Grumpy Start, Zoomy Finish
This morning, I overslept my alarm clock by over 90 minutes after a whole bunch of noise from the neighbor and a whole lot of noise in my own apartment had me staring at my alarm clock at 12:15 am, wondering when I was going to sleep. I scrambled out of bed at 6:35 am (I had reset my alarm clock to 5:00, when I missed my 9:30 pm go-to-bed time), jumped through the shower, ate a little something, and kicked to work.
Drop-kids-off hour on Middlefield Road is usually about 7:30 am, which is right about the time I headed past Menlo-Atherton High School and on through Menlo Park, Palo Alto, and Mountain View, three upscale towns with among the highest average per capita incomes in the United States. Commuting the nearly eleven miles to work at this time of day reinforced one of the many things I know about cars. Here’s something you can quote me on:
No automobile with a retail value over forty thousand dollars ($40,000) is equipped with turn signals.Also, a little known, but apparently heavily followed, unwritten rule in California:
If you spent more than $40,000 on your automobile, you are legally required to own a cell phone and use it every instant that you drive it.
So, it’s easy to see why my commute was slow. I averaged 17.6 mph (28.4 kph) on the way to work, still fuming from oversleeping my alarm clock and not getting very much sleep in the first place. This whole morning, I had to really really work to keep my focus from slipping off the chain ring, as it were.
After work, which means about an hour after I usually leave, I pedaled home, sleep-deprived and pissed off, and just leaned my head down, got down in my drops, and started spinning. As I rounded the little entrance from Homestead Road to Foothill Expressway, my average speed was already 18.7 mph (30.1 kph). Damn. Foothill caressed my wheels and I pounded toward home. At 30 minutes, I broke my half hour distance record (now 9.94 miles / 16.00 km) and set my 10 mile sprint at 30:10 (a full five seconds faster than my personal best). At 11 miles, the timer read 32:33 (20.3 mph avg) and I saw 20.4 on average speed mode for the first time ever. Unfortunately, my speed was about to drop drastically and I would spend the rest of the time trying to recover a little bit of the glory of the first half of this commute.
A strong crosswind assaulted me as I approached the little hump that Foothill makes as it crosses Page Mill Road. The crosswind turned into a headwind (probably about 20 mph) and I struggled to shove against it, reaching down to shift more times than I’m probably legally allowed to. The Stanford quagmire (now that a bottleneck intersection is closed until Thanksgiving) gave me a little of my speed back, but the fierce face wind climbing Sand Hill Road and the ignorant drivers who decide to turn right only when they can read the emblem on the front of my bicycle slowed me up a little bit. A nice fast stomp down Valparaiso and a couple extra blocks and I shoved into my driveway with a total time under an hour, having completed a hundred hours of riding so far this year. Now, that’s how you finish your day!
Home : 19.63 mi; 0:59:38 (19.8 mph avg; 32.0 mph max)
Today: 30.22 mi; 1:35:41 (19.0 mph avg; 32.0 mph max)
April: 123.79 mi; 6:35:58 (18.8 mph avg; 32.0 mph max)
2005 : 1854.20 mi; 100:00:32 (18.5 mph avg; 43.0 mph max)
Goal : 5000.00 mi (3145.80 mi to go : 37.08% complete)
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