Mike's Bike Blog

I'm not sure if this is a written rule but crashes usually happen in 3's, celebrity deaths happen in 3s. My last 3 rides fell to this pearl:

Sunday
First thing in the morning Jack and I got out for an hour of pace line work and decending drills. After that I was going to ride for another hour. I headed out on Limecreek Road towards Volente Beach. 2 Miles into it I hear a loud pop and the hiss of the air being released from my back tire. Upon inspection my tire had a severe blowout. I booted the tire with a dollar bill and changed the flat and rode home. That evening at the boys' soccer practice I changed out the tires with a set of Hutchinson Fusion tires I've had for awhile and got a 20 minute ride in.

Monday
This day will probably be remembered as Chaingate from the Tour de France. The day Andy Schleck lost the yellow jersey when his chain came off. I had my own chain issue. I had the TT bike and was planning on doing a 45 minute Sweet Spot interval (SST) which starts at the base of Courtyard and up City Park Road and down to Emma Long Park and then back up City Park and finally up the backside of Courtyard and finishes at the top. I was making my way up and was on the final part where it kicks up to around 20% grade when I hear a click and see the shifter for the rear derailleur move! Since I was out of the saddle when this happened the unexpected shift caused me to fall forward a bit. In the mealy I didn't realize the chain had came off so when I sat back down and started to peddle I got 3 or 4 spins in until I realized what the lack of resistance meant. By the time I realized the chain was off I didn't have time to unclip and braced myself for impact. There was no support vehicles for a bike swap nor any fans to give me a push so I had to go down a little on the hill and go back up. With the phantom shifting I decided not go up City Park cause if it happened again I didn't want to risk rolling into traffic and getting run over.

Tuesday
Still had the TT bike and was going to get a full 40 minute SST workout in but was going to play it safe and doing 40 minutes of down and backs on a 1 mile stretch of road on Rivercrest Dr. For this type of workout I'll usually do Bunny Run Road, which also runs parallel to Capitol of Texas Hwy and is right behind BreakingPoint Systems.  The nice thing about Rivercrest is it's a little flatter then Bunny Run and offers more shade. The downside is the road is much narrower and on some days there's too much day worker traffic (landscapers/construction, etc). I usually give it a ride as a warmup to gauge the amount of traffic and if it's light will ride it or go back up Hillbilly to Bunny Run. Today, the traffic was really light and was a perfect setting for a 40 minute SST interval. 10 minutes into it as I was approaching the turnaround point a truck that was parked on the left side of the road, facing the wrong direction starts to make a Uturn. I'm approaching at 23 mph and see the impending collision and hit the breaks. There's no way to swerve around him. I'm still not sure how I was able to stop as fast as I did. Instead of hitting him straight on I turned right a bit. I grabbed his big side mirror with my left hand and my bike came to a stop with a small thud against his passenger door. The left side of the handle bars are the only part of the bike that made contact with the truck. The left bar end shifter left a small dent and a scratch. There was surprisingly no damage to the bike, luckily all that happened was the impact caused the front derailleur to shift.

I took the bike into Southwest Cycle Sport and the culprit for the phantom shifting was more than likely a bent derailleur hanger. Peter made some other adjustments and I should be as good as new again. I rarely ever get into the small chain ring on the TT bike but hopefully the next time I try to go up a hill like Courtyard it won't fail me again. Now I'm ready for some good luck after getting the last 3 days out of the way.

Exhibit #1
I like a good April Fools joke, ok I'll be honest I like a good prank anytime. This one I'm about to relay took place back in the late 90's, probably around 1998. I was working as a software developer for a small company specializing in CD-ROM and Web based delivery, at the time it was called multimedia. One of my fellow developers, we'll call her Patty, because that's the name her mother gave her, had a big thing for Tom Cruise.

Nick, also his real name, who did video for the company and myself would like to tease Patty that Tom Cruise was gay. Not that there's a problem if he is or anybody who is, but it seemed to really get under her skin and she would argue viciously almost to a point where blood vessels behind her eyes would pop. Great fun.

Nick was leaving the company, or so we thought, to go to LA or Phoenix to pursue a film career so we wanted a grand finale, a prank of all pranks. This next part might be a little technical but follow along as best you can. I came in early, real early one morning. I set up a DNS server (DNS is what resolves domain names like CNN.com to the actual computer that the files live on, it tells the web browser where to go) on Nick's computer and set up an entry for msnbc.com and pointed it to my computer. At the time and in our office at least MSNBC.com was the place most people went to get their daily news.

On my computer I ran a web server, for local development and I downloaded the front page to msnbc.com and a few of the main articles. Nick and me wrote an article worthy of publication on the coming out of Tom Cruise. As fake news goes this was premo! Now we had a web site that looked like MSNBC.com with our fake news on the front page and when clicked it would take you to the fake story. Nick went around to a few of the computers in the office and set them up to use the DNS server we had set up. Now when these people typed in www.msnbc.com in their browser it would take them to our version.

While Nick was doing this we needed something else to really pull this off. Patty had a little desktop application she had downloaded from MSNBC.com, it would pull the latest news headlines from their site and display it in a small box in the system tray. I quickly replicated this application. I built my own knock off desktop app, and programmed it to pop up with our news story around 10:30, about the time Patty usually got in to work.

The trap had been set and all we had to do was wait and try to keep a straight face. At 10:30 right on cue the application I wrote fires off the notice with the fake headline and with it sends Patty into a screaming fit. At first it was "No, No! I don't believe it!" She instantly started blaming me and Nick like we had some hand in this. She clicked the headline to go to MSNBC.com for the full story and voila the full fake article was displayed. Her acquisitions against us stopped. Coworkers came running into our office area to see what the commotion was. There were skeptics in the crowd, telling Patty that it must have been Nick and me somehow. A group of nonbelievers ran back to the reception area and went to MSNBC.com. That computer was one that we strategically changed the DNS settings on so it to brought them to our fake news server. A silence fell over the crowd of woman. We had crushed many a fantasies that day.

We really had no plan for the second part, the first part really wasn't through through either. So after lunch we changed out the MSNBC.com site with another fake story, this one was 2 men were wanted in questioning for hacking the MSNBC.com website with our pictures.

That was one of my better office pranks. Is it one of my best one? I'll let you be the judge.

Exhibit #2
When I worked at Keller Williams Realty International in their corporate IT department there was a running joke. If you walked away from your computer and left it unlocked somebody would walk by and mess with it. That somebody was usually Kurt. In all my past work environments I wasn't exposed to these types of shenanigans so I would get up and forget to lock my computer. There was the time I walked down the hall to get a VP level executive and other high ranking stakeholders to demo an application I had been working on. You can imagine my dismay when I returned to have my desktop background and everything else set to a teletubby theme. The execs got a good laugh as well as everyone else in IT. At that point I started plotting my revenge. It wasn't going to be simple, Kurt ran Linux so even the times he walked away and left his computer vulnerable all I could do is sit there not knowing how to use Pine to send an email on his behalf, or change any of his desktop. Plus I needed to take it to the next level in hopes to prevent any further pranks.

One night I wrote a little surveillance application, all it did was detect motion on my web cam and record it. Then whenever the mouse or a key was pressed it would mimic the blue screen of death and prompt that it was reformatting the hard drive. I built this as a screen saver with the background that looked like my desktop, so to the unsuspecting fool walking by it looked like my computer was unlocked when it fact it was not only locked but had a booby trap waiting.

For the next week I would leave my computer "vulnerable" waiting for Kurt to jump at the chance to get to his hijinks. For 4 days he didn't take the bait, in fact on the 3rd day he told me how I left my computer unlocked and he could have gotten me big time if he had wanted to. I kind of egged him on in hopes to spur him to. On the 5th day, April Fools day of all days. I caught him in my trap.

When I came back to my cube he and Charles had a worried look and were apologetic. They were worried that they had really messed up my computer. I quickly sat down and reviewed the video. It was quite funny you see Charles in the background acting as a lookout while Kurt is sitting at my computer. You don't see much except the top of his head, but then when the blue screen of death is displayed he backs away from the computer and he has a look of fear and Oh Crap on his face.

I sent out an email, with a link to the video, to all of the IT department to be on the look out for the suspects in the video. I was never pranked again while at Keller Williams. A month or so later, unable to top me Kurt left the company and moved to Switzerland. Charles also departed the company as well. I did have a couple other ideas I could have pulled in case we got into a prank war, I'll keep those in case an occasion ever arises.

So you be the judge, which one is better? Or do you have one that can top these?

Here's a different twist on my lunch ride as I was heading over to Limecreek Road for a 40 minute SST interval when I'm on Anderson Mill warming up. I started to ratchet up my speed a bit. I shift up to the 53T and start to pick up speed. I'm going about 21 mph when I hear someone shouting at me. I look to my left and there's a big truck with the passenger window rolled down and the driver leaning over to yell at me. My first thought was one of despair as I thought for sure this could escalate into a confrontation. However what he says next leaves me stunned. He says "I'm impressed, you're going over 20 mph, Good Job!"

I gave a little chuckle and tell him thanks as he speeds off. So was this a cyclist in a Bubba truck or a real Bubba who's turning over a new leaf?

A couple months back while at the RunFar Time Trial  the Bike Noob asked me why I shaved my legs. I gave the standard roadie reasons about it being easier to clean up after a ride, this is especially so when I ride during lunch in wet weather. I can wipe down and not have dirt and grit encrusted in my leg hair. Getting compression socks on and off is a little easier, no hair pulling. And until recently my best answer was because it's tradition.

That is until recently, a couple months ago while shaving for a race I noticed a lump in my leg. I wasn't too worried about it but would bring it up at my yearly physical with my family Doctor. That appointment was last week, he ordered up an ultrasound of my legs to see what it was.

The ultrasound went down this Friday morning and I'm happy to say that "it's not a tumor", say it again but with a Schwarzenegger accent "it's not a tumor". It turned out to be a blood clot. It wasn't a fresh clot however, it's been in my leg for a little while, not sure if they'll be able to determine how long I've had it. At first my Doctor wasn't too worried about it, he told me to set up an appointment with my Hematologist next week and he ordered a prescription of blood thinners. At this point I was still set to race the next day in the Tour of Austin.

Of course Jennifer wanted to be sure that I was cleared to race, the Doc and me didn't talk whether or not I could race or should be racing so Jennifer wanted the peace of mind knowing that I wouldn't combust out on the road. His Friday office hours ended at 2 so by 2:10 when I called he was gone. Around 4 after much deliberation I called the after hours line and got ahold of him. We talked a bit about it and he said it would be best that I didn't go at race pace, he didn't have a problem with me riding just not at  a threshold heart rate for at least 48 hours while the blood thinners kick in.

I was quite bummed that I wasn't going to race, I had high hopes for it. At least a pack finish anyway. I think the course suited me quite well and I like riding out in the Manda area and have ridden and raced out there before. I was contemplating going out to the race anyway and riding it but taking it easy. That way I would still get credit for the race in my pursuit to upgrading to cat 4. A couple things would happen if I did that, more than likely I would not be able to hold back and would go to hard. The second possibility would be that I would get in the way. In the end I just moped around the house in compression socks.

This week I'll get in to see my Hematologist and see what is going on. I've waited the 48 hours and I've been on a couple harder effort rides, not all out race pace, but enough to not be consider recovery or easy rides.

So without shaving my legs I would have probably never noticed the lump that led to further investigation. Who knows what it could have led to. Now I have a new reason to shave my legs and best of all I've won over Jennifer and she does not have a problem with the shaving tradition any more.

Sorry to those that have noticed the comment spam here the past few days. Hopefully I have nipped it in the bud without limiting legitimate comments.

Last week, the day after my crash my route took me by where I wiped out. I did a little investigating and I am certain it was not water that caused my tires to lose contact with the pavement but a foreign substance. This slick substance could be transmission fluid, brake fluid, oil or some other form of lubricant. I'll know more when the lab results are returned.

The above photos shows the corner where it all transpired and the dashed lines show my path the best as I can recall. Note the dark oily spot in the bottom of the picture, that portion was not there when I went down. At least it wasn't as dark and noticeable. All I recall seeing was the smaller spot where the arrow is that indicates the oil slick that caused me to crash.

Upon hitting the spot indicated by the arrow I instantly went down and proceeded to skid on my right hip and forearm coming to a stop at the double yellow line. The road rash is not a problem, my arm is still tender and if I knock it just right it'll hurt and bleed. The hip is a little swollen and has turned to a nice bruise. The bruise runs from just below my waist down to about 3 inches above my knee. It is by far the biggest bruise I've ever had and I've had some doozies from hockey.

Close up of the spot that caused the mishap. The other tire tracks were not there when I rolled through the day before. I must have rolled through it shortly after it was leaked onto the road. In conclusion, it does not appear to be water that caused the crash like I initially thought. Upon further inspection of the crash site it is apparent that the crash was caused by a lubrication agent put down on the roadway from a car. Further investigation and analysis is in order to rule out foul play. For now I'm just gonna keep riding my bike.

During my workout yesterday (Hill sprints. On 3-5% hill do 5-7 x 8-12 second) I took a nasty fall. I was out on Sprinkle Road, the intersection of Ferguson & Sprinkle has a short hill that averages 2.5%, perfect for the  days intervals. After the 1st interval I went back down and turned left onto Ferguson Lane and then turned around and made my approach back up to ready for the next interval. As I made the hard right turn off of Ferguson Lane onto Sprinkle Road I hit a small patch of water and my tires went right out from under me. In a blink of an eye I hit the pavement with my right elbow and hip. I proceeded to skid a few feet. I quickly jumped up to get out of the middle of the road. The cars there were on Ferguson turning left onto Sprinkle rolled down their window and asked if I was ok, same with a group of cyclists coming down Sprinkle that turned onto Ferguson. So I had quite a large audience to witness my Sprinkle Spectacular.

We're in the middle of a drought here in Central Texas, so how and why was there water on the road? There is road construction going on, it looks like they are extending Sprinkle road so there are construction crews in the field. At the time I started my workout there were 2 vehicles parked in the median at the Sprinkle/Ferguson intersection. When I came down Sprinkle after my first interval one of the foreman in the median had a big jug of water. I speculate that for whatever reason he spit or poured out water onto the road. Thus on my next time through causing my tires to slip when I made the 90 degree turn.

My hip and arm took the worst of the crash, the bike came away unscathed (some minor scratches to the right pedal).  My hip swelled up with a softball sized hip pointer with a little road rash on it for good measure. The worst road rash is from my elbow to the middle of my forearm. It burned a hole in my long sleeve base layer. Surprisingly my Sugoi bib shorts didn't sustain any damage, not sure how that happened.  The entire right side of my leg is sore and I pulled some tendons in my foot in the process as well. Again, nothing major, just some minor hobbling around. In fact I finished the other 6 hill sprints. 

Act fast! Today (8/13/2009) only donate $5 or more to my LiveStrong Challenge page and get a 1 year Deluxe membership to the CertifiateCreator.com web site for free. That's a $45 value! Offer is good on new memberships or renewals for existing members. Like I stated above this is for today only and the offer ends at midnight (MST).

Want to get a membership for you and each of your son or daughter's teachers? Donate $100 or more and I'll set up deluxe memberships for you and each of their teachers. When the school year starts send me their name and email addresses and I'll set them up. Fine print: I'm thinking a 5 pack, please don't try to outfit the entire school with free memberships, as much as I'd like to give it away my family still has to eat. Donate now LiveStrong Challenge.

Tuesday was a recovery day on the bike so I was the navigator for Jennifer while she ran 5.75 miles. While at Mike's Bikes Mike said a local must do ride was the Olympic Discovery Trail. The trail is a bike/hike and horse trail and goes from Port Angeles through Squim down to the casinos in Blyn. The Discovery Trail will be extended out for 150 miles of paved trail from Port Angeles all the way to the Pacific Ocean in La Push. Further development will continue the trail from Blyn to Port Townsend.

I started out early in the morning to ride from Sequim to Port Angeles on the Discovery Bay Trail with Mark's Motobecane road bike. As soon as I made my way down from my mom's place to the trail it started to drizzle. About 5 miles into the ride it turned into a cold rain. I didn't let it dampen my spirits. It did make me chuckle that I had just taken off the fenders. The trail meanders through the woods and crosses many roads and for the most part was great. The only downside was the roads that it crossed as I was attempting to keep up a long effort (8 min) it would break up my workout as I'd have to slow to watch for cross traffic. Plus at these cross sections the trail was not marked so there were times I'd go the wrong way looking to see what direction I had to go. There were times I wasn't sure if it was the trail or a driveway.

There are beautiful bridges and trussels that cross over the Dungeness River that more than make up for any shortcomings. I would suggest if you are out for a workout find another route the Discovery Trail is better for site seeing and a leasurily ride. As the trail approaches Port Angeles it takes your right along the coast line offering seascapes. Once the trail starts to head in from the coast the pavement ends and it turns to rock and gravel. I rode a little bit on this but the rain had made the trail muddy, I opted to turn around and not inflict too much abuse to my brothers bike.

On the way back to Sequim, along the coast a deer was walking the trail, it looked back at me and gave me the look as it started to speed up. I knew exactly what this meant, but unlike Jan, I took the challenge and sped up. He sped up into a full sprint, I was shifting and accellerating as well. He dashed to the left and off the pavement onto a hill. I was gaining on him as I looked up to see him. He thought he would run down the hill he was on and cut me off but I had made up the ground and he looked surprised to see me right there with him. In defeat he applied the breaks and and ran back the other way.

I didn't ride the entire trail back, instead I got back on one of the surface roads that would take me back. Riding Old 101 Highway was much faster as I could maintain 20+ mph and not have to stop at all the cross sections.

Stats:
Duration:      2:53:02 (3:10:23)
Distance:      43.106 mi
Elevation Gain:        3610 ft
Elevation Loss:       3499 ft
Grade:         0.0 %  (111 ft)
        Min    Max    Avg
Heart Rate:      30    62    37     bpm
Speed:           0    41    14.9     mph
Pace             1:28    0:00    4:01     min/mi
Altitude:        22    406    184     ft

On Monday (07/06/2009) we drove the 65 miles from my brother's house up to my parent's place in Sequim, WA. For Monday's ride I didn't venture out too far. I mainly used the hill outside of my parent's retirement community to do 9 intervals of 3 minutes up with 2 minute recoveries between each. I only had my Doug's mountain bike so I had to do the intervals by feel. I think I was able to hit my power levels, I know on the last few it was slipping as I was having trouble getting back to the same end spot on the hill that I was reaching in the earlier sets. I did have several spectators looking on in the form of deer. There were 6 or 7 deer in a few of the yards the lined the hill. After the intervals I rode up to Happy Valley Road over to River Road (runs along the Dungeness River) and down River road to almost Highway 101 and turned around.

What's really surprising was the amount of climbing on this ride. The intervals added up along with the hill on Happy Valley on the return, 4343 feet of climbing!

Stats:
Duration:      1:18:30 (1:20:26)
Distance:      16.03 mi
Elevation Gain:        4343 ft
Elevation Loss:       4294 ft