This is a fun-looking bicycle child seat. We saw a kid in Tiburon riding one and having a blast.

Uh oh.

A wild seat with the rails built into the *sides* of the shell. Check the video to see the full shape. More images.

Finally. Beyond TTs this would be great in the rain and cold; those GoreTex ones never look very good.

A family of 5 is cycling across the country, from Kentucky to Florida to San Diego to Alaska, on a 5-person bicycle. They’re currently in California…maybe I’ll see them on the road?

Bummer. I liked the concept and the bikes; my one worry was that at $500-$700 the bikes were too expensive for their target usage.

You would think that by the age of 30 I would be able to resist the siren song of a road called “Crazy Pete’s“, which features a hand-painted wooden sign and dwindles to a poorly-marked cow path within a quarter mile, especially when I was on my road bike. You would think that, but you would be wrong. Especially when said road features a beautiful waterfall in the woods.

On the bright side, I discovered that my new 28mm front tire floats remarkably well through 10-20 foot sections of deep mud and water. Just don’t expect to get much pedaling traction…

Current weather on Skyline Blvd in Palo Alto. This will come in handy.

Both the Kouign Amann LD and John Morciglio’s M1 are pretty cool looking.

These fenders are my next set. Super-slim and clean, they also stabilize themselves using felt pads which clean your rims as you ride.

Some very cool recumbents from RaptoBike. Low Racer is really low; Mid racer takes up to 2 700c wheels. Might have to give one a shot.

This looks really interesting, and jives with my own experience surging on climbs with each stroke.

The folks at RoadBikeReview are skeptical, as are the commenters at Bicycle Design, but while I admit any energy storage system will lose some amount of power, the benefit of reducing acceleration and deceleration on climbs may be worth it.

Bike-Eye rearview mirror – a clever way to tuck a mirror on a bike

Bicycle Comics – Yehuda Moon and the Kickstand Cyclery | His Commute.

This just gets crazier and crazier…

“It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them. Thus you remember them as they actually are, while in a motor car only a high hill impresses you, and you have no such accurate remembrance of country you have driven through as you gain by riding a bicycle.” – Ernest Hemingway

drawing by Wil Freeborn.

Crazy cycling thought of the day: There’s been a lot of research on how your cadence affects your heart rate–for a given power output, there is usually a cadence that creates the lowest heart rate for an individual. But could there be a correlation the other way? What if your blood flow worked best when pumping at a similar frequency to your pedaling? It seems to make sense that oxygen would best be replenished at the same frequency it was depleted. Given a bicycle with infinitely-variable transmission, might you find good results by matching your cadence to something like 1/2 your heart rate, e.g. 90 rpm for a heart rate of 180?

I haven’t ridden my bike for a while; changing jobs and travelling turning me into a stress case. But this morning a cancelled meeting opens up a chance to spin, so I rise at dawn and roll onto the road. Fitness is gone, bike complains about being left alone so long, I pedal through traffic and up into the hills. The sun is out but threatened by clouds to the south, and I am glad I rode early today. Little rattles from the wheels and frame remind me of my inefficiencies, let loose by weeks of sloth. Rising up to the top of the hills I glance behind like Lot’s wife and nearly turn motionless myself as the valley opens up before me, sun shining in the north and wispy clouds moving in from the south. Up to the top, I turn again–pause in place as silence envelops me, wind whistling softly past. The hills rise in sets to the south, each a different shade until the last blurs into the cloudy sky. And life itself waits for a moment; a hiccup in time and my anxiety melts–I float in the air. Pause for just a moment, then glide down back home, changed.

While riding today, I realized that I’ve put a lot of pressure on myself to do well in the race this weekend. It’s dangerous to do so, because it is just my first race and it’s one that, despite my having successfully finished before, is on a course entirely ill-suited to me. So in classic Bob fashion, I’m writing out my excuses (to myself, my greatest critic) in advance to avoid any disappointments later.

1. My reason for cycling again after a long time off was simply to do the long, epic rides I most enjoy. I started riding faster just so I could do those more quickly and comfortably, and any racing that I do is extra and unexpected. I’ve said this before, in fact when I started cycling the first time, and I quickly became obsessed with racing. But I’ve got plenty else to console myself with if cycling doesn’t become my full-time activity this time.
2. My worth as a person does not depend on how I do in this race. Most sane adults do not spend their Saturdays racing around local neighborhoods on bicycles, dressed in spandex and eating fossilized energy bars. It’s all right if some of the other insane ones do it better than me.
3. I, like hopefully all other non-full-time-professional cyclists, am doing this for the enjoyment of the sport. If it is not enjoyable, it’s ok to stop doing it.

With those ground rules in place, it’s easy to set my goals for this first race:

1. Start it — always the most difficult thing for me, and the thing I’ve really been aiming for. I never said “I really want to finish a race again” — I said, “I really want to race again.”
2. Stay safe — no stupid crashes.
3. Have fun

Those rules make it entirely acceptable for me to pull out of the race as soon as the starting gun goes off, if I decide I’ve had enough fun. Of course, knowing my history I’ll probably try to stick around a bit longer, but it’s important to know that I don’t have to. Even though the race cost me 43 freaking dollars to enter, it’s my “freaking” money, not my team’s or sponsor’s, and it’s up to me to define successful usage of it. For me, that puts me on the start line tomorrow at 4:10 pm Pacific Time (thoughts and prayers appreciated at that time). Anything further is icing on the cake.

I just registered for my first bike race in four years. It’s this Saturday afternoon in Los Gatos, kicking off at 4:10 pm. But I’m still hesitant due to my unknown fitness level, so I thought I’d post my plans online. Now other people know about the race and I have to do it (well, that plus my Dutch heritage won’t let me waste the $43 I paid to enter–what happened to entry fees while I was gone? Yikes.) Wish me luck!