Yesterday morning greeted me with not just an additional hour of time, about which I had forgotten, but also a significant amount of rain. It ended up raining for most of the day in San Francisco, creating one very wet Sunday for all.
I enjoy rain and usually welcome it, as I did yesterday. The downside, however, was that this surprise downpour steered me away from adding to the challenging bicycle mileage I logged the day before. Saturday morning was an absolutely beautiful time for the weekly Alto Velo Club ride. This was my second Saturday with this group of riders, starting and ending in Los Altos. I’ve been on the search for a local bicycle racing group to replace La Grange in Los Angeles, and so far Alto Velo is filling the void. As the weeks progress, and as my personal level of cycling fitness hopefully returns to a higher level, I’m looking forward to getting to know this club all the more.
As wonderful as San Francisco is in so many ways, it’s not a city for any good amount of performance cycling. Riders might meet somewhere in the city, but from there typically comes an immediate dash across the Golden Gate into Marin and beyond, where terrific routes abound. The Peninsula is another great area for pedal power, as cyclists flock to the back roads and twisty climbs of Woodside, hitting Skyline Boulevard and often continuing on to the coast. While many exciting cycling options weave themselves around the Bay Area, none of them appears to exist in San Francisco itself. I’ve done a few short jaunts around the city just to spin my legs, say 12 to 15 miles, and of course this is better than nothing. However, when it comes to longer and more serious training, it’s going to happen either to the north or to the south.
Here’s a link to a map of my 30-mile ride this past Saturday, created via the GPS application on my iPhone. I would have gone the full distance with the group, about twice as far, had I not needed to turn back early. I needed to get to a different kind of bike appointment, this one pertaining to my other game, as in the one with a motor. This Saturday, weather, work and home permitting, I’m hoping to go the day’s full distance with Alto Velo. As I realized on this last ride, out of peak cycling shape as I currently am, two wheels sans motor is still my main game!
Ryan R. Sanderson 