to the implosion of my former employer Apelon). It was at one of those Tuesday Night rides that I first met Phil Morris, who had been described to me as a very strong, fast rider. Phil was working himself back into condition after a lengthy cycling layoff, an...

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...

In August of 2007, I put my bike on a plane and along with several hundred other Americans, I flew to France to participate in the Paris, Brest et retour, the once every four years cyclo-touring event most commonly referred to in the US as ' PBP '. It is an understatement to say that my experience there was not what I was anticipating, but by any measure the trip and experience were simply fantastic, and it was fantastic in spite of near constant rain and in spite of falling far short of my goal. I named this blog after the distance I was able to accomplish on PBP that year. I registered this blog shortly after returning from France on that trip, with the intention of chronicling my preparation for returning to PBP in 2011, in whatever form that 'preparation' would take. In the days, weeks and months just after PBP I thought often about the trip. Again, an understatement. For weeks, I had nightly dreams of the ride. I would frequently dream of riding up a gentle slope...