449 km

RUSA's (unnamed) route # 300 is one of the Santa Rosa region's most popular routes. The route has routinely been offered each year in January and for the last so many years the turn out has always topped 100, sometimes going well beyond that. What is the attraction? The topography of the route is perfectly matched for legs in early season form, which is to say there is a dearth of hills. The route also is short on controls. The start is in Healdsburg near the City Hall, but the turn around is less than 100km so the morning route does some 'bonus' miles to the west and north before heading to the real destination to the southeast in the outskirts of the town of Napa, CA. Those bonus miles require a control and Bob Redmond, the Santa Rosa region's RBA usually makes it an info control and one that relates to, well, lets say it is one of his other passions while off the bike and a seeming competitor to the main agricultural product of the terrain we'll pass throu...

In the interests of chronological accuracy, this addition to the 'chasing K-hounds' series will be about the Worker's Ride version of the San Francisco Randonneurs (SFR) Point Reyes Lighthouse 200km, held the same day as the SFR Point Reyes Populaire. The latter is a subset of the former and covers the same routes save for two different out-and-back legs, one to the lighthouse which lends it's name to the 200km route and the other up to Marshall, CA on Highway One. Worker's Rides, according to RUSA rules, are held sometime within 15 days prior to the main event, to allow those volunteers that make the main event happen a chance to ride the brevet themselves. Trying to pack in enough rides to reach 10,000km this year will be a challenge. I can't justify riding two days out of the weekend on all day rides and there were only two weekends prior to the main event, and on the 2nd weekend in this time frame was a ride I really did not want to miss (more on that in the...

Way early on a Wednesday morning on the first day of the new year, I'm waiting and shivering in a shopping center parking lot along with 47 other riders. We're all there to ride the Davis Bike Club's (DBC) First Chance 200km brevet which will take us from the western edge of Davis, itself on the western edge of the great Central Valley up through the Vaca Mountains over to Calistoga where we'll retrace our steps back to Davis. Earlier in December the Bay Area had experienced a longish stretch of really cold weather and on this day it seemed to have come back for a curtain call. Despite wool gloves under my cycling gloves my hands are painfully cold on the first few miles out. Out of the parking lot, the pace was very sedate and only gradually picked up. I had made my way up to the front of the first group and hung around there, sitting in comfortably (pace wise) with the group. My very first ever brevet, save for a team event the prior year was a DBC 200km in March ...

Quite some time back, I created this blog as a place to record my progress in getting prepared for PBP 2011. The title of course refers to the distance I attained in my attempt at PBP in 2007, which is the distance from the start to Loudeac where I had to abandon the ride owing to a host of issues. The most asked question in late August, early September of 2011 that I answered was 'Are you going to change the title of your blog?' I did not as you can see, and I kept at it, though at a reduced rate of postings. PBP 2015 is drawing near and I have been committed to riding PBP 2015 since before I got off the plane when returning from France in 2011. I've been at work preparing to return and participate in 2015 in a host of different ways, and for 2014 it will be a foundation year. I've let a few people know that I am trying to take a run at the K-Hound award, which will require me to complete 10,000km in RUSA events in the calendar year. In laying out my brevet season, I s...