Declan's Blog

Elaine and i just finished up trying out the Taste of Adams and had a few reflections:

When we started researching the event, there were 2 different dates referenced on web sites. In fact, the Blind Lady mailed out that they had confused the date too.

The tickets cost $25 each, but Mercedes found a $5 off deal. Still, the ordering site added a $2.50 processing fee, so that kinda sucked. For what we got, we think it was over priced by about $10.

Parking was about the same as normal for Adams, so about 5 mins of hunting side streets. The ticket booth was quick, with laser zappers that read the 2D barcodes nicely. Then we got a necklace badge with numbers that some of the vendors punched, I guess so you didnt come back for another whole bite of soy chorizo burrito.

We started at Blind Lady – a slice of nicely spicy margherita pizza. Then we hit Mariposa ice cream and they were very generous with two scoops of whatever they had. The Mexican chocolate was great! Next was Tams Thai which had a line too long to wait for so we skipped it. Next was Gold Donuts. They gave you a piece of a donut or fritter, or 3 donut holes for yer card punch. That was actually a pretty nice portion and fulfills my donut needs for the next year.

Then we met up with our buddies Kay Marie and Gerardo, and headed back in the other direction. Country Kabob Greek had some steam tables on the sidewalk with a tiny piece of pita with really spicy yogurt, and a bite of yummy spanikopita. Portions too small, but very tasty.

Lestats had iced coffee and brownie bites. Elaine liked the coffee, I never touch the stuff. The brownie was fine – kinda dry. Then we ran back across the street to TAO Thai and had some nice spicy tofu and a great chicken in some sweet sauce with mixed wild rice. No skimping on the portions here! They even had a mini dessert with mochi and bean curd. Right next door was Viva Pops! where they make their own Popsicles. The blood orange was yummy, and the girls said the chocolate banana was great too.

Elaine really liked El Zarape – rice, beans, carne, and chicken. Then a nice margarita shot! Well be back! Then we walked all that off and stopped into Incredible Cheesecake where I think they gave us a wafer thin hint of a smell of a taste of some cheese cake. Really chintzy.

Next was Jaynes Gastropub, who did the best job of all of the venues to treat us as more than a bother. We were seated and served bangers and mash. The portion was tiny, but we liked the service and the friendly people. We stayed a bit and ordered some beers to keep our strength up. Senior Mango was next, and I had a berry smoothy that was a nice size. None of the others had been inside AC Lounge before, so we popped in and were greeted very warmly by the bartender. They were serving half off drinks, but we were worried about running out of time, so we pressed on.

We skipped Twiggs because of time and tried Cafe 21. They had some dried out hash on dried out bread crumbs on a tray. Quite meh. Then we jumped on the trolley, which was a really nice part of the event, and went to the Farm House Cafe and had ricotta pancakes in a butter sauce with oranges. Very rich and tasty!

The trolley driver was cool and let us take our food on board so we didnt have to wait another 10 mins for the next bus. One of my main goals was to get to Ponces, someplace Ive heard great things about, so we rode the trolley all the way to the other end of Adams to Kensington. This was about 2:40, so we had 20 mins until the end of the event.

We tried out the Kensington Cafe, which had really nice people staffing sidewalk steam tables, but served up a minuscule bite of the aforementioned soy chorizo. Double meh. Burger Lounge had a 5 minute wait while they whipped up some more food, so we skipped it and hit Bleu Boheme. My old buddy JenBen was hosting and directed us back to a gentleman serving escargot in a rich sauce. Id never had them, and they were kinda like mussels or salty, chewy mushrooms with a slightly grainy texture. Oh, and they were snails… So that was different. I liked the place and the vibe tho.

Finally, with 10 minutes to spare, I get to try out Ponces!!! But no, theyre rejecting people at the door saying they ran out of food. WTF? How the hell do you run out of food? Youre a restaurant! The snails didnt leave a bad taste, but Ponces sure did. What a shitty way to treat people.

So, all in all, it was a nice event but many of the venues didnt do themselves any favors by being cheap on the offerings.

EDIT: Awesome! Kitchen just posted the Garmin log:

http://connect.garmin.com/activity/36057011

Time: 07:22:09
Moving Time: 06:02:09
Elapsed Time: 07:22:11
Avg Speed: 12.9 mph
Avg Moving Speed: 15.8 mph
Max Speed: 32.8 mph

I survived my second century ride, the LA River Ride!

That’s 100 miles on a bike… and I’m feeling all of them today 🙂 I really should have taken the day off of work, but I didn’t know I was riding before my Monday had already filled up with meetings. I was going to pass on this ride until I remembered that my buddy Tom lives right next to Griffith Park in LA where the ride begins. Tom and Jen just had a new arrival 7 months ago, Charlie:

Charlie’s the pudgy one with short hair… 😉 He’s a delightful kid who was a lot of fun to play with. So’s Tom! Sorry, Jen, I didn’t get a good picture of you… 🙂

Anyway, they let me crash on their couch on Saturday night after another buddy, Terri, cooked us a wonderful pasta dinner.

Sunday came too soon and I was up at 5am with cool SMSs from work friends wishing me well. I got outside and started putting the bike together:

then waited for Kitchen to show up. Of course, he set his alarm wrong and was way late, so I biked the 2 miles over to the park alone to get my registration materials.

The ride was well organized and I had my bracelet and cue sheet within minutes. On the ride over, I’d noticed that my bike computer was dead, so I borrowed a way-too-big screw driver and got it open in about 20 minutes. It all worked when I shifted the battery around, then promptly died again when I snapped it back into its holder. Damn computers… Kitchen has a fancy pants Garmin bike computer, so I’m counting on him to give me the route and all the stats. Well, I should say he SHOULD have one, but he left it in his car, so when he showed up at 7:30, we picked it up as we started the ride:

Then we were off on this almost totally flat 100 mile ride! Except they forgot to tell us that the first 4 miles was a climb up the big hill in Griffith Park. That got the heart pumping, especially Kitchen’s as he was riding his brand new fixed gear bike! He had to zig zag up the hill, but he make it! Throughout the ride, people were very impressed with his bike and the effort. They didn’t know he had a motor hidden in the tubes… 🙂 not.

Once we were through the park, we got on the river path:

The LA River is a concrete bank with water running at the bottom. It runs for miles and makes for a great bike path, but man, it’s kinda ugly. In some places, enough silt has backed up to support trees and bushes. I was surprised how much bird life I saw. Sand pipers, some kind of white hawk, kestrels, and ducks. It might be an interesting place to go up and photograph. I’ll have to go learn about why it was built the way it was. At the very least, many parts of it are a lesson in why to think about aesthetics when you design a city.

There are a lot of scary creatures in there too:

I liked these bridges:

As a spoiled San Diegan, I mostly find LA pretty ugly:

but Seal Beach was pretty nice:

Long Beach was the halfway point:

A mess of bikes:

Friggin’ hipster:

More riding:

More posing:

Then finally, after seven hours, it’s over!!!

Time to grab the tshirt and go find a shower!

I got some great support on Twitter and Facebook! Thanks for that!

I just got a 3G iPad for work and Ive been keeping some notes about things I like and dont like. This is the Fail post and Ill be adding more as I learn.

a href=http://www.declan.net/2010/06/02/things-i-love-about-the-ipadClick here for the Love post./a

Cant copy from a pdf to use a snippet in an email
Cant edit a photo as much as aperture – not a surprise
Jumping from app to app is jarring
Sharing the device is very difficult – a passworded badge screen would be cool
Is there really no tab key?
To get this list to my blog, I had to email it from my Notes app and it lost all the carriage returns
When my 3 yr old buddy Sage started using the screen, she had a really hard time not moving the icons she was trying to click. Its like the UI is too slippery and a setting for that for young users might be cool.
In Flickr, I cant double click on a set in Organize view to open it, although i can select the set name as a link. But then I cant click and drag items into the set.
Wordpress app keeps stripping the HTML in my post edits.
Gmail cant show a full graphical email, like flickrs daily updates from contacts.

I just got a 3G iPad for work and Ive been keeping some notes about things I like and dont like. This is the Love post and Ill be adding more as I learn.

a href=http://www.declan.net/2010/06/02/ipad-failure-modes-or-why-i-cant-move-completely-to-an-ipadClick here for the Fail post./a

ul
My photos look great on it
The Wired magazine app is beautiful and shows whats possible with journals
The keyboard works well
Battery life is great – went a whole day of constant use on 50%
Netflix is just wonderful on the device, even in 3G
My 3 yr old buddy Sage mastered the Netflix and iBook interface in about 2 minutes – with some issues Ill put in the other post.
The WordPress app is very smooth. Im using it now. I wonder if itll get me to blog more.
From Samuel Atlan on my Facebook side: you can do a long press on comma to show the apostrophe (just like a long press on a vowel will show accents). Even faster, a quick swipe up from the comma key works too./ul

Elaine and I had dinner out at West Coast Tavern and liked it so much that I wrote a Yelp review.

Click here to read it.

Elaine’s been off in the Midwest for a few days, visiting her Mom. Her flight was delayed a bit, so I headed to one of my favorite views of downtown San Diego which is right across from the airport, and shot this:

I’m pleased! Which is saying a lot… 😉

ED: I’ve gotten a lot of questions about whether this is the sun or the moon. It’s the moon. 😉 I took a really long exposure with a small aperture – that’s what causes the starring of the moon.

Thanks for all the positive feedback! It makes we want to take more pictures. SOME day I’ll even sell one! 🙂

D

To celebrate Mothers Day, we went and picked up the boy at SDSU and went to Ali Baba in El Cajon. We had the 4 Person Feast, and it started with a blanket of bread:

and ended with a trough of lamb, chicken, rice, and so much food that we filled three take home boxes. All for $60! Very good deal. Then we dropped the boy back at school:

and I snapped one more picture:

Gina Trapani had a great post on how to make your own QR Code, so I just had to do it!

I’ve considered riding a century (that’s 100 miles in one ride for my non-biking buddies) for a few years now. There are metric centuries, 100km or about 62 miles – but I’d done that during the Ride Across California. 100 miles as a goal has loomed out there, beyond the edge of what I thought I was capable of. I held that fear until about mile 65 of the ride this weekend. In fact, I wouldn’t even buy the ride jersey before the ride because I seriously questioned if I could finish.

A barcampLA buddy, Jeremy Kitchen, tweeted something out a few months ago about getting ready for the Tour de Palm Springs, an annual bike ride made up of a number of routes. Here’s Kitchen:

The timing was pretty good for me to start thinking about training for their century ride. I ride nearly every weekend, but usually only 20 to 40 miles, mostly with this crew:

Jen, Grace, Peter, Brad, and moi.

I’d need to ramp that up to get ready for the century. I didn’t know if I could do the 8-10 hours on the bike, and I’d never ridden that terrain before. Tracey from work had ridden the course last year and got me some route and elevation info. Here’s the official Tour de Palm Springs route map:

The scary part of any ride is the elevation and how much effort that will take to climb. Here’s the elevation profile for the ride, taken from the awesome Veloroutes site:

So, a lot of climb at the beginning of the ride when my legs will be fresh, followed by a lot of downhill, then a gradual climb to the finish. I was having a hard time comparing it to my hardest regular climb, the 1.6 miles and 440 ft. at the Torrey Pines grade, because the distances are so different, so I started plotting out rides around San Diego with a lot of sustained climb. I combined my regular run from Penasquitos (PQ) and up the coast with a leg inland to Escondido to form a box back to PQ.

View Larger Map

I rode this route the first time just to see if I could do 50 miles without much prep, and it went well. I was dog tired after, but I really didn’t eat or hydrate well. I rode the route again with Peter from work a few weeks later, and it felt good, even with a stop at Churchill’s Pub in San Marcos for a beer and a sammich in the middle! 😉

The thumb is Peter’s. He likes to get into the shot a lot:

That was a ride we did up to Pt. Loma – a fair amount of climb. Peter has a lot of experience with long rides and gave me great advice on ibuprofen and caffeine use to make the ride a lot more tolerable.

I realize I’m writing a lot about the pre-ride, rather than the ride itself so far, but I think that’s appropriate because the only way I survived this ride was because of the preparation beforehand. But, let’s get to the ride itself!

Elaine and I took Friday off to make it a super long Ride, Valentine’s, and President’s Day weekend. Nathan kindly agreed to come home from SDSU and keep an eye on Erin (or vice verse?), so we were free to take off. It’s nice getting old and having kids who can watch each other! 😉 Kitchen was arriving on Friday too, so we got together for a beer and plotted out the ride. Kitchen and I had never ridden together, so I was stressing about slowing him down. I’m a big dude and it takes some time for me to get up hills. He also had another buddy, Mike, who I’d never met, which added another variable to the mix. Elaine and I were staying in Palm Desert, about 30 minutes from the start of the race. Kitchen had gotten a room less than a mile from the start, so we decided to meet in his parking lot in the chilly, 46F morning of the ride.

I had the bike in pieces in the trunk, so I got my pretty hands dirty:

You can see Kitchen has a much heavier, touring bike. He’s getting ready for Ragbrai, a week long ride in Iowa, so he carried a pannier too. Mike also had a heavy bike, so this helped us all keep pace on the initial climbs. We bid farewell to Elaine and biked over for the 7am ride start. There were thousands of riders at the start, so we were let go in waves. We met up with Mike and got released to start at about 7:30a.

I set my trip odometer to zero:

and off we went!

We worked our way out of Palm Springs, crossed the 10, then started climbing and climbing and climbing… 😉 Actually, I train on hills a lot in San Diego, so I felt pretty good. I quickly shed my long gloves, outer shell, and thanked Kitchen for talking me out of wearing the Under Armor shirt I was planning on. I got down to just a jersey and was very comfortable for the rest of the day. Jeremy took a great shot as he passed us at one point:

There were 5 SAG support stops on the ride, and we arrived at the first at the end of the initial climb, at about 15 miles. The support was great on this race! They had water in bottles and big coolers, Chex Mix, peanut M&Ms, fig bars (this IS date country, after all), and an electrolyte drink. Each station was run by very nice people who took great care of us.

I’d been training to continuously eat on a ride this long (ok, I’ve been training for that all my life, but HERE it was appropriate… 😉 ). I’d brought a bunch of gel blocks, both regular and with caffeine, to keep me going. I’d also broken up 8 Trio bars (nuts, fruit, cane juice) into two bags, one of which I put in my newly acquired Novara Quick Draw Bike Pack (it’s just like the Bento Boxes that some of my friends have):

This bag turned out to be great! I wasn’t fishing around in my back pockets for food, and having it in my line of sight kept reminding me to grab a bite every 10 or 15 minutes. I packed WAY too much food, eventually only going through one bag of Trio bar pieces, one normal gel block, and one caffeinated. I kept refilling the Novaro bag at all of the SAG stops with Chex Mix and guilt free M&Ms and this was enough to keep me going. The SAG stop at 50 miles had simple sandwiches so I grabbed one of those and felt no hesitation in slathering it with mayo! 😉

There were a number of routes in the tour, including a 55 miler that my friend Kevin was riding. We met up at the second SAG and I gave him trouble for taking the easy way 🙂 When I finally finished my ride a long while later, he was already home in San Marcos! 🙂

I tried to get 10 or 15 minutes of rest at each SAG stop. I was very worried about running out of steam all of a sudden, so I kept fighting the urge to join fast pelotons as they sped by. I did my best to stay with Kitchen and Mike to make sure my pace didn’t wear me out, but I have to admit that the downhills were too enticing to hold back. I zoomed on ahead as we neared the 50 mile mark and waited at that SAG station for Kitchen. Mike was still fighting a cold, so he’d faded back a bit and arrived just about as we were to take off again. He hung out at the SAG and we got moving. Mike’s in the back left filling up his water bottles:

I got Jeremy to shoot me being cute:

At the 70 mile SAG, we met up with Elaine in La Quinta and she shot a few pictures:

Mike caught up and then we were off again!

I had 30 miles left and was feeling pretty good. I was dropping ibuprofen every four hours, and I think I’d had half of a caffeinated gel block package. I was feeling almost no fatigue and I wanted to see what I could do. My average speed was about 11 miles per hr so far, but I knew I’d been holding back out of the fear of bonking. After about 5 miles, Mike and Kitchen seemed to be doing great at their pace and I decided to punch it up. We were on a relatively flat part of the route and I started pushing at about 19mph. I got to the 90 mile SAG point,

stopped for a few minutes for water and electrolytes, then zoomed on without stopping until the trip meter on my bike computer said exactly 100.0 and snapped a picture.

Then I wound my way through the rest of Palm Springs to the finish line!

Kitchen joined me soon afterward, and talked some group out of a beer:

Then Mike made his triumphant appearance!

Elaine met us at the finish and got a nice shot of me with the ride tshirt:

Some stats:

Average Speed: 14.1 mph
Max Speed: 36.9 mph
Time in Motion: 7h 10m
Actual Time on the Ride: 9h

Lessons learned:

Don’t overdress. It’s so easy to overheat.
Don’t carry so much food. Or rather, become very familiar with exactly what will be provided on the ride.
Don’t be intimidated by scary elevation charts. Ok, this ride isn’t all that strenuous in terms of climb, but I almost let the chart scare me out of trying.
Top-tube-mounted bags are awesome, even if they look kinda dinky. I kept my engine running at top speed from just nibbling out of the bag every 10 – 20 mins. It scares me to think how often I’ve done that riding a couch rather than a bike.
Get a room closer to the start of the race. The morning logistics meant I had to get up 45 minutes earlier than needed.
If a ride has thousands of riders, don’t sweat the 7a start time. It’s ok to be a little late.
Unless you’re going for performance, don’t be at the front of the pack. I was amazed by how many people I saw pulled off to the side, changing tubes. I was also happy there was a huge crowd ahead soaking up road debris 🙂
Tweet out your progress. I got wonderful support in real time from Twitter and Facebook as I was riding! Thanks folks!!!
Get a small camera that can go on the bike. I should have more pictures, but the iPhone camera mechanisms are a joke when you’re on a bike.
If the ride is in Palm Springs, bring your own beer. Man, that town suffers from the lack of craft brews. Babe’s BBQ is a notable exception, and the Tap Room had Dogfish Head 90 Minute and Spaten Optimator. Their parking lot was impossible tho.
Ibuprofen is your friend. Before, during, and after the ride.

One more picture!

There was a rogue photographer (Stevesphotos.org), my favorite kind!, on the ride who got this image: