In addition to the HUI-VUI, I’ve discovered another thing that happens every six years: I purchase a new GPS bike computer. In this case, we’re talking the Garmin Edge 840 Solar, which I picked up last month after it came out back in April. A new GPS head unit is a really big deal for someone who spends as much time in the saddle as I do.

The Garmin Edge 840 Solar

Before diving into the new unit, let’s look at how far we’ve come. I first used a GPS to log bike rides waay back in 2000, using Garmin’s original yellow eTrex handheld, but the tech back then was so primitive that it didn’t have maps or routes or points of interest; just a blank monochrome 64 x 128 pixel LCD with a breadcrumb trail of where you had gone, and even that initially suffered from “Selective Availability”: an intentional inaccuracy imposed by the government on civilian GPS signals. Six years later I grabbed an eTrex Vista (my review), which had finally added color and some very rudimentary maps. In 2011 Garmin released the cycling-specific Edge 800, then 2017’s Edge 820 (my review), and this year’s Edge 840.

Along the way, I’ve watched these units evolve into incredibly useful and sophisticated navigational and analytical tools. Garmin updates their cycling products about every three years, so I’ve usually skipped a generation (e.g., the Edge 810 and Edge 830). So when I buy a new unit, there are some substantial improvements and compelling new features to check out.

And by that point, my old unit is usually pretty worn out. That was certainly true of my loyal old Edge 820. To begin with, its touch screen – a novelty at the time – was very sluggish, and the processor took forever to calculate routes or pan and zoom the map display. And the Micro USB connector was outdated technology from the start. After a few years the screen faded significantly, leaving a prominent grid of its LCD guts showing through its faint display. And its battery life – originally billed as lasting 15 hours – had shrunk to about 90 minutes. These were the shortcomings that I expected the new Edge 840 to fix.

With that, let’s look at the new beast. As always, I’ll divide this review into four sections: things I’m neutral about; features I don’t know much about because I didn’t test them; features I’m excited about; and the things that already disappoint me. With an executive summary at the end.

The Neutrals

My main display: speed, distance, with power and heart rate charts

My main display: speed, distance, with power and heart rate charts

One of the most noticeable changes is a revamped UI. It works fine. Its organization of functions isn’t 100% intuitive. And it’s still based on “activity profiles” rather than gear, which has always seemed a bit clunky to me.

The unit also supports phone-based configuration. I really don’t see a ton of value in that over configuring the unit on a computer or the device itself.

Potentially useful features include alerts for upcoming sharp turns and high-speed roads. But the high-speed road alerts arrive way too late to be actionable (e.g. navigating to avoid them). And the last thing you want when speeding around a sharp turn is having to read and dismiss an alert popping up on your head unit. They’re nice ideas, but not practical (at least not with the current implementation).

An unexpected surprise was that when following a route, the GPS can now have your phone verbally announce navigational cues as you approach them. “In fifty meters turn right on Mesa Drive.” Another cool idea, but they’re just not intelligible when your phone is stuffed into a jersey pocket on your back.

The unit can also walk you through a heart rate variability stress test. This isn’t for general health purposes, but for telling you how well or poorly you have recovered from your previous rides. That’s not something I need to wait around for three minutes for a device to tell me.

The Cycling Ability feature can tell you what your general cycling strengths and weaknesses are, as a very gross training aid. Garmin doesn’t add much value by telling me that I’m an endurance specialist.

Same with their measurement of heat acclimation. A simple percentage is way too simplistic to be of any actionable value.

Another hamstrung feature is showing the battery status for all your sensors (e.g. heart rate monitor, electronic shifters, power meter), where you really need more discrete battery levels than “okay” and “dead”.

There’s also a ton of features that I don’t really care much about, but you might. But to be honest I really don’t have any opinion about things like incident detection, structured training plans, mountain biking metrics, hydration alerts, an integrated bike alarm, lost device finder, etc.

The Unknowns

It might surprise you that I didn’t bother testing the unit’s integration with my indoor trainer. But the only useful function that provides would be the ability to simulate the gradients of riding a known real-world course, which isn’t as engaging as riding in the richer worlds on Zwift.

The Power Guide feature gives you a plan for specific power numbers to match when following a particular route. Just not something I’m likely to want.

Same story with the Event Training Plan feature. I hate structured training and already know how to build and taper for a major event. Not something I need, and not something I’d look to a head unit to provide.

There’s also the new and very promising Group Ride feature, which lets groups of riders share their route, in-ride messages, and live map with everyone’s location. This sounds like a really awesome feature if a critical number of rides and riders adopt it, although it’s limited to Garmin’s most recent units. It’s only in my “Unknowns” section because I haven’t had any opportunity to test it out.

The Positives

My customized boot screen

My customized boot screen

Solar power gain, showing 71 minutes gained over a 9-hour ride

Solar power gain, showing 71 minutes gained over a 9-hour ride

ClimbPro displaying map, elevation profile, current grade and power

ClimbPro displaying map, elevation profile, current grade and power

Real-Time Stamina, estimating 21% or 17km remaining before bonking

Real-Time Stamina, estimating 21% or 17km remaining before bonking

Let’s start with the basics: critical things my Edge 820 did that the 840 still does. I can still download my activity FIT data files to my laptop, as mentioned above. It still communicates with my Di2 electronic shifting and displays what gear combination I’m in. I can still capture screen shots, as you can see at right. I can still set the text that appears on the startup screen. And you can still charge it from a portable USB battery while using it. Good!

Then there’s things that aren’t new, but are features the Edge 840 has improved upon. Starting with the most important improvement: battery duration is now listed at 32 to 60 hours! The touch screen is so much more responsive that it’s actually usable now! Panning and zooming maps is reasonably quick! Calculating and re-calculating routes takes a second or two instead of five to ten minutes! Adding the GNSS GPS system improves GPS accuracy in cities and other challenging areas! And while my old unit would show alerts when calls or text messages came in, the 840 also shows email and all other phone notifications! Very nice!

The passive solar receiver adds around 8 to 10 minutes of extra power per hour in Texas sun, which might not be a huge deal for folks in cloudier locales, and there’s a data page showing the unit’s solar efficiency. Even I debated buying the non-solar model when I learned that the special glass makes the solar screen a little less bright, but it seems fine, and way better than my old, faded Edge 820.

On the topic of charging, we’ve finally made the transition from a MicroUSB to a USB-C charging & data port!

One of the highlights of the new interface is a home screen with “Glances”, little UI widgets that summarize important information and link to the most frequently-used functions. For example, there’s a Weather Glance that shows current conditions and clicks through to a dedicated weather page. And the Navigation Glance will show and give you one-touch access to the route you most recently downloaded onto the unit.

But by far the most massive UI enhancement is the widespread addition of graphical data fields! Heart rate and power are no longer a single number, but also time-series charts that are color-coded for intensity. Solar power, route elevation and gradient, and several other data fields can be shown as color graphs that encapsulate a ton of information in a small screen factor. Very cool!

One special application of charts is the new Climb Pro page. When you begin a climb, a new page pops up to show your current power, how much longer the hill is, its current slope, and a chart that shows where you are on the climb, and color-coded undulations of how steep it gets over its entire duration. It’s a very handy little tool for managing your effort, especially on long or steep ascents.

And if you need to manage your effort over an entire long ride, the Real-Time Stamina page is a great new feature. It uses your history to estimate what percentage of your total endurance you’ve used up – and therefore how much you still have left in the tank – and what that translates to in terms of time or distance until you hit the wall and your performance plummets. This sounds like a gimmicky pseudo-feature, but on my recent 100-mile Livestrong ride, it accurately foretold that I’d run out of juice about 30 km before the finish.

I could have included this in my “enhanced features” above, but it deserves its own paragraph: enhanced text message functionality. On my old Edge 820, when replying to someone’s text message, I could only pick from a pre-set list of 8-10 basic canned responses. Now there’s about three times as many canned responses. And you can customize them in their mobile app. And you can add emoji. And the Holy Grail: you can even compose your own responses on the fly, using the on-device keyboard! Finally Garmin no longer artificially limits me to replying with “Yes”, “No”, or “Almost there”!

The Negatives

The most obvious and glaring negative is that the meager screen resolution (246 x 322 pixels) hasn’t increased. It’s not a huge issue, but a higher resolution display would improve my perception of the unit a great deal.

Garmin advertises a cool feature that will tell you your “fitness age” based on your measured physiology. Why is that a negative? Because you don’t get that piece of data unless you buy both a connected scale and wear a 24-hour fitness watch that’s paired to their central database. Garmin advertising this feature as available on their bike computer is completely misleading.

While I haven’t sussed out exactly which features require it, the bike computer will nag the user to not only install but keep Garmin’s smartphone app open and running in order to take advantage of certain online features (IIRC things like current weather, voice navigation, text messages, and phone notifications).

The only true malfunction I’ve experienced is that a distance alert I set failed to trigger on my recent 100-mile Livestrong ride. Unfortunately, I’ve only done one century ride, so this isn’t something I can test very often!

Finally, the unit often hangs whenever I disconnect it from a cable connection to my laptop. It’s recoverable, and most people probably don’t do this very often, but I download my activity data file after every ride, so it’s a big annoyance for me. Aside from the fact that the unit shouldn’t hang under normal operating conditions to begin with!

The Bottom Line

Six years ago, I was disappointed after buying Garmin’s Edge 820. After defining and owning the GPS bike computer market, they released an underwhelming product that was unimaginative, behind the times, and deeply flawed. As a result, more agile competitors like Wahoo and Hammerhead eagerly and justifiably took major chunks out of Garmin’s once-dominant market share.

Garmin seems to have learned their lesson. The Edge 840 has improved on several old features and introduced a raft of new functions. I’m genuinely excited by the improved UI and graphical data fields, the passive solar charging, ClimbPro, Real-Time Stamina, the enhanced SMS capabilities, and the potential of the Group Ride features. Assuming they figure out the missing distance alert, my only knock on it is the meager screen resolution; but that’s still markedly brighter and more responsive than my old, fading 820’s terrible display.

Am I happy with it? I’m delighted! While it’s not perfect, the Edge 840 is a tremendous improvement over my old 820, with far fewer built-in flaws.

I’m an old man. I’m not gonna set any speed records (aka Strava KoMs) on the melty-sweltery streets of south-central Texas. Especially in a city full of amateur and pro racers like multiple and current Tour de France participant Lawson Craddock.

However, what I can do is ride frequently, and if you’re the person who has ridden a road segment more often than anyone else in the previous 90 days, Strava recognizes you with their “Local Legend” award (aka LCL).

Looking back from the top of Ladera Norte

Looking back from the top of Ladera Norte

So with few century-length rides happening in the unrelenting convection oven heat of summer in Texas, and needing some kind of cycling goal to motivate me, I decided to try to win the LCL on one of Austin’s most notorious hills: the kilometer-long, 100-meter, 16%-max climb up Ladera Norte, where the aforementioned Lawson Craddock holds the fastest ascent.

My first introduction to Ladera Norte (Spanish for ‘North Slope’) was during our apartment-hunting trip last Thanksgiving. We had just completed our second viewing of the house we would eventually lease, and took some time to drive around and explore the neighborhood. Just three kilometers from the house, we randomly turned at a sign for “North Cat Mountain” and up a slope that immediately reminded us of the ludicrous hills back in Pittsburgh, like maybe Hazelwood Ave. It was a huge eye-opener.

Becoming the Local Legend on it wasn’t gonna be an easy task. Not only is it a challenging climb, but the guy who held the title had ridden it over 30 times. I’d have to climb that beast more than once every three days, for three months straight! During… wait for it… June, July, and August.

So I added the climb to the start of my short one-hour recovery ride loop and started doing it as often as I could tolerate. By riding first thing in the morning, I could avoid Austin’s daily 40° C heat, although it gets unpleasantly humid overnight. Doing this route so often really limited my other riding, but I wasn’t planning on many long rides in that heat anyways. Riding straight out to the climb, over the top, then cooling down with my recovery loop became my not-quite-daily ritual.

Because I was riding the same route so often, I became the LCL on a number of other segments along my route: No Hills Drive, Mesa, Greystone, Bull Creek, Hancock. And, eventually… Ladera Norte!

After much repetitive climbing, I finally stole the LCL on July 30th. Having done 30 climbs over 65 days, I’d completed nearly one ascent every other day for 9½ weeks. Mission accomplished, at least temporarily.

See, when you take the LCL from someone, Strava sends them an email letting them know. So the next question was whether the former LCL was in the mood to go out and immediately take it back from me.

It’s been a week since I took the title, and he hasn’t made any attempt to catch up. Meanwhile, I’ve done a few more reps, and our current tallies are 33 to 27. So it looks my status as the Local Legend on Ladera Norte is somewhat secure.

Which means it’s time for me to switch goals, and that’s something I need to do anyways.

Five weeks from today I will be doing my first Livestrong Challenge, which is also my first attempt at a 100-mile ride in Texas, and my first century on the new bike: Pæthos. If I keep doing these dinky 26km morning rides, there’s no way I’ll be prepared to tackle 100 miles, so now I’m changing my focus to: getting lots more kilometers under my belt, and getting better acclimated to the extreme heat of high noon in Texas. Wish me luck!

And of course if you can, it would be wonderful if you expressed your support via a donation to the Livestrong Foundation, which supports cancer survivors. You can do that on my LC rider page: https://give.livestrong.org/ornoth

Thanks for being with me!

Cyclists come in many flavors: roadies, commuters, mountain bikers, racers. Then within the ranks of roadies, you have sprinters, climbers, all-rounders, endurance riders, and more.

It might sound odd then that after such a long time—exactly 1,000 weeks, in fact—I still struggle to find where I fit in that spectrum.

Cycling Roman legionnaires

It’s obvious I’m not a sprinter. My top-end power is perfectly described by the term “pedestrian”.

Does that mean I’m a climber: a grimpeur, as they say? Not if you judge by my build, or my performance in the Dirty Dozen! True climbers are much lighter than my (reasonably scrawny) 77kg, and usually much shorter, too. My best strategy for becoming a climber involves losing 6kg of weight and nine inches of height by cutting my head off at the neck.

But I do drop people on short, steep climbs. Perhaps that makes me a puncheur. Tho to be honest, rolling hills wear me out and leave me more exhausted than any other kind of terrain.

I might be a rouleur, an all-rounder: another word for someone who sucks equally at all elements of the sport. Not exactly a flattering image to have of oneself.

Fifteen years ago, I considered going down the very, very, VERY long road to becoming a randonneur: a long-distance rider. I enjoy spending a day in the saddle as much as anyone, but for a randonneur, 125 miles is the shortest ride they’ll do. Their normal rides run 250, 375, or 750 miles at a time, and sanity (at least my sanity) has its limits!

But enjoying (moderately) long rides is what defines me as a cyclist. The label “endurance cyclist” would fit perfectly, except that an “endurance ride” might be 400 miles for a randonneur, or maybe just 30 miles for a casual rider. That’s so vague that the title “endurance cyclist” is essentially meaningless.

I define an endurance ride—and the type of ride I enjoy—as 100 to 125 miles (200km). The ride that matters to me most is the 100-mile imperial century. That’s what I do, what I enjoy, and how I judge my success. So if I were to give myself a label, it would have to reflect that.

That’s where things have stood for the past twenty years: no real resolution, and no real identity. But last week I was thinking… If the sport didn’t provide me with a category, maybe I should come up with one myself. What word would convey the idea of a person with an affinity for centuries?

Once I thought about it, the answer was pretty obvious: a centurion!

By leveraging the common term for a 100-mile ride, it’s instantly recognizable among cyclists, denoting a long-distance cyclist while removing the ambiguity associated with “endurance riding".

It also has the positive connotations of a warrior—strength, experience, self-discipline, and leadership—which translate equally well to cycling.

So if you ask me what kind of rider I am, I can finally answer you: I’m a centurion!

I’ll admit it: I respond well to gamification, whether that’s keeping my streak of consecutive days of meditation alive on Insight Timer or—more pertinent to this forum—my indoor cycling on Zwift.

This fall Zwift added 25 new achievements to their existing set. The new ones are based on completing specific routes, which earn both an achievement badge as well as bonus experience points. A sucker for XP, I recently finished completing the entire set.

Of Zwift’s known cycling achievements, I’ve earned 57, leaving 7 badges that I’ve yet to achieve. And therein lies the rub.

Liftoff badge

One of them is simply a matter of time. Once you’ve climbed Alpe du Zwift—Zwift’s in-game copy of France’s Alpe d’Huez—25 times, you earn the “Masochist” badge. It’s a tough climb, but no problem there; I’ve already ridden it 11 times.

The second badge is too stupid to consider: the “Everest" badge for climbing the height of the world’s tallest mountain in a single ride. That’s the equivalent of nine Alpes back-to-back, which would probably take me more than 15 hours. That’s not fun; that’s just flat-out stupid.

Four of the remaining badges have to do with sprinting power. I’m no sprinter, but I’ve already earned the 500, 600, 700, and 800 watt badges; however, there are additional ones for hitting 900, 1000, 1100, and 1200 watts. I might conceivably earn the 900W badge, but it’d require a lot of force, shaking the trainer and possibly damaging my bike. But beyond that, I’m okay admitting I’ve never been capable of sprinting that hard.

And then there’s the final badge—the one that really irritates me—the “Liftoff” badge (above) that you earn for climbing the Alpe du Zwift in less than 60 minutes.

As of today, I’ve made 11 ascents, with an average time of 69 minutes and a best time of 62m46s. I’ve tried really hard, and come tantalizingly close.

It takes about 3 W/kg to break 60 minutes. At my weight, that means sustaining 230W for the whole hour. But my FTP—which is literally my maximum sustainable power over an hour—ranges around 200 to 220W. Unless I somehow get 5% stronger without gaining weight—or reduce my weight by 6% without losing any strength—the numbers unequivocally state that I cannot break the 60 minute barrier. Neither of those options are particularly feasible, and I’m not getting any younger here, folks.

And it’s pissing me off. I have no problem letting go of ludicrously stupid goals like Everesting; and I’m not bothered by challenges that are categorically impossible for me, like (literally) kilowatt sprinting.

But it’s this goal that’s perpetually just out of reach that irks me: something I could have done five or ten years ago, but can’t seem to surpass. It’s just too close to simply let it go and walk away from this particular challenge. So like a cycling Sisyphus, I keep destroying myself by attempting it—on the off chance it might happen—even though I know it will probably remain beyond my ability as an aging cyclist.

Psychologically, there’s a vociferous part of me that just can’t accept that it’s beyond me. I’m frustrated as hell; not so much because I can’t surpass the challenge, but because I keep listening to that goddamned voice and trying…

Maybe you’re after the “Lift Off” badge for climbing the Alpe du Zwift in under an hour, or maybe you just want to beat your previous best time.

The problem with trying to beat a specific time up the Alpe is that Zwift doesn’t display an estimated finish time, so you can’t pace your effort. Are you falling behind pace and need to increase your effort to get back on schedule? Or are you ahead of pace and able to ease off and conserve your strength? There’s no way to know!

Until now.

Let me introduce you to the AlpenTimer: a simple one-button app that tells you how much of the climb you’ve completed, and estimates your finish time as you round each of the Alpe’s 21 switchback turns. It should format well on most desktop, tablet, and cellphone browsers.

AlpenTimer main screen

As stated on the app, all you need to do is hit the big red button.

First, start the timer by hitting the button as you pass the KOM start marker. THIS IS ABSOLUTELY CRITICAL because ALL calculations are based on your start time, so DON’T GET THIS WRONG!

For a reminder, the KOM start marker looks like this:

Alpe du Zwift KOM start

After that, press the button each time you pass the triangular marker that marks one of the Alpe’s 21 switchback turns. This is how the app knows how far you’ve gone, from which it calculates and updates your estimated finish time.

Alpe du Zwift corner marker

If you’re after the “Lift Off” badge, all you have to do is keep an eye on whether that estimate stays below an hour. Or if you’re chasing a new PB, use whatever time you’re targeting instead. Now you’ll know whether you’re on pace or not, and can adjust your effort accordingly.

If you forget to click on a turn or two, it’s okay. Just click until the button caption reflects the next turn coming up. Your estimated finish time will be accurate again after the next turn where the turn number, the button caption, and your click are all back in sync.

Finally, if you click the button as you pass beneath the KOM finishing arch, the app will display your finishing time.

AlpenTimer finishing screen

It will also show a list of the times you passed each of the switchbacks, in case you want to cut and paste them into a spreadsheet, like this:

Example spreadsheet

That’s all there is to it! Give it a try, let me know if you have any feedback, and good luck nabbing your goal time!

It’s almost time: time for the 2018 Dirty Dozen, Pittsburgh’s signature cycling event, where participants ride up 13 of the steepest streets in this ludicrously hilly city.

After missing out in 2015 and 2016, last year I was finally able to participate, and conquered the official course, to my great satisfaction. However, after a lot of reflection, I’ve decided I won’t be riding again this year.

2018 Dirty Dozen jersey

2018 Dirty Dozen jersey

While last year’s event was fun and a very memorable achievement, it probably was also the most painful ride I’ve ever done. While cyclists often have love/hate relationships with challenging rides, the Dirty Dozen definitely maxed me out on the “hate” side of the equation. Having done it once and earned my finisher’s ribbon, why suffer even more?

Mentally and physically exhausted after last year’s event, I continued to push myself harder than I wanted to in order to complete my end-of-year goal of climbing 250,000 vertical feet. Between those two events, I lost all my hill-climbing desire. Well into 2018’s training season, I was still demoralized, lacking any sort of motivation at all. After making 83 ascents of Dirty Dozen hills in the fall of 2017, I didn’t climb a single one in the following ten months.

In mid-September, I grudgingly did three of the easiest hills and was okay. Although I was behind on training, I began to entertain the remote possibility of doing this year’s ride. Then a couple days later there was one fateful night…

First some background. In my writeup of last year’s race, I described the passage from the top of Logan (Hill #5) down to Rialto (Hill #6) thus: “Just mind the construction zone where half the road has fallen off the side of the cliff into the woods below…”

Well, last February an entire section of that road (Pittview Ave) did indeed “fall off the side of the cliff”, and nine months later it’s still impassable. Since that’s the one and only way down from Logan (short of turning around and gingerly riding back down), there has been talk about skipping Logan this year, and riding some other hill in its place.

Veteran Pittsburgh riders knew exactly the roads to consider: Ferndale and Dornbush, which are equal in difficulty to the hardest Dirty Dozen climbs. One Tuesday evening, when the regular Team Decaf ride leaders were absent, Dirty Dozen marshals Jason and Chris led us down to the East Hills to scout out those two roads. When we got to Ferndale, I looked up at the blatantly stupid slope and immediately knew I wasn’t going to ride this year’s Dirty Dozen. It hurt so much just looking at it, and—like just about everyone else in the group—I was too scared to even consider attempting that climb. No… fucking… way… period.

Still, I missed the camaraderie among the riders, so I decided I’d at least do some of the weekly training rides that lead up to the event. It’s a seven-ride series, where the first four rides each tackle one quarter of the full ride, then two that do each of the two halves of the ride, and the final ride doing the entire route two weeks before the official Dirty Dozen.

The first training ride was nice, doing the first three hills, plus the alternate version of Hill #3, all of which are easy (relatively speaking). I managed. A week later we did Hills 4-7, where I ran out of strength and had to pause for a dizzy spell partway up Burgess before finishing it. I missed the third training ride due to the intense joys of colonoscopy prep, and never resumed them afterward.

So no, I won’t be riding that sadistic sufferfest this Thanksgiving, and given how the season has gone, I’m not terribly surprised or disappointed. Been there, done that, paid the price, and got the finisher’s ribbon. As I said above, why suffer even more? Tho I reserve the right to ride sometime in the future, if my preparation is up to it.

Additionally, by not riding I have my first opportunity to see the race as a spectator. I hope to drive around town, leapfrogging the riders, playing “Event Photographer”. For decades I’ve wanted to shoot some of my favorite rides, but that’s always been trumped by actually participating in each event; but this year is the perfect chance to camp out and get some awesome action shots of a ride I really love… and really, REALLY hate.

So instead of dreading facing the ride or moping for missing it, I’m having fun getting excited about shooting it. Assuming all goes well, my results will be posted around the end of the month!

My second year riding in Pittsburgh somehow felt both pleasantly normal as well as superlative and memorable in so many ways. Overall, I rode a ton, befriended some good folks, grew more familiar with my new hometown, set some new records, met all my goals, vanquished Pittsburgh’s hardest challenge, and had a blast doing so. Here’s my year in review…

Team Decaf group ride at the Point

Team Decaf group ride at the Point, with Ornoth back center

Ornoth crushing a hill

Ornoth crushing a hill on the Escape to the Lake MS ride

Ornoth & Monica finishing the 100k

Ornoth & Monica finishing the Pittsburgh Randonneurs' 100k populaire

Ornoth leading a pack through the city

Ornoth leading a pack through the city during PedalPGH

Ornoth descending Dirty Dozen Hill 6 (Rialto) from the neighborhood of Troy Hill.

Video of Ornoth (in black) amongst a group of Dirty Dozen riders (around 3:02) to the top of Suffolk St.

Great closeup action shot of Ornoth ascending Dirty Dozen Hill 9 (Canton Ave).

Video of Ornoth conquering the upper half of Canton Ave (10:50 to 11:00).

The tired-but-happy look of an official Dirty Dozen finisher!

Ornoth's 2017 Cycling Calendar

My Original 2017 Goals

This time last year, I set four explicit goals for 2017.

Purchase and learn how to use a new Garmin Edge 820 GPS cyclo-computer. This was the first thing I did upon getting back to Pittsburgh in February. The 820 has a lot of new features, some of which actually work. The D-Fly integration with my electronic shifters has mostly worked, despite the added drain on the Di2’s battery, and I’ve enjoyed perusing my shifting data on di2stats.com. I created my own custom data field (feet of ascent per mile) for display on the 820, and got Shimano’s E-TUBE app working such that I can update my shifters’ firmware from my phone. While the 820 didn’t live up to what it should have been, it’s been a steady performer and a worthwhile purchase. Read my full Garmin Edge 820 review.

Ride both days of the 2017 Escape to the Lake MS Ride. My partner Inna’s support made this weekend expedition possible, and it was a lovely experience. Not only did I get to complete the event and finish on the very shore of Lake Erie, but Inna and I stayed and spent an extra day lounging on the lakeside beaches of Presque Isle State Park. It was very reminiscent of my Cape Cod trips with Sheeri back when she supported my Pan-Mass Challenge rides. Read my Escape to the Lake ride report.

Complete the 2017 Woiner Cancer Foundation 3-2-1 Ride. This became a primary goal after I missed the 2016 ride during my mother’s hospitalization. In 2017, they offered a special 80-mile route to VIP fundraisers from 2016 (which I qualified for), so on October 1st I saddled up for a long, chilly, flat ride along the Great Allegheny Passage from Ohiopyle back to Pittsburgh, most of it on crushed limestone rail trail. I enjoyed exploring some new territory while further increasing the amount of money I’ve raised for cancer research. Read my 3-2-1 Ride report.

Attempt my first Dirty Dozen race. Climbing the city’s 13 steepest hills, including the steepest public street in the world, this is an immense challenge, and the city’s most infamous ride. I missed last year’s edition while caretaking my mother, but this year I participated in all the training rides, then enjoyed an immensely fulfilling and memorable ride on race day, earning hard-won lifetime bragging rights. Unquestionably the highlight of the year. See my training rides blogpost, my full Dirty Dozen ride report, and my time-lapse videos of the most difficult hills.

Additional Highlights

Achieving all my explicit goals guaranteed that I had a good year. But there was an awful lot more to 2017 on top of that…

  • Further deferring my job hunt gave me the entire year off to devote to cycling, and I made good use of the opportunity. I topped 4,000 miles for the first time since 2010. And I shattered my record for number of rides per year; this year’s 154 rides is about double number of rides I used to do in Boston.
  • I continued meeting and befriending lots of local cyclists, which has been rewarding, and one of the biggest overall themes for 2017. It’s nice when someone recognizes you, which is happening regularly now, so I’m starting to feel more like a known community member than an unfamiliar outsider.
  • I attended both the Spring Rally and Fall Rally organized by the Western Pennsylvania Wheelmen, and got a snazzy new WPW jersey.
  • I claimed 13 more tags in the BikePGH forums’ Tag-o-Rama cycling and photography game, placing me within the Top 20 players. It’s been an interesting way to learn more about the city. See all my Tag-o-Rama photos.
  • I was quoted (anonymously) in BikePGH’s summary of their survey of cyclists’ attitudes toward self-driving vehicles, and re-quoted in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s article covering the survey. I was righteously amused. Read my self-driving vehicle blogpost.
  • I participated in the National Bike Challenge, confirming that I’m around the Top 10% most active cyclists locally, state-wide, and nationally. Read my National Bike Challenge blogpost.
  • I joined a half dozen other BikePGH forum readers in playing Velogames’ annual Tour de France fantasy league. It was interesting, but my team selections placed me near the middle of the pack. Oh well!
  • I picked up an attractive graphic poster of the “Hell of the North: Paris-Roubaix”, which is hung above my desk at home.
  • I continued to maintain BikingPGH’s Annual Ride Calendar, as I described here, and also iterated on my paper-based cycling wall calendar. Both have been useful planning tools that I’ll continue working on for 2018. Here’s a link to the full size 2017 version.
  • I picked up two absolutely pivotal pieces of kit: a thermal cycling jacket and a pair of thermal full-leg bibs, both from my favorite manufacturer: Craft. Those have utterly transformed my relationship to cold-weather riding, and made even the 17° Dirty Dozen practice ride a pleasant experience.
  • My Strava trophy case added badges for completing climbing challenges and gran fondos for April, May, June, July, and August, plus a gran fondo for October. Ironically, despite training for and completing the Dirty Dozen, as well as my 250,000-foot climbing goal, I failed to earn Strava’s climbing challenge badges for October, November, or December!
  • That 250,000-foot goal, as well as the six centuries I rode in 2017, are highlights that I’ll discuss in more detail in the next section.

The Charthouse

Last year’s annual summary included a chart showing that my first year riding in Pittsburgh utterly shattered all the previous climbing records set during my years in Boston.

In 2017, I eclipsed last year’s record, surpassing a quarter million feet of climbing (47 vertical miles), more than double the climbing I’d ever done back in Boston. My 62 feet of ascent per mile ridden is also a new record. You can see an updated version of that climbing chart by reading my 250,000 foot blogpost.

Also in last year’s summary, I used the Strava Premium and Stravistix TRIMP “fitness and freshness” charts to tell the story of my year and put it into context with previous years, so I’ll do that again here. In 2017 I used the detailed TRIMP charts exhaustively in planning my pre-event training and recovery, which proved remarkably effective.

2017 TRIMP fitness chart

The above chart shows my fitness level over the past twelve months, with major rides highlighted. Obviously, I started the year with zero fitness after spending five months off the bike while caretaking my mother. You see a big jump when I got home in February, followed by a period of consolidation; another jump in mid-April, which kicked off a lengthy and consistent improvement leading up to my first century of the year: the two-day Escape to the Lake MS Ride in mid-June.

After finally notching that first 100-mile ride, my fitness stayed at a high level through my four summer centuries: the Akron Bicycle Club’s ABC Ride in July (a new event to me), followed a week later by the PMTCC 3-State Ride (when my fitness peaked), then August’s Every Neighborhood Ride, and PedalPGH (which were both long group rides that I extended into full centuries).

My fitness dipped noticeably during a two-week vacation in September before a quick spike for my first 3-2-1 Ride on October 1 (a long charity ride that I extended for my sixth and final century of the year).

The next two months were spent preparing for the Dirty Dozen ride, but hill climbs don’t accrue as much fitness benefit as endurance rides, so although I was gaining power, you see a jagged slight downward trend in fitness there. After the Dirty Dozen, my fitness remained high to the end the year, while I polished off my goal of climbing a quarter million feet in 2017.

2011-2017 TRIMP fitness chart

Tacking my 2017 fitness onto the end of the chart to depict my past seven seasons tells the same story in brief: beginning from ground zero, an initial kick, consolidation, and a second kick up to peak fitness. I stayed at a high level of fitness for a much longer time this year, thanks to training for November’s Dirty Dozen and my climbing goal-driven riding in December.

All that late-season riding drives the major difference between 2017’s curve and that of previous years: I’m ending the calendar year at a much higher level of fitness than ever before. Now, whether that will translate to better form next spring is an open question, and will depend on how much riding I do in January, February, and March.

I’m sure there’ll be days that call me outside for a ride, but right now I’ll happily take a couple months to rest and recover.

Goals for 2018

It feels kind of strange, but I’m going into 2018 without any major cycling goals.

Having two seasons under my belt, I’ve done all the new rides that I wanted to experience when I moved here, so I don’t feel like I have any unfinished business that needs particular attention.

I’m happy with my fitness, my equipment, my knowledge of the area, and the relationships I’ve been growing in the local cycling community.

So my overall attitude going into 2018 is: “Nothing specific, but more of the same, please.”

That said, there are a couple things I anticipate for 2018.

With a trip to Italy planned for May, I do hope to do some riding around the Tuscan hills, and hopefully spectate a stage of the Giro d’Italia, as well. That trip would probably be the highlight of my year, and it’s the only new experience I’m specifically targeting.

And there’s a rumor that GCN might be sending a crew to Pittsburgh next year, presumably for November’s Dirty Dozen, or at least a peek at the route. It would be fun to be involved with that somehow, although I’m not relishing the idea of doing that ride again!

And along the way, I’ll pass two milestones on my R2-Di2 bike seen here; I’ll eclipse 15,000 miles on it, which is just a round number, but at 16,800 miles I’ll surpass all the riding I did on my first bike—the Devinci hybrid seen here—reminding me that after five years “the new bike” ain’t quite so new as she used to was.

But other than those things, I’m happy to take 2018 as it comes. If it’s anything like how enjoyable and eventful 2017 was, I’ll have absolutely no cause to complain!

I really don’t know what I was thinking.

Last year’s end-of-year summary included a chart of how much climbing I’d done over each of the past seven years, because after climbing 87,000 to 120,000 feet per year in Boston, my first year in Pittsburgh had tallied a record 190,000 feet. But having been forced to stop riding at the end of September, I added: “If I had ridden at the same pace for the last three months of 2016 I would have broken a quarter million feet.

You can see where this is headed, then? A quarter million feet of climbing in one year. That’s double or triple the climbing I’d done back in Boston. 76 vertical kilometers. Imagine climbing a mountain that stands 47 miles tall. That’s nearly nine times the height of Mt. Everest… Or a third of the way to Skylab’s orbital altitude!

Now take a look at the chart below (click for bigness). The pink (2016) and grey (2017) lines represent my two years here in Pittsburgh, and everything else is from Boston.

2017 climbing chart

My strategy throughout 2017 was to roughly do the same amount of climbing as I’d done at the same point in 2016. I started six weeks “behind schedule” after my exile to Maine, so I spent February through May catching up to my climbing from the year before. Once those two lines converged, I was back on track, and from June through September I mostly just kept pace with my 2016 numbers.

In October and November, my annual climbing goal was back-burnered while I focused on training for the Dirty Dozen. So although I was still doing a lot of climbing, my progress toward 250,000 feet was haphazard and untracked. And I had nothing to compare myself to once I surpassed by 2016 total…

After completing the Dirty Dozen at the end of November, I checked on my progress toward my mostly-forgotten climbing goal, and discovered that I already stood at 226,000 feet. I was still roughly on track to surpass a quarter million feet of climbing.

But I needed another 24,000 feet: an average of 667 feet per day. In the four previous months I’d averaged 905, 570, 785, and 705 feet per day, so it was certainly doable. But it would still take dedication to achieve, especially in the discouraging cold and snows of December.

Furthermore, my legs were shattered after the Dirty Dozen ride, and I was exhausted by 2½ months of hill climbing. The last thing I wanted to do was go out and spend another whole month doing hill repeats in sub-freezing weather!

But that’s exactly what I did. I spent the next four weeks burying more stupid hills beneath my wheels, accumulating the remaining vertical distance, and finally surpassing 250,000 feet on Christmas Eve. Happily, I didn’t have to endure any of those ridiculous Dirty Dozen ramps, but with much less time for rest and recovery, I did quite a job on my aching kneeballs.

If I was riding in Boston, a quarter million feet of ascent would be a huge accomplishment; but is it really a big deal here in Pittsburgh? After all, if I hadn’t been exiled to Maine last winter, I would have surpassed that threshold in both 2016 and 2017, just by doing my regular amount of riding.

Of course, that’s “regular” for years when I’m not working for a living, and thus able to spend more time in the saddle. Even here, 250,000 feet would be hard to achieve while working nine-to-five. So I’ll say that it was as a noteworthy achievement, especially in the context of my cycling career to date.

When I finished that goal-conquering ride on Christmas Eve, my overall mileage for the year stood at 3,996. Obviously, a numbers-obsessed rider like me wasn’t going to finish the year just 4 miles short of a round 4,000. So once more into the 17° weather for a final ten-mile ride to polish off the last milestone of the year.

Though noteworthy, riding 4,000 miles isn’t anywhere near a personal record; in Boston, I exceeded 4,000 miles per year three times. But the last time that happened was way back in 2010, meaning this has been the most I’ve ridden during any of the past seven years, and the most I’ve ever put on the (2013 vintage) R2-Di2 bike in any single season. So it’s worth noting for that.

Plugging those two numbers into a simple equation—a quarter million feet of climbing over four thousand miles—produces another factoid: over the entire 2017 season I averaged over 62 feet of climbing per mile ridden.

That’s a record amount of hilliness, topping last year’s 58 feet/mile. Thanks to Pittsburgh’s stupid topography, I doubled the 30-34 fpm I averaged in Boston.

All that put a nice cap on my 2017 cycling season, leaving me to take some time off to crunch some numbers and spit out my comprehensive “year in review” post. That will be posted shortly, since I’m finally declaring a belated start of my official “off-season”!

I've posted one-minute hyperlapse videos of the five hardest hills in the Dirty Dozen, compiled from my on-bike action cam footage, so here’s a quick and painless run-thru if you’re interested in seeing how it went.

Or rather, it would be painless, except for the usual nausea-inducing camera shake associated with action cams. The hyperlapse helps, but only so much.

Also bear in mind that since the camera was mounted to my bike at a fixed angle, even steep hills appear flat because the bike—and thus the camera—are both tilted up at the same angle. The best way to judge the incline is by features at the sides of the road. And by other riders weaving back and forth, falling off their bikes, and walking…

1-Minute Dirty Dozen: Logan (4x)

1-Minute Dirty Dozen: Suffolk (6x)

1-Minute Dirty Dozen: Boustead (6x)

1-Minute Dirty Dozen: Eleanor (6x)

1-Minute Dirty Dozen: Tesla (10x)

No cutesy lead-in, just the unadorned fact that I completed Pittsburgh’s legendary, epic, ridiculously evil Dirty Dozen ride. And it was awesome!

This blogpost starts out with the high-level whys and hows, followed by a lot detail about the ride and each of the thirteen hills, and ends with my advice, hints, and tips for anyone considering riding the Dirty Dozen. Along with a chunder of photos and links to numerous videos.

Two riders share a kiss while waiting for a train to pass before climbing Hill 5 (Logan).

Weaving back and forth across Hill 5 (Logan), this rider nearly took me out.

Ornoth descending Hill 6 (Rialto) from the neighborhood of Troy Hill.

Video of Ornoth (around 0:16) rolling up Hill 6 (Rialto).

Two riders hit the deck and two others are stopped early on Hill 7 (Suffolk).

Video of Ornoth (in black) amongst a group of riders (around 3:02) to the top of Suffolk St.

Group 3 after Hill 8 (Sycamore), with helmet-less Ornoth left of center, looking down.

Great closeup action shot of Ornoth ascending Hill 9 (Canton Ave).

Video of Ornoth tackling the lower half of Canton Ave (from 2:43 onward).

Video of Ornoth conquering the upper half of Canton Ave (10:50 to 11:00).

Video of my Canton Ave ascent taken from my front wheel. Camera vibration warning!

Ornoth on the final ramp of Hill 12 (Eleanor) with the Birmingham Bridge in the background.

Ornoth still climbing that final ramp of Hill 12 (Eleanor).

Gasping for air, just rolling over the top of Hill 12 (Eleanor).

This is on the flat bit (Flowers Ave) at the start of the final climb. My shadow appears more eager than I am to face Hill 13 (Tesla).

The yellow hospital FALL RISK wristband I hung from my saddle... Very appropriate for the Dirty Dozen!

My 2017 Dirty Dozen jersey and that precious, hard-won official finisher's blue ribbon!

The tired-but-happy look of an official Dirty Dozen finisher!

What is it?

Spend the Saturday after Thanksgiving riding your bike up the traditional thirteen steepest hills in Pittsburgh. None are less than 20% max incline, some are over 30%, and at 37% Canton Ave is the steepest street on the entire planet! I am talking absolutely out-of-your-skull ludicrous amounts of pain.

Uhh, that sounds stupid. Why do it?

Each rider has their own motivations, but it usually boils down to the obvious: it’s a remarkable challenge. Do you have the muscle strength to survive the unforgiving length of Suffolk? Do you have the technical skill needed to ride up Canton without falling off the planet? Do you have the mental strength to look at a wall like Berryhill or Boustead and not give up and cry? And do your legs have the endurance to ride thirteen of these unforgiving bastards back-to-back? And can you do all that on cold, blustery day in late November?

Because it’s such a ridiculously extreme challenge, finishers earn lifetime bragging rights and respect. It’s a unique ride you can only do here in Pittsburgh. And between the cheering crowds and the camaraderie of other riders, it’s a whole lot of fun.

The race—yes, it actually is a race, if only for an inhumanly strong few—drew my attention long before I thought about moving to Pittsburgh. Since I was regularly here to visit Inna, years ago I checked out the local bike scene and discovered the event, even watching the live video feed streamed over the internet for several years.

When I moved here two years ago, I missed the 2015 event by just four days. Even if I was in no condition to ride, I would have enjoyed spectating and playing photographer.

Once here, I resolved to ride in 2016, and my resolve was doubled that spring, after the event’s colorful founder—two-time Race Across America winner Danny Chew—was crippled in a bike crash. I registered, scouted out eleven of the thirteen hills, riding them for a combined total of 21 ascents, and participated in the first of seven preparatory group rides…

Then my mother was hospitalized and I spent the next five months in Maine, missing the ride and resignedly watching the live video feed for another year. I consoled myself by creating a tool to compare the steepness of multiple road segments, including the Dirty Dozen hills.

How did I prepare?

This being my first attempt, and knowing I wouldn’t be racing for points, I took a step back and considered what my goals were. At the most basic, I wanted to have fun and to learn a lot. But my stretch goal was to become an “official” finisher, completing all thirteen hills without crashing, stopping, dabbing, or losing uphill progress.

You do not want to go into the Dirty Dozen without training for the rigors of climbing steep hills. My strategy, as with every ride I do, was: train by doing the same kind of riding you expect to encounter in the event. And with eleven of the thirteen Dirty Dozen hills within striking distance, the plan was obvious: climb those goddamned hills!

For eight weeks preceding the race, I spent one midweek day doing solo rides of the hills, both to build up my strength as well as to recon the hills themselves, learning where they were hardest and where I could back off and conserve my strength.

Then, each weekend I would join the weekly group training rides organized by the Western PA Wheelmen. Those started out doing 3-4 hills at a time, graduated to doing 6-7 at a time, and culminated by riding the entire course two weeks before the event, leaving ample time for recovery before race day.

As early as the second group ride I was joining others for “extra credit”, doing an additional four hills for a total of eight at a time. That gave me a lot of confidence that my body could withstand an entire day of hills. My self-assurance grew further when I successfully completed the group ride that covered the first seven hills in the rain!

As I described in my pre-ride blogpost, the final, full-course training ride was a brutally cold 17° ride, and I was disappointed by having to dab no less than four times for various reasons, including insufficient strength to finish off the last two hills.

When the training rides were done, I’d ridden every hill at least three times, some a dozen times, with a combined total of 75 ascents. I was as well prepared as possible. I was pretty confident, except for the difficulties I’d had on that last training ride. And I was really scared.

Although the forecast had called for temps rising from 38 to 50° with 30% chance of rain, I woke up to a pleasant surprise Saturday morning: clear skies and a temperature of 48°, heading toward the mid-50s! I donned my new 2017 Dirty Dozen jersey underneath my thermal jacket.

I set out at 8:15am and ran into other riders heading in the same direction, including one with my friend Ryan. I overheard them saying it was the best weather in the history of the event!

The Start

I swooped into the Bud Harris bike track at 8:30 and was greeted by friends Stef and Jim directing traffic. Stef had come back for the event from her new home in Vermont. She was going to marshal the fourth of four groups of riders—the “Party Bus”—but said she was sure she’d run into me out on the course. Sorry Stef, I wasn’t about to let that happen!

By 8:45 I was signed in and ready. They’d had a lot of last-minute registrations, and people were saying there were a record 450-500 riders for this 35th Dirty Dozen.

I moseyed over to the track infield and chatted with some training ride buddies, including Jeremiah, who has become famous for riding the event on a ponderous HealthyRide rental bike. We waited for the various groups to line up, which would be released in waves staggered by 5-10 minutes.

The first group were the cyclists racing for points on each hill. The second group were experienced cyclists. I had considered starting in Group 2 and then taking a long rest break halfway through the ride and falling back to a later group, but scrapped that idea when they announced that they were limiting Group 2 to riders below age 40.

So it would be either Group 3 or Group 4. The Group 4 Party Bus is slow and waits for everyone, and is filled with inexperienced riders who are dangerous and have no idea what they’re getting into. Since the danger presented by other riders was my biggest fear, I lined up with Group 3.

At 9:30 my group took the ceremonial lap around the track before hopping onto Washington Boulevard for the neutralized ride across the Highland Park Bridge over the Allegheny River to Aspinwall. Way too soon, we turned into a residential area on the flat along the river. The 2-mile ride barely counted as a warmup before the first hill.

Hill 1: Center Ave, Guyasuta St

Center Ave is just a nice warmup hill. You pass under the Route 28 highway and climb a really steep grade that only rates as middling-steep for the Dirty Dozen. After a quarter mile and 200 feet of climbing, it levels out into a second neighborhood. As you catch your breath, you wonder, “Was that all?”

The answer of course is “no”, but you do get a whopping six blocks of near-flat road to recover before turning onto Guyasuta, which stair-steps another 150 feet over another quarter mile without forcing you to go into the red.

Hill 1 will wake you up and get your legs warmed up. And it does make the first selection, turning back the worst of the tourists and newbies who aren’t ready for the challenge. For the real riders, that big rest in the middle is awfully forgiving, making it one of the easier hills we’d face.

According to Strava, Center/Guyasuta is 0.6 miles, gaining 377 feet in altitude, for an average grade of 11%. In training, I’d ridden Hill 1 four times.

Setting a precedent I would follow all day, I decided to ride at the back of the group. Although the weaker riders would be there, I would at least have the ability to regulate how close I got to them, and I could choose my own pace up each hill. It’s important to remember that your speed doesn’t matter in this race; what matters is that you don’t stop, and that you conserve enough strength to complete all 13 hills.

I eased up Center at a slower pace than I’d done in any of my training rides. Halfway up Guyasuta, I caught up with my riding buddy Phil, who has accompanied me on numerous rides. We finished the hill together, with my time a leisurely 8:01.

Unlike the training rides, where the group enjoyed plenty of recovery time at the top of each hill, we immediately set off for the next. If I had been closer to the front, I would have had more time to rest, but that would have meant taking more risk by riding in the middle of the pack.

One of the implications of climbing the steepest hills in town is that nearly every ascent is followed by an equal—but by definition longer and more gradual—descent. Over the neutralized 4 miles we’d drop 400 feet back down Kittanning Pike to the riverside in Sharpsburg for the next climb.

Hill 2: Ravine St, Midway Dr

If Hill 1 was a nice warmup, Hill 2 proceeds to the next level. Ravine/Midway is a carbon copy of Center/Guyasuta, but without that six-block rest zone in the middle. Another moderate climb, it passes under Route 28, then up a challenging slope, climbing 250 feet over a third of a mile.

The route used to bear left onto Sharps Hill Rd, but now the ride turns right onto Midway, which hairpins back on itself, then—like Guyasuta—climbs another 150 feet over a quarter mile. Strava says Ravine/Midway is also 0.6 miles, rising 404 feet at a 13% grade. Also like Center, I’d ridden it four times in training.

The last time I rode it, two weeks before the race, Midway had been partially milled, and I was concerned about what it might be like on race day. However, it had been freshly paved, which was wonderful.

Again, I paced myself casually to the top, following Phil before eventually passing him. Although I again finished in my slowest time all year (8:19), by the top I was getting kinda sweaty.

Before 2016, from this point the route went out Dorseyville Rd to Hill 3: Berryhill Rd. Although it’s short, it’s the first extremely steep hill, and a real kick in the teeth. Strava would tell you that Berryhill rises 164 feet in just a tenth of a mile at 17%.

You approach Berryhill at the end of a fast descent down Brownshill Rd, and—unlike most other hills—you get a demoralizing full view of its impossible slope rising ahead of you. Many riders are too gobsmacked to downshift before they hit the incline, which causes an immense pileup of riders. Berryhill is the first bloodbath.

Typically, the town of O’Hara closes Berryhill for the season once snow flies; it’s the only Dirty Dozen hill that closes. In 2016, with Danny not in charge, his backup organizers decided to replace Berryhill with a different hill back on the Pittsburgh side of the Allegheny. Needless to say, it wasn’t the same challenge as Berryhill.

Despite warm temperatures and no snow, this year the organizers again opted to forego Berryhill and repeat the 2016 route. For my money, it’s not a real Dirty Dozen without Berryhill. In training for this year, I only rode Berryhill three times, suspecting it might be replaced again.

So after gathering up at the Midway Dr VFD, instead of heading toward Berryhill we rolled up to Kittanning St and down into Etna. From there we took the 62nd St Bridge back over the Allegheny for a brief visit to Lawrenceville, passing Group 2 as they came back across the bridge in the opposite direction. In three miles we approached the alternate version of Hill 3.

Hill 3 (alternate): 57th St, Christopher St

Turning off Butler onto 57th St one starts a gentle 6-8% grade. After a jog onto Christopher, the grade becomes a steady 13%: it’s a hill, but not one where you need to get out of the saddle until a steeper bit at the end.

“Hill 3-B” is three times as long as Berryhill, but lacks the challenging slope. 57th/Christopher climbs 258 feet in a third of a mile (13% average). It’s simply not a Dirty Dozen hill. But having expected the change, I had rode Christopher St five times before the event.

By Hill 3-B I had determined which of the weaker riders posed any danger, so I gave them a wide berth. It was another calm, steady ascent, but my 5:13 wasn’t a new slowest time.

As warm riders regrouped at the top, ride marshal Jason generously offered to carry riders’ discarded layers of clothing in his panniers!

We enjoyed the descent down Stanton and the three miles right back across the 62nd St Bridge, hopping back onto the ride route right at the base of the next climb.

Hill 4: High St, Seavey Rd

Right off the main drag in Etna, High St ramps up to a pretty respectable slope. Then it takes a cambered right turn, followed by switchback reversing to the left onto Seavey. This right-left chicane is the most memorable and challenging feature of Hill 4, and provides a rare—and sometimes demoralizing—opportunity to see other riders just above or below you as you climb the terraced hillside.

After the switchback, Seavey stair-steps, giving you a brief rest before a steep kick to the top. Altogether, High/Seavey is a third of a mile, and gains 224 feet (12%). I also rode High St five times in training.

Because of the view, Hill 4 drew our first sizable crowd of spectators cheering us on. I went wide through the turns, avoiding the steeper inner line, and made it up nicely, despite a headwind blasting me right at the end. Finishing in 4:33, I set another slowest time of the year. I was flawlessly executing my strategy of taking it as easy as possible!

A lumpy three miles brought us down to Millvale Riverfront Park, the first rest stop, at 11:25am. I tucked away my gloves because it was too warm, and I wanted a good grip on the bars for the next section of the route.

After a 25-minute break we rolled out, only to get caught behind a train for 3-4 minutes at a level crossing. A couple blocks later, we were delayed another 3-4 minutes waiting for a garbage truck to come down the hill we wanted to go up. It brought back memories of the 2014 Dirty Dozen, when a belligerent garbage truck driver had blocked the way up Hill 4.

With four hills complete, you might start getting comfortable with the idea of nailing this ride. But the first four hills are nothing more than a friendly warmup, and all conception of “friendly” hills is about to come to a screeching halt.

Hill 5: Logan St

Mere blocks from the rest stop, you’re faced with the steep slope, narrow roadway, and broken pavement of Logan Street. Logan is only a quarter mile, but it climbs a full 244 feet (20% average). The first section through some trees, although steep, doesn’t seem terrible, but the trees part to reveal a veritable wall that ramps up in front of you, and it just keeps getting steeper. This is not a manageable slope like Center or Ravine, and it’s not a steep-but-short sprint like Berryhill. The last tenth of a mile is an unfailing 100% effort, and even that doesn’t guarantee that you’ll make it to the top, because the road surface can be slick, causing many falls. I had slipped out and nearly fell yards short of the top on one of the rainy group training rides.

Hill 5 is the first serious kick-ass hill on the route, and you have to be both strong and a skilled bike handler to overcome it. Logan is where any lingering casual riders whimper, fall over, and die.

I inched up the lower section, then clawed my way through the steep bit, dodging numerous participants walking up the hill, and yelling at one rider who weaved back and forth across the road toward me. Like many of the Dirty Dozen hills, Logan saves its steepest slope for the very top, and I had to pour everything I had left into a vicious sprint to the line.

I had done four ascents of Hill 5 in training, and as expected my time of 4:06 was the slowest I’d done all year.

From Logan, we rode for a mile along the top of the ridge, enjoying views of downtown before diving back down toward the Allegheny. Just mind the construction zone where half the road has fallen off the side of the cliff into the woods below…

Hill 6: Rialto St

Once upon a time, the pig farmers living at the top of this ridge—called Pig Hill—used to herd their swine through a narrow, muddy path straight down the cliff to the slaughterhouse at the riverside. This being Pittsburgh, they poured some concrete down the hill and called it “Rialto Street”. At some point they built some stairs along the side, too, just to make it even narrower.

Not being satisfied with this ridiculous “street”, they decided to build a five-way traffic light-controlled intersection right at the bottom of this stupendously steep street, controlling both sides of the Route 28 divided highway, the busy 31st Street Bridge over the Allegheny, another road from Herrs Island, and River Ave. It is a complete and utter cluster, and you’d better have good brakes if you go down that hill.

The good news for riders is that Hill 6 is a short, monotonic sprint of a hill. Climb 123 feet up Rialto in about 750 feet (18%), and you’re done before your body even registers the effort. The bad news is that before you can climb it, you have to carefully inch down it, somehow come to a sudden stop at the bottom to avoid getting splattered on the divided highway, then turn around in a tiny space and climb back up the stupidly narrow road from a dead stop, while other riders are still descending toward you.

This was where my partner Inna had chosen to watch the event. I called out to her as I started my descent, and she got some nice footage of me as I powered back up. Although I had no opportunity to stop, it was encouraging and gratifying for her to share in the event by cheering me on.

Although it does take an intense sprint effort, Rialto is one of the easier hills, which is a blessing, sandwiched as it is between two of the most difficult. On the other hand, car traffic makes it difficult to train on it on your own, so I only rode it four times before the event. Although I completed it in just 1:56, that was still my slowest time of the year.

Between hills the riders would chat, and this is as good a place as any to note how many comments I got. Several people asked about my hub-based Nut-R GoPro camera mount; a couple asked about my little Ass Saver clip-on fender; and one asked about my Di2 electronic shifting. Everyone loved the yellow “FALL RISK” wristband that I’d picked up during my mother’s hospitalization, which I’d attached to a loop on my saddle; that was particularly appropriate for a Dirty Dozen rider! And a guy who knew me from group rides observed that I wasn’t wearing my usual Shimano cycling sandals.

Leaving Rialto, we had a mile and a half of descent before hitting East Street, which in turn comprises a half mile of climbing. This is another section where conserving energy is important, because when you make the left onto Suffolk, you’re gonna need every ounce of strength you’ve got left.

Hill 7: Suffolk St, Hazelton St, Burgess St

After dipping beneath I-279, there’s a sharp, steep climb back up the other side. As the road curves around to the right, you expect the slope to level off, but it never does. It just keeps going, and then gets even steeper. A quarter mile later you see the top of Suffolk and claw your way up to a flat that looks like the top of the hill.

But that’s only the first section, and just when you think you’ve crested the hill, you’re immediately faced with another viciously steep ramp on Hazelton that you somehow have to power up. If you make it up that, there’s still a left turn onto Burgess, which isn’t as steep, but it makes up for it by being paved in granite setts, aka Belgian block, which most people wrongly call “cobblestones”. Altogether the three sections of Suffolk/Hazelton/Burgess are 0.4 miles and gain 358 feet (16% average).

For me, Hill 7 is the hardest of all the hills. It’s long, it’s steep, there’s nowhere to ease off and recover, and before it ends it hits you with the demoralizing wall on Hazelton and the Belgian block on Burgess. It’s a hard, long, intense challenge that will take everything you’ve got, and then some. Like Logan, I also rode it four times in training.

I was wary of Suffolk because on my ill-fated final training ride, I had been taken out by another rider on the lower section coming up from underneath I-279. So for the event, I took a wide line around that corner and was glad I did when I saw two riders come together and fall, stopping two more riders, in exactly the same place I’d been taken out two weeks before.

I nursed my way up to the top of Suffolk, dodging the spectators, weaving riders, walking riders, and riders sitting on the roadside with leg cramps. When I reached the flat bit between Suffolk and Hazelton, I used all the room I could to soft-pedal and rest, nearly getting walked into by a pair of oblivious spectators.

Attacking the narrow ramp on Hazelton, I trailed another weaving rider who just happened to swerve out of my way as I got onto the setts of Burgess, then bounced my way up the rough surface to the top. I finished in 6:37, which is a decent time for me.

I had my thermal jacket partially unzipped to vent the heat from that effort, and the 55° air temperature would work perfectly for me all day. I unzipped my jacket before the hot climbs; enjoyed the cool breeze on the descents, which felt lovely; and zipped it up once I fully cooled off again.

After Suffolk you have lots of time to recover, as the four-mile transfer to the next hill includes a long descent, winds through downtown, and crosses two rivers on two bridges to get from the north side to the south side.

Hill 8: Sycamore St

From the Monongahela riverside, Sycamore climbs straight up Mount Washington to the overlooks on Grandview Ave. Thankfully, Sycamore is another one of the middling-hard hills, rising 296 feet in 0.4 miles (12%). It begins moderately hard, gets a little harder before hitting a cambered switchback. Then it eases off for a quick rest before a final kick that isn’t too difficult.

Four weeks before the Dirty Dozen, Sycamore had been milled, making for a treacherous, gravely ascent during the height of training season. Thankfully, a new surface was laid down a week before the race.

The climb wasn’t bad, but there were a lot of cars trying to get down the hill at the same time. Having stopped to let us pass, many of the occupants were screaming encouragement. There was some runoff water on the road surface in places, which I instinctually avoided, lest I lose traction. I was surprised that there were no spectators near the switchback.

Since it’s easy for me to get to, I had ridden Sycamore eight times in training; three of those while it was milled, and once to check out the new surface. I finished in 7:00, which was a slow time, but faster than when the road had been milled!

A short but painful section of cobbles leads the riders to the Mt. Washington overlook, where a group photo is traditional. I took the opportunity to bleed air pressure from my tires, so that I’d have maximum traction on the upcoming setts of Canton Ave.

The next two hills are three miles away down in Beechview, in Pittsburgh’s south hills. They’re hard to get to for two reasons: first, it requires riding on two extremely busy high-speed arterials; and second, you have to traverse two major hills and valleys to get there.

The second of those intermediate hills—Crane Ave—would qualify as a Dirty Dozen hill in any city other than Pittsburgh. Climbing 263 feet in a half mile (9%), it’s a long, steep climb that inevitably causes tiring riders to whine. It also loads some extra fatigue into your legs: the perfect preparation for the steepest street on the whole damn planet!

Hill 9: Coast Ave, Canton Ave

From the Banksville Road divided arterial, you turn onto Coast Ave, which is the start of Hill 9. Although the entire Coast/Canton hill rises 106 feet in a tenth of a mile (135), you have a gentle 50-foot climb up Coast before the left onto Canton.

Canton is only 200 feet long, but you climb 65 feet in that distance. It’s a full-out 30-second sprint, but you’re at the top before your body has time to react to the effort. From a physiological standpoint it’s one of the easiest hills on the course.

But at 37% grade, Canton is the steepest public street in the world, and it is totally unlike any hill you’ve ever ridden. It’s a special kind of challenge, for many different reasons.

First, it asks whether you have the mental strength to even look at that stupid, obscene hill and not give up. Then there’s the technical challenge of riding something steeper than you’ve ever experienced. If you put your weight too far forward, your back wheel will lose traction, slide out, and you’ll fall; but if your weight is too far back, your front wheel will lift right off the ground and you’ll lose control and fall. And trying to swerve back and forth across the narrow street ain’t gonna help you.

During the Dirty Dozen there are additional complications. You need to make it up amongst lots of other riders, who will be at the limits of their control and likely to fall in front of you or into you. You also need to block out the hundreds of screaming spectators lining the street, drawn by the spectacle of widespread carnage.

But those are just the obvious challenges. Like stalking a lion on safari, Canton is wily and treacherous, and you should not approach it casually.

At the bottom, the road is cambered wildly, so the left side of the street is a dramatically steeper grade than the right. Furthermore, trees and shrubs encroach into the road, blocking the left third of the street. There’s deadfall and moss making the surface very treacherous, and don’t forget the likely complications of November rain and snow and salt, as well.

And then there’s the surface. You start out on nice, sticky asphalt. As the incline begins, it switches to broken concrete, with broad cracks filled with grass or nothing or maybe a pile of leftover asphalt. Then, at the point where the slope requires the most traction, you drop off the concrete surface onto loosely-joined Belgian block setts. You have to somehow lay down maximum power on the steepest slope while bouncing along atop the granite paving stones and hopefully avoiding the occasional holes left by missing stones. Then pull yourself over a thin strip of concrete and back onto some asphalt to crest the hill. So you have to manage four changes of road surface on top of everything else you’re supposedly focusing on.

On the training ride when I first attempted Canton, I started bouncing around and immediately lost traction when the road transitioned from cement to setts. I went back down and dropped about 20 PSI of air from my tires to get better traction, then decided to take it easy until I had gotten firmly onto the Belgian blocks before putting down maximum power; those two changes seem to have unlocked the hill for me. But heading into the race, I had only ridden it two times in my life.

Coming up Banksville just prior to 2pm, I chatted with Phil, which completely distracted me from thinking about all those things I should have been worrying about. Once I turned onto Coast and soft-pedaled to fall well behind the rest of the field, I could hear the band and screaming crowd who had come out to watch the spectacle.

Since there is no such thing as momentum on a hill that steep, I slowly approached the turn, only looking up long enough to register that my way wouldn’t be clogged with fallen bodies or riders walking their bikes up or down the hill (the video actually shows I would thread the needle between three of them). Then I looked straight down at the road in front of me, blocked out absolutely everything going on around me, rolled slowly over the edge of the cement surface onto the Belgian block, and gunned the living hell out of it.

Not thinking about anything but laying down power, I tracked arrow-straight right up the hill, bouncing around but managing to keep traction and forward progress. And in 30 seconds it was done, and I was looking for a place to park the bike.

My time was 2:47, but like everything else, times on Canton aren’t what they seem. Most of that was spent pussyfooting my way up Coast, saving my strength and letting the carnage play out for the rest of the group in front of me before my rabid sprint to the top.

Since I blocked everything out of my mind, it was nice to find some video footage so that I could later hear the cheering and look at what was going on around me while I was locked on: in the Canton Zone. Someone got a nice still of me, and I appear in this video at 2:43 and this video at 10:50. And then there’s my own on-bike POV video

Since we’re often at the top of Canton for some time as people who fail to crest the hill the first time try again (and again), that’s also where the race’s second rest stop is located. I took on a banana and Gatorade, and put some air back into my rear tire to handle the mere 30% grades remaining.

After a 15-minute break, we set off for Hill 10. Along the way, a kid tried to race me up the steep hill behind Canton. I let him go, saying, “I’d race ya, but I’ve got four more hills to ride!”

Hill 10: Wenzell Ave, Boustead St

People are usually elated after Canton. They’ve beat nine hills, including the steepest one of all. It’s all “downhill” from here, right?

No, no it isn’t. There’s a lot of difficult riding still ahead, starting just three blocks later, when you are smacked in the face by Boustead, which is nearly as steep as Canton, but longer, and you get a nice long view of the ridiculous wall ahead of you.

There’s a moderately steep (80 feet in a tenth of a mile) climb up Wenzell before the turn onto Boustead, which has a little dip in it before it launches skyward, climbing another 120 feet in a tenth of a mile. The Wenzell/Boustead combo is 220 feet in 0.3 miles (12% average). But it gets viciously steepest right at the top. Like Canton, I had only ridden Boustead twice in training.

On my final training ride, I’d cleared Boustead, but it had cost me, and after that I hadn’t had the strength to complete two of the three hills that remained. So Boustead was the hill I was most afraid of coming into the race. I was concerned about whether I would be strong enough to get over it, and if I did, would I have anything left in the legs for the three hills after that?

The wily old veterans Phil and I hung back before hitting the hill ourselves. Halfway up, I found myself having to swerve back and forth across the road to make it up, but at least I knew I wasn’t interfering with anyone behind me! At it steepest, when I was about to bust, I pulled out all the stops in a full-bore sprint, which somehow got me far enough over the crest to crawl toward the line. It was deathly hard, even at my slowest time of the year (5:58).

After commiserating with the others at the top, we had another four-mile ride back up to the south side, along those busy arterials and back over two climbs that were very meaningful (to the legs) but utterly meaningless (in race terms). That included descending P.J. McArdle, which was surprisingly free of runoff water from the hillside above, which usually makes it very dangerous.

Hill 11: Welsh Way

Welsh Way is a clone of Rialto: same monotonic incline, same narrowness, same shortness; the only differences are that there’s no divided highway at the bottom to contend with, and you go up it first, then have to come right back down again, because it’s a dead-end street.

For my money, Welsh is the easiest of the Dirty Dozen hills. It’s manageably steep, 123 feet of climbing, and only 800 feet long (11%). And it’s the last easy hill amongst the satanic hills that precede and follow it. Though on these narrow ones you do have to watch out for other riders, especially out-and-back streets like Rialto and Welsh, where riders are going up/down while you’re going down/up.

Along with Sycamore (Hill 8), hills 11-13 are all close to home, so I’ve done them many times in training. For Welsh, that came to nine ascents.

Hill 11 was an opportunity for me to take it slow and easy as I kept my distance from other riders. My 3:11 time was on the slow side, but what surprised me was the number of riders who were cramping up, or that had to stop and walk the hill: the easiest hill of them all!

At the top, the group took a long, unexpected 10-minute rest; I was thankful for the recovery time, because I was dreading Hill 12. After coming back down Welsh Way, there’s a little more than a mile before you get to the next climb: the one most cyclists fear more than any other.

Hill 12: Barry St, Holt St, Eleanor St

And here we have it: the last truly vindictive hill. Many people think Eleanor is harder than Suffolk; I disagree, because Hill 12 does offer riders a precious mid-climb rest, but I can definitely see where they’re coming from. Barry/Holt/Eleanor climbs 343 feet over 0.4 miles at 15%. If it’s not the hardest, it’s the next one on the list, and by this point your legs are completely used-up.

Riding along the flat of Josephine Street, Barry is a sudden switchback up and to the right. You climb up to a 90-degree turn, which reveals a hard drag leading up to a steeper ramp in the distance. This is another one where you have to save your strength for the end.

That distant ramp is a one-way the wrong way, but we go up it anyways. After two tenths of a mile and 150 feet of climbing, you turn 90 degrees into Holt St, leveling off quickly for a very short breather, followed by tiny second kick, then a longer breather as you soft-pedal on the blessedly well-placed flat bit of Holt. Milk it for every picosecond of recovery you can, because…

Then you’ll see riders turning left onto Eleanor St and climbing at an unbelievable angle. You hit it and are faced with a long, steep slope: 25% grade, or 130 feet over a little more than a tenth of a mile. It’s a slow drag for several blocks and it just keeps getting steeper the farther you go. Finally the road bears right and you fight your way gasping over the final—even steeper!—rise to the line. Like Welsh, I’d ridden Eleanor nine times before the race.

I was noticeably much slower than normal up Barry. I barely managed the ramp between Barry and Holt, only to be pinched with two other riders in a two-foot space between a guardrail and a line of cars waiting to come down.

While I soft-pedaled as slowly as possible on the flat, one rider asked if we had finished the hill, and several riders passed me before they realized they still had the entire painful length of Eleanor to go. And therein is the best demonstration why you scout these hills before the race.

Even with my precious extra picoseconds of rest, Eleanor was a hard, long, painful death march. The three riders just in front of me were swerving wildly in slow-motion back and forth across the narrow road, but I watched gratefully as every one of them gave up and veered off onto the flat side-streets a mere third of the way up.

I heard “Ride of the Valkyries” played inexpertly on trumpet up ahead, and the cheers of a boisterous crowd of spectators. Just like on Boustead, on the vicious final kick near the top—where I’d dabbed on my last training ride—I reached the end of my strength, but somehow dug deeper and managed a leg-searing low-speed “sprint” over the top. My 7:34 was—can you guess?—my slowest time of the year. You can see my progress near the top in photos one, two, and three.

The neighborhood—bless them, including the trumpeter!—have a big party and rest stop in a garage on Cobden St, at the top of Eleanor. Between that celebration, waiting for the slower riders, and recovering before setting off for the final hill, there’s always a happy little extra time to rest here. Just one hill left; what a wonderful thought! If I rest up here, and take it easy on the approach, I might just be able to make it up the horrible final climb…

After 15 minutes, we set off on the long 4-mile transfer, ripping down the Josephine descent, over the Hot Metal Bridge across the Monongahela, then down Irvine Street to Hazelwood. Along the way, ride marshal Jason reminded people of the after-party taking place at a local brewery… and that the celebration had officially started 49 minutes ago!

Hill 13: Flowers Ave, Kilbourne St, Tesla St

Way too soon for my legs—but not too soon for my shadow!—we took a left turn off the main drag onto Flowers Ave, where the ride’s longest hill begins. However, it starts out perfectly flat, becomes a false flat, then a turn onto a slightly steeper—but still easy—ramp. A turn onto Kilbourne: another long climb that—at about 15% grade—doesn’t warrant the term “steep”.

That long lead-up is just there to soften you up. Kilbourne ends at a flat spot where you can gather your breath before the final sprint. At this point you’ve climbed 280 feet over three-quarters of a mile. Turning onto Tesla reveals another short but intimidatingly steep wall that is all that stands between you and the finish line.

Although it’s by far the longest, people don’t put Hill 13 on their list of the hardest climbs. It’s not that bad until the end, but it’s a hard battle getting up the punishingly steep final slope, especially with the residue of 12 other ludicrous climbs already weighing down the legs. It’s another 140 feet of climbing, jammed into a little more than a tenth of a mile. The flat sections make it misleading, but the entirety of Flowers/Kilbourne/Tesla is 430 feet of climbing over 0.9 miles (9% average).

But eventually it tops out in a tiny neighborhood: six houses sandwiched between a cemetery and a huge water storage tank. And, thankfully, the finish line.

As I turned onto the flat part of Flowers, I passed three riders stopped off the road, cramping: cramping on the flat! That wasn’t the only time I was grateful to have ridden 75 Dirty Dozen hills in training!

Tesla is my “local” hill, so I’m very familiar with it. Having done Hill 13 a dozen times in the past two months, I took my time on the preliminary slopes of Flowers and Kilbourne. Then I did everything I could to recover, slow-biking on the flat spot at the top of Kilbourne. I didn’t have any strength left for the final ramp up Tesla, but it had to be done, and it was all that stood between me and my goal of being an official Dirty Dozen finisher… And more importantly, putting an end to this long day’s interminable pain and suffering!

I hit the base of the hill with everything I had, which was damned little. I don’t know how I made it even halfway up. When the slope reached its most punishing, I tried to pull out the stops and sprint over the crest, but there just wasn’t any more strength to call on. But somehow I clawed my way over the magical point where the grade lowers just a little, then crawled up the remaining slope toward the water tower just ahead.

A spectator ran right up to the rider in front of me and made noises and hand gestures like he was revving a motorcycle engine. I think that was supposed to be encouraging. Then a kid came up to that rider and handed him… a blue ribbon? A *finisher’s* ribbon!!! I rolled slowly toward him and claimed one for myself: “Pittsburgh Pennsylvania; 2017 DIRTY DOZEN; FINISHER!” (the righteous caps and exclamation point are theirs).

Finish

With my blue ribbon clutched in my teeth, I coasted through the small crowd and off to the side and panted for a while, recovering and trying to sort out my feelings.

I was filled with an incredible sense of accomplishment and satisfaction. I’d surpassed all the goals I’d set for myself: I had enormous fun, learned a ton (which you’ll see below), and successfully finished the entire event without crashing, stopping, or dabbing. In this later stage of a long life that’s been filled with lots and lots of cool shit, finishing the Dirty Dozen ranks as Certified Cool Shit.

After catching my breath, I went over and chatted briefly with my buddy Mike, who had also ridden in Group 3, and got him to take a picture for me. I think it’s a perfect representation of the moment. It’s clear that I’m exhausted, but also really, really happy, and you won’t find another picture of me with a more genuine smile.

However, my fellow riders were dispersing, many headed toward the after-party. Few people were hanging around, since that neighborhood doesn’t like our presence. It was 4:15pm and time for me to go home.

Epilogue

Thankfully, home is only two miles from Hill 13, with much of it flat or downhill before a shallow climb to the apartment. Along the way, my odo ticked over 50 miles for the day. I pulled into our driveway 8 hours and 15 minutes after leaving, having climbed 5,971 feet, well more than a vertical mile.

After having been preoccupied and anxious leading up to the event, it was wonderful to have it over and done with. I piled up a plate of leftover turkey and observed a heartfelt Thanksgiving meal. It was only then that I understood the real meaning of Thanksgiving: not having to even consider riding any of those verdammten Dirty Dozen hills for six months or more!

Although I’d proclaimed this would be my toughest challenge, going by feet per mile of ascent it was number four, and Strava’s “suffer score” feature, which measures heart rate and duration, lists it as number 51. My preparation helped me go into the event strong. I was lucky and a little wily in managing to avoid any crashes and falls, and you couldn’t have asked for better weather. There’s no guarantee that the experience would be similar in the future, or for anyone else, but for me it was a damned fine day all around.

Will I do it again? That’s impossible to say. At my age, it requires a lot of dedicated training, and willingness to ride in inclement conditions. I’ll surely do those hills again from time to time, and maybe some of the group training rides, which were fun. But the full event is an immense undertaking, and I’m not sure whether it’s something I want to commit so heavily to. We’ll see.

For now, I’m completely happy and satisfied to have completed it once.

Strategies to Beat the Dirty Dozen

When I was preparing for my first Dirty Dozen, I looked all over the place for advice, hints, and tips. So I want to offer this distilled advice to other cyclists considering this event.

Here are several of the things I learned. All this preparation and training might not be easy, but in my opinion this is how to beat the Dirty Dozen and have a good time doing it.

The most obvious first step is to know what you’re up against. Don’t go into the event unprepared; this isn’t an event you want to take lightly, unless you’re someone with a deep affinity for failure.

Pre-ride all the hills at least a couple times, so that you intuitively know when you need to give 100%, and—more importantly—where you can rest and let your legs recover. You can recover a lot of muscle power by backing off for just a few seconds. Use the organized training rides to learn valuable pointers from the veterans who have done it before.

Second, prepare your body. Climbing is all about your power-to-weight ratio. Maximize your power by training for the effort you have to put out. Build up the necessary strength over time by riding those hills. The full-course group ride two weeks before the race is valuable for getting your body used to doing not just 4-6 hills, but all thirteen. At the same time, make it easier on yourself by losing any extra weight you’re carrying.

Unless you’re racing, your only goal is not to dab; don’t worry about your time or speed, because no one cares about your finish time. Knowing how to pace yourself and conserve your strength is the most important thing to learn. That means saving your strength for the worst part of any given hill, but also conserving your energy over the duration of the entire course. Even knowing how long and how hilly the neutral sections are can be a valuable way to manage your effort and recovery.

Know what your equipment needs are. How low of a set of gears do you need to make it through the day? What tires—and what tire pressures—will give you enough traction to make the hills? What clothing are you going to need in order to endure the alternating max efforts, freezing descents, and lots of standing around in the cold? What can you take off your bike in order to make it lighter?

I ran a low gear of 34x28 (32 gear-inches), which is a moderately easy gear for a standard compact chainset. I would have run a larger cassette—a 30 or 32—but my older Ultegra Di2 won’t take anything bigger than a 28. On the other hand, the electronic system produced much more reliable shifting under load than a mechanical groupset.

Then there’s climbing technique. Most riders know that you use much less energy seated than when you get out of the saddle and stand to power over a rise. But with hills this steep and long, you need to be able to alternate between both techniques to balance muscle fatigue, even at extreme slopes. Pulling up on the handlebars helps, but your biceps can wind up cramping. And as I said in the section on Canton Ave the steepest slopes require a mastery of balance. You need to know where your balance point is, especially on wet Belgian block at a 37% incline.

Though your strength and equipment and technique will always be secondary to external conditions. These steep roads don’t get much maintenance, so they have potholes, broken-up surfaces, can be off-camber, or even paved with granite setts. You might encounter loose gravel, sand, or salt spread across the road, or spots made slick by snow, ice, wet leaves, or just leaked automotive fluids. And sometimes your way can be blocked by cars or something else completely out of your control.

Now take all of that, and try to do it amidst 400 riders of mixed ability, all riding at different paces, many of them completely unprepared for the conditions. In that situation, your biggest threat comes from other riders weaving in front of you, dropping their chains, falling into you, or blocking you and forcing you to stop. While you’re fighting the hill and the road surface, you have to watch for dangerous riders.

Finally, you need to be psychologically prepared. The best advice I have here is to explicitly not psych yourself up; treat the event as if it were just another fun weekend out. Take all the stress and pressure out of it, and you’ll be better able to deal with whatever comes up.

As for dealing with the pain and suffering… I’m sorry, but that’s what you signed up for. You have to welcome the worst the course can throw at you. Think about the bragging rights you’ll gain and the stories you’ll have!

Finally, enjoy the camaraderie of your friends and fellow Dirty Dozen riders, as well as the spectators’ encouragement and awe. Whether you finish the course or wind up walking several of the hills, have fun, because if there’s one phrase that captures the essence of the Dirty Dozen, it’s “ridiculous fun!”

September’s been a dud as far as riding goes. It’s been unseasonably cold and rainy, I started the month still suffering from a summer cold, and to be honest even when the weather’s conducive I just haven’t had much desire to lay down the miles. Poop on that!

WPW Fall Rally: Morning on the Yough

WPW Fall Rally: Morning on the Yough

WPW Fall Rally: Soutersville Train

WPW Fall Rally: Soutersville Train

I skipped the Pedal the Lakes century up in Mercer County due to a showery forecast and the organizers’ persistent refusal to provide GPS route data, something which has become de rigueur for everyone else.

I had the opportunity to do a 1am night-start 200k brevet, but just couldn’t motivate myself. It was a cold night, a very hilly route, I haven’t got the form, and it was Inna’s last night at home before a long trip. Having seen the weary finishers—all three of them!—I’m glad I gave it a pass.

That 200k ended at the Western PA Wheelmen’s fall rally, which I did go to (at a more respectable 9am). It was still cold and foggy, but it wasn’t dark, and I only had to pedal 35 miles instead of 135! I still went off course twice, and it was hilly enough to dissuade my lazy ass from undertaking an additional 32-mile route after lunch.

On the other hand, I saw the 200k riders finish, got to socialize with a bunch of folks, picked up the snazzy new argyley WPW jersey I’d ordered, and got a free (surplus) WPW “ride leader” tech tee and wind vest.

This month of poop gets even worse going forward, as I’m leaving to join Inna for a week in Seattle and Victoria. There goes what’s left of my late-season fitness!

Unfortunately, I could really use that fitness, because with the change of seasons comes the transition from endurance riding to obscenely steep and painful hill repeats in preparation for my first infamous Dirty Dozen ride. And if I get enough climbing in, I’m hoping to hit a quarter million feet of ascending by the end of the year. But in order to do any of that, I need to re-find my lost bikey mojo.

The sole bright spot has been new advances with my Edge 820 bike computer. First, I was able to wirelessly connect my new phone to my Di2 electronic shifters, download new firmware patches, and install those patches myself. Previously, you had to pay a bike shop to have their mechanics do all that; and even when Shimano’s hardware and firmware supported it, my old phone didn’t. Now, when Shimano introduces new functionality, I can just download and install it myself. So that’s quite a convenience.

And after posting an idea for a new data field on Garmin’s product forum, I found a guy who wrote a ConnectIQ app called AppBuilder that you can download to your bike computer and program to calculate your own data fields, which is exactly what I did. So now, in addition to the regular fields that Garmin supplies, my bike computer now displays how many feet of ascent I’ve done per mile for the current ride. That’s something I’ve been following since moving from flat Boston to hilly Pittsburgh, and having my cyclocomputer display it for the current ride is pretty darned cool.

But the reckoning is coming… DD minus 10 and a half weeks.

As you would expect, my first year riding in Pittsburgh was eventful and full of new experiences. Judging by the size of this 2016 year-in-review post, I consider it a pretty successful year overall.

Here I’ll review my original goals for the year, plow through a list of other noteworthy developments, show you a few informative charts, and then close by looking forward to 2017. All accompanied by a handful of related photos.

Ornoth"s MS Ride
Ornoth climbing segment one
MS Ride start
50,000th Mile
Ornoth hammering
Pit randos crossing the Mon
Collapsed roadway
Cheez ball spill

Original 2016 Goals

When I moved to Pittsburgh at the end of last year, I set four explicit goals for myself, plus two implicit ones. How did we do?

First goal was to buy a new indoor trainer. It didn’t happen because nice weather allowed me to ride outdoors throughout last winter, and I wanted to conserve cash. Although I never got that new trainer, I can’t call saving hundreds of dollars a failure! And there’s always next year…

Second goal was to do more century rides than the feeble four I had done in 2015. I bagged seven, one of which was a 200k. Great success! To enumerate them: Pittsburgh Randonneurs’ McConnell’s Mill 200k (a new all-time record for most climbing in one ride), Escape to the Lake MS ride, a solo century to Brush Creek, the Pittsburgh Tour de Cure Gran Fondo, the Western PA Wheelmen’s 3-State Century, the Mon Valley Century, and the Pedal the Lakes Century.

Third goal was to check out Pittsburgh’s outdoor cycling track. Definitely did that, and set my first personal hour record there (20.77 miles). But I didn’t participate or even spectate at any of the races held there… Yet!

Final goal was to ride the Dirty Dozen. Sadly, family obligations brought my season to a screeching halt just after I started training for the Thanksgiving-weekend ride. This one has to wait for next year.

My two implicit goals were to ride more than I did in 2015, and to learn and become familiar with the roads and routes used by Pittsburgh cyclists. I covered both of those without question.

Overall, I did a reasonable—but not perfect—job of meeting my original goals for the year.

Innumerable Highlights

But the story of a season isn’t made up solely of chasing predicted goals. It’s also a collection of serendipitous moments and unexpected developments. And 2016 was a very eventful year.

How come? Here’s a quick run-down:

  • I opted to take the summer off from work, giving me lots of free time to ride.
  • I rode more miles in 2016 than I did in any my past six years except for 2014.
  • Overall, my average distance per ride is down, but my climbing per ride is way up, and I rode much more frequently this year.
  • I rode my first brevet in ten years, my first-ever gran fondo, and my first personal hour record on the track.
  • I rode to a town called McMurray in memory of my mentor Bobby Mac, did the PedalPGH and Every Neighborhood rides, rode from home into West Virginia and Ohio, around Saratoga New York on vacation, through a cheeseball spill, and to a town called Bagdad over two closed roads that were broken up and collapsing down the hillside!
  • I rode in regular group rides with Team Decaf and the East Liberty Performance Bicycle shop guys.
  • But I lost out on the Dirty Dozen, its training rides, and the 321 cancer charity ride I’d planned on doing.
  • I met a lot of cool riders, including Stef Burch, Monica VanDieren, Jim Logan, Eric Collazo, Kai, Colleen Spiegler, Ryan Popple, and many, many others.
  • I had one nontrivial crash due to debris in the road, resulting in some road rash and a quick trip to the walk-in clinic.
  • Rode in two processional rides in memory of local riders who had been killed by motorists.
  • Michelin replaced my standard Pro4 line of tires with a new model called Power Endurance. When I was accidentally sent 25mm tires rather than my preferred 23s, I opted to stick with them. They’re more comfortable, and wider tires are a new trend with many riders.
  • Also bought a Continental 4-Season rear tire for wintertime traction.
  • I destroyed another rear wheel, but replaced it with a new Ksyrium with an all-black Exalith brake track that whines evilly whenever I’m slowing down. My bike shop forced me to impersonate a shop employee in order to get my warrantee registered.
  • I bought a couple Ass Savers, a hub-level video camera mount, several new jerseys, caps, and a really nice new insulated winter cycling jacket.
  • I started playing in the BikePGH forums’ Tag-o-Rama photo-finding game, finding and setting four sets of tags. Also bought a cycling card game called Attack the Pack.
  • Bought a new set of Oakley Half Jacket sunglasses, with ear socks and lenses to match my bike’s red and white color scheme. Also attached plastic stick-on reading lenses to those sunglasses, making it much easier to read my GPS bike computer, especially when navigating unfamiliar areas (like all of Pittsburgh!) by map.
  • Although I haven’t bought the new Garmin Edge 820 GPS cyclo-computer, I did buy some electronic widgets that will allow my future head unit to talk to my Di2 electronic gear shifters. More on that in the future!
  • Lost my only Strava KOM up in northern Vermont, but gained a new one located behind Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh.
  • Was shocked to hear that Dirty Dozen founder and Pittsburgh cycling legend Danny Chew had been paralyzed in a crash.
  • Surpassed 10,000 miles on the “new” bike (R2-Di2), and broke 50,000 miles overall since 2000.
  • Ordered a fistful of Camelbak Jetvalve water bottle tops, because those things grow mold like crazy and are difficult to clean. They’re rarely sold separate from the bottles.
  • Added searchable tags to my cycling blog, so that you can now navigate my posts by topic.
  • Finally paid for a Strava Pro membership. Between Strava and the Stravistics add-on, I got all kinds of new features, including:
  • Started automatically posting ride photos to my Strava page via my Instagram feed.
  • Access to my Strava “trophy case”. On top of old challenges from years past, this year I earned eight monthly gran fondo badges, four monthly climbing challenge badges, and one special challenge badge.
  • I used the Flyby feature (example) to identify similar riders in my new neighborhood and learn the routes they favored. And I used Strava’s Global Heatmap to see overall popular routes in Pittsburgh.
  • One of the coolest things I did this year came about because I wanted something no other website provides: a way to directly compare the slopes and lengths of hills against one another. Being a techie and data vis geek, I started hitting the Strava API and created my very own Slope Comparison Tool. It’s really awesome and I’m really proud of it.
  • And then there were some new data plots that I discovered: my personal riding heatmap, my yearly elevation gain chart, and my training/fitness chart.

Let’s go into those charts in a little more detail, since they are extremely pertinent to any discussion of my 2016 season.

Teh Plotz

I told you that one of my implicit goals was to learn Pittsburgh’s roads. My 2016 mileage total was 3,260, which is greater than four of the previous five years, so I definitely covered a lot of territory.

But it’s easier to show you that on a heatmap than it is to talk about it. Here’s a static image of my 2016 riding, which shows a lot of riding around the city core and numerous expeditions further afield.

However, you can get a much better understanding by clicking through to the actual interactive map to pan and zoom around.

Custom personal heatmaps are one of the awesome features that came with my paid Strava membership. I have another map depicting all my riding (since 2010), both before and after my move from Boston to Pittsburgh.

Pittsburgh heatmap

Next comes a truly amazing chart, which shows something my blogposts have belabored: how hilly Pittsburgh is in comparison to Boston.

The chart depicts how much elevation gain (i.e. climbing) I did each year. From 2010 through 2015, while living in Boston I climbed anywhere from 87,000 to 120,000 feet (16 to 23 vertical miles) per year.

Now look at the pink line for 2016. At the end of September, I had 190,000 feet of climbing: nearly twice my previous record for that point in the year! If I had ridden at the same pace for the last three months of 2016 I would have broken a quarter million feet (48 vertical miles) this year. But I didn’t, so I had to settle for a mere 36 vertical miles…

That chart is from the Stravistix add-on for Strava, which adds all kinds of useful information above and beyond what you get from Strava itself.

Climbing chart

Finally, I’ve got two versions of this year’s TRIMP chart, which I described in detail in this blogpost. The first one tracks this year’s fitness, and the second lets you compare 2016 to previous years.

Here’s what you’ll see below:

This past season began with a great build-up from mid February through the end of March. The next month and a half were plagued by mechanical troubles, travel, and bad weather, except for that mid-April brevet I rode: my longest ride of the year. There followed three and a half months of enjoying long summertime rides and steadily-increasing fitness, culminating with the Pedal the Lakes Century on September 4.

After that, I kicked off my Dirty Dozen training rides. Although I was building up leg strength, my fitness chart started trending downward because I wasn’t riding as often or as far; I was just banging out the steepest hills, then taking time off the bike to fully recover.

Dirty Dozen training went well enough until my mother got sick and I left for Maine, which abruptly terminated my season. The chart clearly shows the resulting precipitous decline in fitness from its late-August peak. See?

As with almost all images I post, you can click through for the full-sized version.

2016 TRIMP fitness chart

That’s a tactical view of 2016, but how does this season compare with other years? That’s what we see when we zoom out to a TRIMP / fitness chart for the past six years.

What you immediately notice is that the winter dip from 2015 to 2016 isn’t as deep as any previous year. That—and the irregular jagginess of the curve—reflects the fact that I managed to ride outside a lot last winter; whereas indoor trainer work would appear more regular, like what you see through the winter of 2014-15. Riding outside allowed me to start 2016 at a measurably higher fitness level than usual.

You also see some of the things I mentioned above: the early spring build-up, followed by a brief dip, then a very productive summer season, and a complete drop-off for the last four months of the year.

In terms of the absolute peak fitness I achieved, my max has been pretty consistent over the past three years. See?

2011-2016 TRIMP fitness chart

These two charts are also available as a part of a paid Strava membership. I found them—and especially the underlying form and fatigue data that I haven’t shown here—insightful and very useful in preparing myself for major events this summer without over- or under-training.

2017 Goals

That’s all I want to say about 2016, which leads into the next logical question: what will 2017 look like?

There are a handful of things that I definitely want to accomplish next year, and a couple open questionmarks. Let’s start with the easy ones first.

I plan to purchase and learn how to use a new Garmin Edge 820 GPS cyclo-computer, replacing my reliable six year-old Edge 800. I’m really excited about the many new features it offers, some of which I describe in this post.

I would like to ride both days of next year’s Escape to the Lake MS Ride. This year, I only rode the first day because it was a century and Day 2 was not, and because I could avoid worrying about hotels and overnighting and return transportation. However, Day 2 ends on the shore of Lake Erie, which I have yet to visit, and I think I might enjoy completing the entire event.

I plan to ride next October’s Woiner Cancer Foundation 321 Ride. This year I registered, fundraised, and got the ride jersey, but couldn’t participate due to my mother’s hospitalization.

And it goes without saying that I want to attempt my first Dirty Dozen next year. After several years of anticipation, in 2016 I was all set to take on that challenge, until life intervened. Now having ridden almost all of those hills, I really want to add that ride—and the steepest public street in the world—to my palmares.

Those are my main goals. What about the ones I said were questionable?

One is a 2016 goal that I deferred on: the purchase of a fancy new indoor trainer. That wasn’t necessary last year because Pittsburgh had a very mild winter, and I was trying to save money. The need is still there, but only time will tell whether I need to pull the trigger on it or if it can wait. But I won’t get any indoor or outdoor riding done during this extended stay in Maine.

And then there’s the employment question. Having a job is nice, and it does introduce the possibility of commuting by bike, but it also restricts how much time I can spend in the saddle. Although employment is a non-cycling goal, I’m definitely hoping that I can mesh those two aspects of life together successfully. But that’s also contingent on getting back home again.

That wraps up the end-of-season retrospective. I enjoyed my first year in Pittsburgh, and it was very eventful from a cycling perspective. I learned a lot, got some cool new gear, set benchmarks as well as some new records, met a lot of people, and experienced a whole lot of territory.

Here’s hoping for an equally enjoyable season in 2017!

Ornoth’s been playing with data visualizations again, and as usual the results are pretty cool.

Climbing hills is how cyclists measure themselves. We roam around the countryside, testing ourselves against short, steep hills; long, steady hills; and especially ones that are both steep and long.

Ascending each hill dozens of times, we become intimately familiar with every detail, having discovered where the slope increases, where the opportunities to recover are, and whether a rider should attack it aggressively or work his way to the top more slowly and conservatively.

Slope chart

When cyclists get together, hills are a natural topic of conversation: complaining about them, reminiscing about them, and comparing them to one another. This hill is longer, but that one’s steeper. But the first one is steeper right at the start. Or is it?

The one thing that’s missing from our conversations is quantitative data that allow you to objectively compare one hill with another, or even a whole set of hills. Ideally, that data would all be summarized in one simple chart that you could read at a glance.

You’d think the interwebs would have created such a thing, but I couldn’t find one. Tons of sites will show the elevation profile of one hill, but I couldn’t find any that would show multiple hills on the same chart. So I went and wrote one myself.

If you go to this page, you can enter the URLs for up to thirteen Strava “segments”. The easiest way for me to identify hills (or any road segments) is by leveraging Strava, the cycling activity tracking site.

Once you’ve told me what road segments you’re interested in, behind the scenes my page will fetch all the elevation data from Strava, then build a chart for you that displays the elevation profiles of every segment.

If you click on the thumbnail image at the top of this post, you can view a full-size example, although it won’t show the interactive features of the chart: you can hover the mouse over any line, and a tooltip will display the slope of the hill at that point; you can show and hide each segment; and zoom in closer to see greater detail.

My only disappointment is that it’s only as good as Strava’s data, which isn’t always as good as you’d want and expect.

It can be a bit of a chore chasing around Strava to find segment URLs, so I’ve created some example charts for you to play with.

The first one compares some noteworthy hills near Boston.

The next one shows the thirteen hills in Pittsburgh’s Dirty Dozen ride.

In addition to comparing local hills, this makes it easier for me to compare Boston’s hills with those in Pittsburgh, both to satisfy my own curiosity as well as to share with my cycling buddies back in Boston. Here’s an example chart comparing some hills from Boston and Pittsburgh.

But to satisfy your own curiosity, go to the input page to use whatever Strava segments you care about, from your neighborhood or anywhere in the world.

I hope you enjoy it! It was fun to develop, and I think it carries really interesting and useful information that no other site provides.

Go Higher

Jul. 8th, 2012 06:02 pm

Another summary of recent news to tell you about.

Cape Ann

Three weeks ago, there was the first beautiful, warm, sunny day in a long time, so I decided to take the train up to Salem and do my traditional 65-mile Cape Ann loop. It had a respectable amount of climbing, and I generally felt strong. (GPS log)

Having just ridden Cape Cod, which I really adore, I was also reminded how enchanting Cape Ann is as I rode past all the familiar postcard scenes: the rocky headland of the hidden village of Magnolia; Gloucester’s Hammond Castle and idyllic Buswell Pond; the huge rock and hidden crescent beach at Stage Fort Park; the old Gloucester Fisherman’s Memorial; the Rocky Neck artists’ colony; the elegant mansions and crashing surf at Bass Rocks; Good Harbor Beach, where my mother took her children; the touristy fishing village of Rockport; the granite quarry and slag pile at Halibut Point State Park; the tiny village of Annisquam and its wooden footbrodge over the Annisquam River; the hospital where I was born and the first house I lived in, both on Washington Street; the endless sand of Wingaersheek Beach; and Salem’s common and witch house.

The one odd bit happened at Wingaersheek. I brought my bike out onto the beach and leaned it against one of the huge rocks so I could keep an eye on it. After wading in the ocean and sunning on the rocks, I noticed that the tide was coming in. But Wingaersheek is a very flat beach, which means the tide comes in *fast*. In about 15 minutes, the water had advanced a good 30 feet, and submerged my bike up to the rear derailleur! Not a great way to treat your bike, especially when you’ve got to cross a sandy beach and ride another 30 miles with a very crunchy drivetrain!

But all in all it was just a great day on the bike.

… Which is in sharp contract to the next weekend. I had hoped to do a full century, which would put me in good shape for my upcoming Mt. Washington ride.

Harvard “Century”

I should have known better from the start. On the way out to Arlington I felt a bit slower than normal. After meeting up with my buddies Jay and Paul and Noah at Quad Cycles, I managed to flat on the bike path out to Bedford. Swapped the tube out, only to discover that my spare was just as bad. While I patched the original (thank god for self-adhesive patches), I managed to expose myself to a patch of poison ivy lining the path. Having completed repairs, I caught up with my buds, who had waited at the end of the bike path.

There’s a bike shop at the end of the path, and I’d planned on buying another tube there, so I wouldn’t be without a spare. However, my friends had invited another six riders—all fast guys—to ride with us, so I couldn’t very well hold them up longer than I already had. I figured that if I flatted, at least they’d be around.

So we set off, with me showing folks where to go. At least, that’s how it worked for a couple miles, until we got to the first turn in the route. I’d been setting a steady 18 mph pace on the front that wouldn’t fatigue us, since we had 85 miles ahead of us, but as soon as I rolled off the front, the next guy in line (one of my buddies) slammed it up to an unmaintainable 22 mph. Knowing none of us were going to finish a century at that pace, I just let them go, watching my promised spare tube go with them. Ironically, that friend who had picked up the pace and dropped me: he abandoned the ride within a couple miles and went home.

I figured we’d regroup again once the others noticed that I had dropped off, but that didn’t happen. I didn’t see them again until I pulled into the general store in Harvard, 25 miles later. I asked my two remaining buddies to loan me one of their spare tubes, and both refused, saying that they’d slow down and ride the rest of the way with me.

Can you predict what happened next? Yep, we started out again, and after a couple miles they kicked it back up and rode off without me, leaving me again out in the middle of nowhere, riding on a patched tube, without a spare. At least I knew the route, whereas those guys just kept going, leaving the route and continuing on with absolutely no idea where they were headed. At one point, two hours later, I was standing at a traffic light when two of the group rode past, perpendicular to my path. I called out to them and one of my buddies looked over toward me, but just kept riding along.

As the temperature hovered around 90, I started feeling nauseous and weak. It might have been that I uncharacteristically drank a Coke at the general store, or it might have been that I didn’t eat anything other than that and Gatorade. After another hour, I pulled into our customary post-ride coffee shop and just caught the rest of the group before they dispersed to go home. I was in a bad way, with 10 miles left between me and Boston. I limped along, trying not to vomit, being passed by little Asian girls on rickety utility bikes with grocery bags in their front baskets.

Unable to go further, I stopped and sat on the lawn at MIT, barely a mile from my house. After a long rest, I hobbled slowly home. I was just shy of completing a century, but I couldn’t possibly imagine riding another 5 miles, which was all I needed. I could have ridden around my neighborhood three times and been done, but it simply was out of the question. (GPS log)

It was probably the worst day I’ve had on the bike in a long, long time.

Hill Street Blues

Last week was July 4th, and on July 3rd (Tuesday) my employer let us out early. That gave me a chance to get back on the bike and get in my first round of hill repeats in preparation for next weekend’s Mt. Washington Century. So I found a route over to the Blue Hills and climbed the 400 foot Great Blue Hill access road. And did it again. And again. And again. The whole day I felt strong on the bike, and felt good enough to do my usual climb up Dorchester Heights, even after four Great Blue Hills (GBHs)! (GPS log)

What scares me is that next weekend’s ride contains three major climbs, each the equivalent of three or four GBHs, yielding a total of about 12 GBHs over a hundred miles. It’s billed as the most challenging century in New England; hence the focus this week on training with hill repeats.

Today I went out to Arlington Heights and did my usual pre-PMC hill: one trip up to the water tower from School Street, and five more via Spring Street and Eastern Avenue. (GPS log)

Hill repeats are great strength training, and they look great when you look at your GPS log’s elevation profile, but nothing’ll make you want to puke faster. As I told one friend, I was wheezing like a poorly-sealed steam engine, twitching like Max Headroom, and grunting like Monika Seles!

But hopefully all this agony will serve me well next weekend, when I attempt what might be the hardest ride I’ve ever done: I’ve got an appointment with the Kancamagus Highway, Bear Notch, Crawford Notch, and Pinkham Notch.

Stay tuned to hear how well *that* goes!

Well, May’s rain finally ended, and the season’s upon us, so it’s time to get you caught up on every little thing.

First off is a happy update to my cycling website—specifically the Charts & Statistics page. Instead of a long page full of static images, now it’s all interactive and prettified. Check it out, it’s very cool.

It’s also much easier for me to maintain, since it’s updated automagically, but that’s not anything you care about.

Another big piece of news is that I managed to sneak into one of the most memorable events in the Pan-Mass Challenge’s history: the dedication of the PMC Plaza which fronts the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute’s new Yawkey Center for Cancer Care. Rather than dive into that here, I’ll point you to the article in my main journal for a full writeup and pictures.

Aside from that, we been riding! In addition to the regular commuting, I completed my second century of the year. Like the first, it was a regular weekend Quad ride that I extended past all normal dimensions. This one went out to Framingham to stop by my buddy Paul’s housewarming.

The other big ride I’ve done was an epic excursion up to Vermont with my buddy Jay. We rode a great 70-mile loop over and back the gigantic Jay Peak (no relation), which in pro cycling terms means two Category 2 climbs.

Jay captured a lot of the action in his blog post, which I strongly encourage you to read, but I want to underscore a few things he passed over. First is my GPS data; check it out, if only for the ride elevation profile! I don’t think he captured how ridiculously high/long the ascents were, or how much the rain/cold sucked. He didn’t mention his flatting a tire, or our quick trip to the bank, or the fact that we were both sleep- and food-deprived at the start. And I think he overlooked my glorious post-ride hot tub dip and our Thai food extravaganza that followed. It was indeed an epic trip!

And I should note that another milestone occurred during that ride: the Plastic Bullet’s odometer tripped 16,793. That means it has finally surpassed my old Devinci hybrid as the bike I’ve ridden the most. Chapeau to both of my reliable old steeds.

In the way of a preview, on Saturday is another of my major rides: Outriders. I’ll be pedaling my way from Boston down to Cape Cod and out to Provincetown, then taking the ferry back. At 130 miles, that will almost certainly be the longest one-day ride I’ll do all year. I’m really looking forward to it, even though my riding buddies will all be elsewhere that day.

You might note the lack of any mention of PMC fundraising; that’s because I haven’t even started yet. The one thing I can say is that I did finally complete my 2011 fundraising video, which I hope you’ll peruse. That frees me to start sending out emails; look for yours to appear soon, or get a jump on me by bringing your underutilized credit card to http://ornoth.PMCrider.com/

Introduction

It’s interesting to read what people write about cycling. For the most part, since there are so few variables, there’s only so much to say about cycling technique, and nearly all of it has been written already. There’s a great deal of conventional wisdom out there, and most of it is rock solid and timeless. But maybe I can add a little to that body of knowledge in this post.

If your club rides are anything like mine, the group starts out together and zips along for several miles in something resembling a nice trim paceline. Then the peloton explodes on the first good hill, shedding riders like a malamute in the Yucatan sheds fur.

Real time differences aren’t made on the flats. In most rides, hills are where gaps happen, where you’re most likely to get spit out the back and dropped.

And that’s exactly what’s going to happen if you just think of hills as hills. In order to be your best as a cyclist, you need to understand the terrain, and I don’t mean simply having a course profile taped to your bar. You need to look deeply into the nature of hills and understand how the undulations of the Earth impact us as cyclists. If you don’t have the insight to see the different parts of a hill and the strategies they require, then you’re not well prepared for the challenge they present.

This isn’t about short hills you can just power over. If you can fly over a small hill without pain, by all means do it! I’m talking about hills that present a sizable challenge, that make your legs burn and your lungs gasp and your strength of will shatter.

To begin, let’s break a hill down into its constituent parts. They are, in order: the approach (A), the region of increasing grade (B), the area with the sustained maximum grade (which I’ll separate into two separate sections: C and D), the area of decreasing grade (E), and finally the crest of the hill (F). Sounds obvious, right? But you’d be surprised how few cyclists have even thought it through that far.

After the illustration, I’ll share my preferred climbing strategies for each section of the hill. They’re not the only strategies, and they might not be the right ones for you. But I hope you’ll discover the advantage that comes from making conscious choices about how you approach hills and finding out what works best for you.

Parts of a hill

A: The Approach

Even before the road turns upward, what you do in the few hundred meters before a hill makes an immense difference in how quickly you get over the top. Your goal here is maximize your momentum, so that it will help carry you partway up.

Rather than keeping your steady cruising speed and just riding into the hill, as most people do, consider upshifting and accelerating a little in order to build up extra momentum. You don’t want to redline, but a good 80 percent effort now will serve you well on the upside.

Some riders, looking to put the hurt on, will choose to attack on the approach to a hill, and the best scenario for us would be to latch on behind such an attacker, as this is the only part of the hill where you’ll be going fast enough for drafting to produce any benefit.

B: Increasing Grade

As you begin an ascent, there’s a short period of time when the grade is shallow and your momentum will carry you forward. This is the proverbial calm before the storm. Use this time to recover from your exertion during the approach, soft pedaling at about 70 percent effort in order to nurse the precious momentum you’ve got left.

Since you’re not putting a lot of torque on the chain yet, now is the best time to downshift from the big chainring, and find a suitable sprocket on the rear.

C: Sustained Grade, Part 1

It won’t take long for the hill to reach its maximum grade. With your momentum gone, now it’s just you and the hill. Since it’s too big to simply sprint over, now is the time to be patient and conserve energy. Find a gear that requires an amount of torque that you can sustain for the duration with an 80 percent effort.

Resist all temptation to push harder, because you don’t want to blow up before the hill starts leveling out. Let other riders who are pushing harder pass you; you’ll probably see them again later, going backwards.

D: Sustained Grade, Part 2

Eventually, you will start watching for the point where you believe you can sprint the rest of the way. This can be difficult to judge correctly, because it varies based on the grade, your speed, what gear you’re in, your cadence, and your level of fatigue.

From here, you’ll get out of the saddle and drive at 100 percent effort. Having held some energy in reserve thus far, your goal now is to maximize the benefit of being the fastest when everyone else is at their slowest.

When picking your jump point, keep in mind that you don’t have to sprint to the actual summit of the hill. A lot of coaches will tell you to drive all the way through the crest, but you really only need to sprint hard until you’ve reached an area where the grade decreases enough for you to begin recovering. Remember that you have the most advantage over other riders by sprinting while the grade is still at its steepest, not when it’s easing up.

E: Decreasing Grade

Just before you reach the summit, the hill will start to flatten out and get easier once again. Your goal here is to keep your effort around 80 percent so that you retain the advantage you have gained. If you judged your sprint correctly, you’ll have just enough juice left to begin accelerating as the hill levels out. But don’t ease up yet…

F: Crest

As you crest the hill, your top priority should be to get back to your optimal cruising speed as quickly as possible, to lock down the advantage you gained on the ascent. Every second you delay in getting up to speed gives back the hard-won time you gained on the incline. This is doubly important if a descent follows, since cresting the hill first allows you to stretch your advantage because you start using the gravitational benefit of the descent earlier.

Only when you’re back up to speed and in your aero tuck can you soft pedal a bit, take a drink, and start managing your recovery.

Conclusion

Riders use many diverse strategies to overcome hills. The approach I’ve described isn’t the only one, and it may not be the best one for you. However, the parts of a hill never change, and you should think about how you approach each of them and experiment to discover what works best for you. If you consciously choose how much energy you’re putting out at each stage, and know why, I guarantee you’ll go faster.

Of course, I’ve talked exclusively about strategies, but technique doesn’t trump training. If you want to be fast on hills, you need to make hills a central part of your training regimen. Training is the base, which strategies like these can only incrementally improve.

Last week was the 2004 DargonZine Writers’ Summit, which took place in Oregon. I flew out a couple days early and rented a bike and spent two days riding around the foothills of 11,200-foot Mt. Hood..

My goal was to cover the same ground as four and a half of the five stages in the Mt. Hood Cycling Classic stage race, including the entirety of the very mountainous, 70-mile final stage.

Thursday morning I drove our rented Ford Explorer in to Hood River, the nearest town, located at the eastern end of the famed Columbia River Gorge. I stopped at Discover Bicycles, where I rented a navy blue 60cm Cannondale R400.

Ornoth on MHCC Stage 3Taking it outside for a quick test ride, the first thing that happened was that the frame pump fell off, which I fixed by putting it on properly, as it hadn’t been before. Then, as I worked my way through the gears, I felt a sudden jerk and nearly fell because my pants had gotten caught in the chainring and torn. I’d been dumb enough to do the test ride still wearing my jeans—a stupid move to begin with—and it ripped a seven-inch tear right up the pantleg. I had to hobble back to the shop holding my pantleg up. I also had them decrease the float on the pedals.

That done, I went back to the car, where I traded my pants for cycling shorts and transferred my cyclometer, my GPS, and a bunch of other stuff to the bike, then calibrated my cyclometer for the new bike. By then it was about 10:30 already.

Before I left, I wanted to take one lap around the half-mile criterium circuit that comprised MHCC Stage 4. Starting a block from the bike shop, that was quickly accomplished and I loaded the bike into the back of the Explorer.

Then I drove six miles east to Mosier, where I began MHCC Stage 3: a 10-mile loop along the high ridge overlooking the Columbia, with about 700 feet of climbing. The views were fantastic, and I reached the turnaround—a scenic overlook known as Rowena Crest—where I met a batch of cyclo-tourists, led by a guy from Natick. The ride back was treacherous, as the gorge winds had kicked up to about 30-40 mph. This leg took me about an hour, all told.

Ornoth on MHCC Stage 1Then I drove back through Hood River to the Pine Grove School at the foot of Van Horn Butte, where I began MHCC Stage 1, a 5-mile loop to Panorama Point and back. The road dipped 200 feet between some of Hood River’s famous fruit farms before a short uphill to the lookout tower. The wind was still blowing pretty hard, but not so fiercely as down in the gorge. By then it was time to get back to the group.

Friday I planned to ride MHCC Stage 5, a brutal 75-mile loop with 7500 feet of climbing over three peaks, which coincidentally covered about half the length of Stage 2, as well. I didn’t have to do any driving, either, because the lodge we stayed at was the race’s starting line, and it finished nearby after a short additional climb.

So I set off shortly after 7am. The early morning air was a bit cool, which was doubly uncomfortable because I wasn’t pedaling; the first twelve miles were pure downhill, dropping from 3400’ down below 1000’. This being my first time on an unfamiliar road bike in a long time, I was on the brakes almost the whole way, from the Cooper Spur Mountain Resort through Parkdale and on to Dee, where I turned southwest onto Lost Lake Road for the long climb into the Mt. Hood National Forest.

Ornoth on MHCC Stage 5The first hint of a problem came from my GPS, which seemed to be getting confused between waypoints I’d set for the outbound leg versus those on my return. I wouldn’t figure out until later that I’d missed a turn from Lost Lake Road onto an unmarked forest service road and had actually jumped from my planned outbound route to the road I’d planned to return on!

The first of three planned climbs (2300’) finally dumped me out at the Lost Lake campground at a four-way intersection that made no sense on my map. It was clear that something was wrong, but I still thought I’d come the right way, and surely the way to proceed wasn’t back the way I’d just come (though actually it was). I stopped at the Forest Service office and asked the attendant how to proceed, but she was apparently just as confused as I was, because she sent me back along the way that I should have arrived on, cutting out of my route about 25 miles and the middle, 2500-foot climb that I’d planned.

Proceeding out the way I was supposed to come in, I eventually figured out that I was heading northeast, back toward Dee, rather than southeast. About the time I decided I was truly lost, my front tire flatted. I tried to continue on by pumping it up a couple times, but never got very far before it needed pumping again, so I got off, took the tire off and patched the tube. At this point the day had begun getting very hot, and I was well and truly pissed off.

Under way again, I rejoined Lost Lake Road as I suspected I would and got back to Dee. If I’d successfully followed the Stage 5 route, I would have been dumped in Parkdale, but because I’d missed it, I had to face the long, 12-mile, 2400-foot ascent I’d first come down, and now beneath a blazing noonday sun. I picked up some Gatorade at a convenience store and pumped my way back to Parkdale and then up Cooper Spur Road to the lodge, not bothering to do the additional 2-mile, 800’ ascent to Stage 5’s official finish line at the Cooper Spur Ski Area.

So instead of 75 miles, I’d done 61. Instead of 7500’ of climbing over three peaks of 2250, 2500, and 2750 feet, I’d done two ascents of 2300 and 2400 feet, totaling 4700 feet.

During the two-day trip, I rode 80 miles, which—combined with my 90- and 100-mile rides the previous weekend—gave me a weekly total of 273 miles and just over 19 hours in the saddle, which completely eclipses my previous records of 221 miles and just shy of 14 hours. You can see how it compares on my Training Graphs page.

Despite getting turned around and not properly following the Stage 5 route, it was still a good ride, and a great experience. The climbing will certainly put me in good stead for the upcoming Pan-Mass Challenge, which—although it does have some climbing—isn’t anywhere near as significant. Though I still wish I’d finished Stage 5 because it would have been much more of a challenge for me.

But it was indeed a bit of an adventure, and a lot of fun, as well.

Yesterday was quite an interesting day for me, so I thought I’d share.

Having already put 125 miles in this weekend, I decided that my goals for the day would be some hill climbing and a bit of exploring new routes.

After riding out to Alewife, I began my first exploration. Instead of taking the exceedingly popular Minuteman Bikeway, I turned off and took the less well-known Fitchburg Cutoff, a short stone dust path that runs parallel to the commuter rail line, from Alewife to Belmont Center. The path has been narrowed by encroaching vegetation, but it’s quite passable if you’re not focused on speed.

As I approached the end of the path, up ahead where it intersects with Brighton Street I saw three cyclists go by: one with a red, white, and blue helmet, and two others in blue and green Quad Cycles jerseys. I caught up with them and verified that the leader was indeed Bobby Mac, the guy who leads the Quad Cycles weekend training rides that I often take part in. That was really surprising, because I‘ve never known Bobby to ride in Belmont, and being there at just the right time—midday on a Wednesday—is just ludicrously improbable. We chatted for a bit, and I followed them back to the store, where I peeled off.

That was convenient for my interest in hill climbing, because Quad Cycles is right at the foot of one of the best climbs in the area: a 380-foot hill with an MWRA water tower on top. So I rode my usual route up Park Ave. to the top.

But I wasn’t through exploring. There are many roads that ascend that hill, but I’d only ever done two of them. So the next thing I did was try coming up the other side of Park Ave., from Belmont. Unfortunately, that side of the hill wasn’t much of a challenge, and the road was busy and in poor condition, so that’s been permanently taken out of consideration.

Then I went down Eastern Ave., which turns into Spring Street. My friend Jeremy had said that was a better challenge than Park Ave., and he was indeed right. At just shy of a mile, it’s the longest side of the hill, and because it starts at a lower elevation than the other roads—just 85 feet above sea level—it also sports the most altitude gain.

I was timing myself on each ascent I did, but I’d gotten no more than a quarter of the way up Spring Street when my cell phone rang. I pulled aside, turned off the stopwatch, and talked to my friend [livejournal.com profile] iniren for about 15 minutes. As I did, I saw a woman cyclist ride down the hill, and climb back up past me. She was wearing last year’s Pan-Mass Challenge jersey, the one with the Boston Red Sox motif; amusingly, it was the same one I had on at the time, and I waved and gave her a thumbs-up as she passed me.

After [livejournal.com profile] iniren hung up, I went back down Spring Street (seeing that PMC rider climbing the hill a second time), reset my stopwatch, and began a second ascent. But only six minutes after I hung up with [livejournal.com profile] iniren, as I was about a third of the way up Spring Street, my cell phone rang again! This time it was a consulting company I’d been interviewing at, calling to let me know that they were turning me down. That certainly didn’t help my mood any.

Then it was back down once more, for a third attempt to climb Spring Street. This time I made it to the top. It’s quite a climb, a great discovery, and is now one of my two preferred routes up that hill. If you’re familiar with Route 2, Spring Street parallels the long hill that climbs through Arlington and Belmont.

From there, I decided to explore yet another route. I’d recently seen an article about a Boston bike courier who used Oakland Ave. to train on. As Oakland goes over the hill, I first tried the west approach, but that, like the south approach of Park Ave., is barely a hill at all. Then I went down Oakland’s east approach, which is a bit of a hill, but it’s neither as long as Spring Street’s ascent, nor as steep as School Street.

Oakland did, however, dump me off near the foot of School Street, which is my other favorite approach. While Spring Street may be the longest climb and have the most elevation gain, School Street (which turns into Kenilworth Road) is by far the steepest and most monotonic grade. It’s death on a stick; that’s why I like it so well. So I timed myself going up School Street, as well.

After that, I made two more trips down and up Spring Street again. As I climbed one time, I again saw that woman cyclist. Judging by the number of times I saw her going up and down Spring Street, I became convinced that she’s a machine—probably one of those Fembots used by the villains in the Austin Powers movies. Though on one trip up, I did pass her as she stood at the side of the road, fuming at her chain which she said unshipped every time at that point on the hill.

By then I’d put in about six trips up that hill, and added about 20 miles to my weekly total, so I decided to head home. I took the Fitchburg Cutoff again on the way home, but had some difficulty approaching it via Channing Road, because the commercial landowners had fenced off the connecting property.

Ornoth on Quad Cycles rideOnce home, I had a couple surprises in the mail. One was a PMC donation from one of my aunts, and every donation is worth celebrating these days! The other was the pack of ten “LiveStrong” bracelets that I’d ordered from the Lance Armstrong Foundation. I figure that, as a symbol of support for cancer victims, it’d be a good thing to wear during my PMC ride, but I can also wear one every day in the hopes that someone might either recognize it or ask about it, giving me an opening for talking about my PMC ride and potentially gaining another sponsor for my ride.

Oh, and in writing this article, I also discovered that John Hirtle has put his most recent shots up on the Quad Cycles photo page. He takes snapshots during the weekend rides, and he got a pretty good solo photo of me on June 20th at Concord’s historic Old North Bridge, which is one of our rest stops. A cropped version of the photo illustrates this journal entry, and the original can be seen as picture #9 on this page.

Today was another big adventure. All summer long I've been fascinated by the first graph on Doug Jansen's Northeast Road Hill Climb Profiles page. It lists eleven of the longest and steepest paved summit climbs in New England. Earlier in the year I told you about climbing Mount Wachusett, which is listed there as "the easiest climb reviewed". Well, as my 40th birthday approached, and with the end of the season fast approaching, and with the autumn foliage in color, I decided to make a road trip and bag the next two bigger mountains, which also happened to be the closest to Boston.

So today, despite a forecast for afternoon rain, I headed up to Manchester, New Hampshire. I parked in Goffstown and proceeded to bike to the summit of South Uncanoonuc Mountain (photo). Unca really didn't live up to its billing; it seemed about on par with Great Blue Hill, which must be about right: Unca rises 500 feet to an altitude of 1300 feet in about a mile, at an average 9 percent grade. Some of the roads had been resurfaced, but others were badly broken up, including the main summit road. It was good exercise, but not that tough a challenge.

Just as the very light rain began to pick up in earnest, I drove a few miles to Wilton, New Hampshire, where I'd depart for an 18-mile round trip to Pack Monadnock and back. I gained 1100 feet over the eight mile approach alone, before even getting to the mountain, which was pretty formidable: rocky cliffs, two real switchbacks, and an ascent of 770 feet over a mile and a quarter, for an average grade of 12 percent. But the killer was that the last fifth of a mile was a veritable wall, with a sustained grade of 19 percent. Pack is actually steeper than famed Mount Washington, although obviously only a fraction as long.

Over the whole day I rode 39 miles and climbed a total of about 4100 feet. Unfortunately, the whole ride to Pack and back was in pouring rain along a busy highway, but other than that, it was quite a memorable ride. While Uncanoonuc isn't anything I'd go out of my way to do again, Pack really was quite a nice ride, and would be absolutely amazing on a clear, warm day. It would have produced some wonderful pictures, but it was raining too hard.

I'm glad to end my season, and unfortunately my thirties, by conquering two more noteworthy mountains. And now I've only got Cadillac left, and then I make the big jump to the set of 2200- to 2800-foot ascents, but those will all have to wait until next season.

Today I took my first ride through Prospect Hill Park in Waltham, which was sold to me as one of the steeper hills in the area. While it has a few brief moments of steepness, it really provided no challenge, and it doesn't even begin to compare to Great Blue Hill. On the good side, though, you get an amazing view of Boston from the summit. Hopefully I can get Jer to ride out there with me and take a photo of me with the city as a background...

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