Sox poll

IMPORTANT!! I (Francisco) changed the poll, because the first time I forgot to include some relevant options. You should vote again, if you did it before Friday 8/29 7:00 AM. The poll has been reset. Sorry about the changes.

The club is making custom socks and we'd like to know your opinion before we order. The socks are made by DeFeet and customized with the school's and/or club's colors and logos. We will have two designs available, both cool-looking, but different. They're not male- or female-specific. The socks can be used for running or other sports too.

Please don't vote more than once. If you have any questions, please ask Devon or Carly. Thanks.

The poll is now closed.

Holding Down the Fort

Whilst the youngster racers have flown the UCVC coop for the summer, it should be known that long (and not so long) time members Eric Norstrom, Tim Belton, Thomas Bérubé, Rob Fairbanks, Suchandra Thapa, and Jeff Norris have all been doing their share of riding and racing in the maroon this season. Eric has been posting solid M4 and Masters crits & road races. Tim can be seen on the path at all hours, mondo 53x11. Thomas has been doing his usual brevet madness. Rob posed as and injured Francisco at the Chicago Crit! Suchandra has jumped headlong into M5 racing solo style. And Jeff has posted respectable results in this, his first real season of racing.

I'm sure that there are others out there, too.

Cross Is Here!

The collegiate cross schedule has been posted. Here are the races:

Nov 1/2: Mizzou

Nov 8/9: Michigan Tech

Nov 15/16: Purdue

Nov 22/23: Lindsey Wilson

Dec 14: Nationals in Kansas City

For more collegiate racing info, sign up for the Midwest Collegiate Cycling Conference (MWCCC) group at http://groups.google.com/group/mwccc

Yay for Cross!!!

CX and other blogging continued elsewhere

I am continuing the series of Cyclocross 101 posts on my own cycling blog, Morning Roll, which I just started. In fact, from now on I'll do all my cycloblogging there, except for posts where I specifically write about UCVC, which will remain here. I have also copied all my previous Vélo Café posts to the new blog.

I encourage everyone to keep visiting, posting stuff, and writing comments on UC Vélo Café, and also to visit Morning Roll and to leave comments there too.

Question About Switchbacks

The point of this is not to rub in that I live in the best place for riding. It's a real question, and it could affect parts of my road racing. When a road is really steep, say 14-20%, for a while, is it better to ride a switchback on the inside, which is shorter in distance but steeper in grade, or outside? Or does it even matter?

On a slight aside, have you guys ever heard of the term 'paper boy weave'? I hadn't until this spring, and I totally had to bust it out yesterday, even with a 27 on my back.

Crosstube

Once you're done watching all the great how-to videos Francisco has been posting, you may want to head over to Crosstube to see the techniques in action. I was making a list of the watchable (and it takes more than bad 80's hair band music to make them unwatchable) 'cross videos I could find on Youtube when I stumbled on Crosstube -- it is essentially just that kind of list nicely divided into categories etc.

Al Stern Road Race 2004

A picture of three (Kent, Eric, and Jon) of the six cat fours who raced that day. We thought that we were awesome, but we actually sucked.
Mark Edele who now teaches at the University of Perth, Australia. Mark's bike was a piece of garbage, and we kept hoping that he would ride it into the lake and be forced to buy a new one. Debbie MacDougall, the first female member of the UCVC to race her bike. She would later marry Mark and move to Australia with him.

Andrew, now teaching in one of the SUNY schools, Ben, who does mathematics research for some slimey, money-grubbing hedge fund, and big-headed Sam Yount, who probably still lives off his parents. In 2004, Sam was trying to be a professional triathlete so he went running after his category 3 race.
Although we look like tools in these photos, Andrew and I actually came in second in the Ironman Triathlon Collegiate National Championships later that year.

Do bike lanes increase pollution?

The argument is that bike lanes reduce the space available to cars, contribute to traffic congestion, and therefore cause more idling and more pollution. Obviously, the answer to this question depends on:
a) Whether bike lanes decrease the number of cars in the street
b) Whether they increase the CO2 emissions of the remaining cars (via reduced speed)

I don't take a stand on the issue, but I found it stimulating to read and think about it, in today's Wall Street Journal (I'm not sure whether the link will remain ungated, so I'm pasting the whole article below).

San Francisco Ponders:
Could Bike Lanes Cause Pollution?

City Backpedals on a Cycling Plan
After Mr. Anderson Goes to Court

By PHRED DVORAK
August 20, 2008; Page A1

SAN FRANCISCO -- New York is wooing cyclists with chartreuse bike lanes. Chicago is spending nearly $1 million for double-decker bicycle parking.

San Francisco can't even install new bike racks.

Blame Rob Anderson. At a time when most other cities are encouraging biking as green transport, the 65-year-old local gadfly has stymied cycling-support efforts here by arguing that urban bicycle boosting could actually be bad for the environment. That's put the brakes on everything from new bike lanes to bike racks while the city works on an environmental-impact report.

Cyclists say the irony is killing them -- literally. At least four bikers have died and hundreds more have been injured in San Francisco since mid-2006, when Mr. Anderson helped convince a judge to halt implementation of a massive pro-bike plan.(It's unclear whether the plan's execution could have prevented the accidents.) In the past year, bike advocates have demonstrated outside City Hall, pushed the city to challenge the plan's freeze in court and proposed putting the whole mess to local voters. Nothing worked.

"We're the ones keeping emissions from the air!" shouted Leah Shahum, executive director of the 10,000-strong San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, at a July 21 protest.

Mr. Anderson disagrees. Cars always will vastly outnumber bikes, he reasons, so allotting more street space to cyclists could cause more traffic jams, more idling and more pollution. Mr. Anderson says the city has been blinded by political correctness. It's an "attempt by the anti-car fanatics to screw up our traffic on behalf of the bicycle fantasy," he wrote in his blog this month.

Mr. Anderson's fight underscores the tensions that can circulate as urban cycling, bolstered by environmental awareness and high gasoline prices, takes off across the U.S. New York City, where the number of commuter cyclists is estimated to have jumped 77% between 2000 and 2007, is adding new bike lanes despite some motorist backlash. Chicago recently elected to kick cars off stretches of big roads on two Sundays this year.

Famously progressive, San Francisco is known for being one of the most pro-bike cities in the U.S., offering more than 200 miles of lanes and requiring that big garages offer bike parking. It is also known for characters like Mr. Anderson.

A tall, serious man with a grizzled gray beard, Mr. Anderson spent 13 months in a California federal prison for resisting the draft during the Vietnam War. He later penned pieces for the Anderson Valley Advertiser, a muckraking Northern California weekly owned by his brother that's known for its savage prose and pranks.

Running for Office

In 1995, Mr. Anderson moved to San Francisco. Working odd jobs, he twice ran for a seat on the city's Board of Supervisors, pledging to tackle homelessness and the city's "tacit PC ideology." He got 332 of 34,955 votes in 2004, his second and best try.

That year Mr. Anderson, who mostly lives off a small government stipend he receives for caring for his 92-year-old mother, also started a blog, digging into local politics with gusto. One of his first targets: the city's most ambitious bike plan to date.

Unveiled in 2004, the 527-page document was filled with maps, traffic analyses and a list of roughly 240 locations where the city hoped to make cycling easier. The plan called for more bike lanes, better bike parking and a boost in cycling to 10% of the city's total trips by 2010.

The plan irked Mr. Anderson. Having not owned a car in 20 years, he says he has had several near misses with bikers roaring through crosswalks and red lights, and sees bicycles as dangerous and impractical for car-centric American cities. Mr. Anderson was also bugged by what he describes as the holier-than-thou attitude typified by Critical Mass, a monthly gathering of bikers who coast through the city, snarling traffic for hours. "The behavior of the bike people on city streets is always annoying," he says. "This 'Get out of my way, I'm not burning fossil fuels.' "

Going to Court

In February 2005, Mr. Anderson showed up at a planning commission meeting. If San Francisco was going to take away parking spaces and car lanes, he argued, it had better do an environmental-impact review first. When the Board of Supervisors voted to skip the review, Mr. Anderson sued in state court, enlisting his friend Mary Miles, a former postal worker, cartoonist and Anderson Valley Advertiser colleague.

Rhonda Winter/San Francisco Bicycle Coalition

San Francisco cyclists protest bike-plan delays in front of City Hall.

Ms. Miles, who was admitted to the California bar in 2004 at age 57, proved a pugnacious litigator. She sought to kill the initial brief from San Francisco's lawyers after it exceeded the accepted length by a page. She objected when the city attorney described Mr. Anderson's advocacy group, the Coalition for Adequate Review, as CAR in their documents. (It's C-FAR.) She also convinced the court to review key planning documents over the city's objections.

Slow Pedaling

In November 2006, a California Superior Court judge rejected San Francisco's contention that it didn't need an environmental review and ordered San Francisco to stop all bike-plan activity until it completed the review.

Since then, San Francisco has pedaled very slowly. City planners say they're being extra careful with their environmental study, in hopes that Mr. Anderson and Ms. Miles won't challenge it. Planners don't expect the study will be done for another year.

Meanwhile, Mr. Anderson and Ms. Miles have teamed up to oppose a plan to put high-rises and additional housing in a nearby neighborhood. He continues to blog from his apartment in an old Victorian home. "Regardless of the obvious dangers, some people will ride bikes in San Francisco for the same reason Islamic fanatics will engage in suicide bombings -- because they are politically motivated to do so," he wrote in a May 21 post.

"In case anyone doubted that you were a wingnut, this statement pretty much sums things up!" one commenter retorted.

Mr. Anderson is running for supervisor again this November -- around the time the city will unveil the first draft of its bike-plan environmental review. He's already pondering a challenge of the review.

Write to Phred Dvorak at phred.dvorak@wsj.com

CX 101 on video: Off-the-bike skills II

1) How to go through barriers in a CX race (by Mickey Denoncourt)

(Velonews.tv has its own video on going through barriers, but as of the time of writing this post, I couldn't play it. Maybe you'll have better luck: How to get through barriers. Click on the "how-to" tab. You'll find this video near the end of the list.)


2) How to run in sand in CX racing (by Mickey Denoncourt)

CX 101 on video: Off-the-bike skills I

So you have dismounted and need to carry your bike: How do you lift it? How do you carry it? How do you drop it back on the ground?

1) How to carry and shoulder your 'cross bike. (Again, click on the "how-to" tab and scroll down to the end of the list of videos.) From VeloNews.

2) How to carry a cyclocross bike on a shallow run. (By Mickey Denoncourt.)

3) How to shoulder a cyclocross bike for a steep run. (Also by Mickey Denoncourt.)

Points rides-Classification as of August 16

	GC (top 15) - August 9	Points	Miles
1	Elisabet	63	480
2	Joe	51	465
3	Jeremy	47	340
4	Francisco	36	275
5	Andreas	31	290
6	Dan	28	205
7	Bernard	26	190
8	Mickey	26	240
9	Jesse	24	120
10	Sarah	23	155
11	Araba	23	120
12	Joel	22	205
13	Philippe	22	205
14	Jonathan	19	85
15	Suchandra	19	85

Some weekend CX fun

A seven-minute excerpt of the 2007 Women's UCI World Cyclo Cross Champs. I'll be back on Monday with more educational videos.

CX 101 on video: remounting

1) VeloNews' video is the best I could find. (The guys approach the subject from a, hmmmm, male-centric perspective, but I'm sure everyone can benefit from a smooth remount.)

How to remount your 'cross bike. (Click on the "how to" section and then scroll down to near the bottom of the list of videos.)

2) Mickey Denoncourt didn't do a very good job of making videos about remounting, but here are his two cents anyway:

How to remount a cyclocross bike at a run

How to dismount and remount in cyclocross racing

Free books from a tricycle

From DailyCandy Chicago:

August 15, 2008
Free Ride
The Book Bike
bookworm!

Once upon a time, there was a bibliophile named Gabe Levinson who wanted to spread the word about his passion for books.

So he did the obvious: ordered a custom-built tricycle with a 200-pound capacity and wrote to dozens of publishers asking for book donations. The hook: He’d ride around in his Book Bike and give away free books to the masses.

The responses flooded in — from McSweeney’s, Dark Horse Comics, Not for Tourists, Drawn & Quarterly, and Washington Square Press, to name a few.

Levinson now spends his Saturdays pedaling around Chicago parks giving away free reads. Cops have tried to stop him, but he woos them with his bounty.

This Saturday, you, too, can be wooed (check his website for location).

Pretty cool in our book.


For locations, go to somethingtoread.net.

Points ride-Classification after August 9

	GC (top 15) - August 9	Points	Miles
1	Elisabet	59	445
2	Jeremy	47	340
3	Joe	47	430
4	Francisco	32	240
5	Andreas	31	290
6	Dan	28	205
7	Bernard	26	190
8	Mickey	26	240
9	Jesse	24	120
10	Sarah	23	155
11	Araba	23	120
12	Joel	22	205
13	Philippe	22	205
14	Jonathan	19	85
15	Suchandra	19	85

CX 101 on video: Dismounting II

The first of today's videos doesn't teach a new skill, but brings up an issue that is relevant to those of us who are building a CX bike now: the setup of your brakes.

1) Dismounting II. Part I. Dismounting a bike at speed in CX racing.

I can't explain it better than cyclingnews.com does in its CX section:

Often the brake levers are set up opposite from road bikes, so that the left lever controls the rear brake. This is to allow for better speed modulation during a dismount, where the racer is still moving quickly, has already swung their right leg over the bike and only has their left shoe clipped into the pedal and has their right hand on the top tube (or down tube) ready to lift the bike. Using the left hand to brake the rear wheel allows for a smooth deceleration without the risk of locking the front wheel or making the rear wheel pop up.

Would our in-house CX experts care to chip in with their experience in this matter?

Now a video on how to dismount in sand, which apparently is different from dismounting in other terrains:

2) Dismounting II. Part II. How to dismount in sand from a CX bike.

Let's wrap up the dismounting section with a summary from VeloNews (hat tip to Bernard for directing me to these videos):

3) Dismounting wrap-up from VeloNews. How to dismount your 'cross bike. (Scroll down about two thirds down the list of videos.)

CX 101 on video: Dismounting I

Mickey Denoncourt explains the basics in three videos (watch them in that order):

1) Dismounting I. Part I . Introduction to dismounting and remounting.

2) Dismounting I. Part II. How to dismount a cyclocross bike.

3) Dismounting I. Part III. Doing a step-through technique.

Points Ride August 9th

Proving that the points rides are never dull, we set off into uncharted territories this week. Okay, they were pretty charted, but we did ride a new (for the points ride) route, and we traveled with the Tatitos for the first half of it. We followed Team Tati's excellent route out to the riverside town of Willow Springs, where we found hills, trees (like foresty kinds of trees), hills, awesome roads, and some hills. Once there, we wished the Tatios well and took our own lap around the Palos Forest Preserve. On the way we rode up some more hills before heading back.

We were having so much fun, I neglected to take a single photo, but I feel compelled to relate that the points ride regulars are getting very strong! Thanks to Team Tati for having us along: I think I can speak for all the points riders when I say it was great riding with you!

CX 101 on video: more "get-excited" stuff

OK, one more get-excited video and then I'll post some educational material... This one is more about the atmosphere surrounding CX, plus some people talking about the sport.

Cyclocross 101 on video: a prologue

I'm gonna start posting videos about cyclocross, starting with the basics and hopefully proceeding in an organized way towards more advanced stuff. (Warning: this is a learning process for myself too, since I've never ridden a cross bike...)

Watch this first to get excited...

Points ride classification - August 2

Time to update the general classification of the points ride series. Elisabet's maillot jaune is proving hard to grab. Regulars (and ride leaders) Jeremy and Joe continue to amass points, but Elisabet rarely misses a ride. Will Je-Jo be able to take the top spot when when she's temporarily gone in September?

Andreas quickly made it to the top ten, after attending several rides in a row. He shouldn't have any problem climbing to the top five and crossing the 500-mile mark if he can make it to the upcoming longer rides.

J is fighting hard for the lanterne rouge spot, accumulating -27 points (!!!!!) in a single ride. Whether he broke 27 different rules, or the same rule 27 times, I won't discuss. But it's not hard to believe that he could accomplish such feat in a single morning (those of you who've ridden with J know what I'm talking about...). Please don't do what J does.

	GC (top 15) - August 2	Points	Miles
1	Elisabet	54	395
2	Jeremy	47	340
3	Joe	41	380
4	Francisco	32	240
5	Dan	28	205
6	Bernard	26	190
7	Mickey	26	190
8	Andreas	26	240
9	Jesse	24	120
10	Araba	23	120
11	Joel	22	205
12	Philippe	22	205
13	Jonathan	19	85
14	Suchandra	19	85
15	Charlie	18	170
48	J/Tati	-14	120

Points ride Aug 2

A nice points ride to Shererville Starbucks on Sat, joined by the (hard-core!) TATI crew for coffee while down there. Beautiful day, little traffic, good company, and we were back well before noon! Definitely, a success.

Jeannie Longo Is One Tough Cookie

Since May, Jeannie Longo has been training and racing in Colorado in preparation for Beijing. Sure, she's headed to some bigger races like Mt. Hood, but she also has shown up to almost all the local things. Sometimes she races in the men's 35+, a field that is stacked with former pros, former Olympians, and other local strongmen, and she walks away in the top three. When she races the women, she always adds another one to her list of over 1000 career wins. 1000! I think I have 3-5 career wins, and 2 of them don't count as they were by default, so 3. She is also in her 50s, went to the Olympics the year I was born (1984), and is a really cool person. She hangs out after the races and shoots the shit with everyone and talks about how much she loves Colorado. I would love to be badass by proxy by saying that I have raced against her, but really she and I have only ever shared the same start line for a very short amount of time, and then she lights the field on fire, cooks it, eats it, and spits it out. The picture is lifted from a friend, M. Hottman, and is of Jeannie accepting a medal at the Salida Omnium. She is so cool, and though French, I'm totally rooting for her in Beijing!