With today's Cayuse Pass and Chinook Pass ride, I finished riding 1000 miles in exactly two months. This involved 32 rides, 56000ft of climb over 77 hours on the saddle (not exactly happy with the saddle time). Here is a screen shot from my ride diary at Cyclogz.

I needed to remind myself this morning that I should not stop getting out even if there is a 40% chance rain in the forecast. When I started from home this week, there was a slight and annoying drizzle, but I decided to ignore it and give it a try. It turned out to be great for most of the ride today.

This weekend I rode up the Steven's Pass along Highway 2. This was a slow and long climb for about 40 miles from Startup (WA) to the pass. For up to 32 miles or so, the climb was so gradual that it just does not give much chance to recover. Worse yet, the descent on the way back does not feel like a descent at all. But the actual climb for the last 5 miles was excellent.

It is going to be a busy cycling season for me this year. After moving to WA nearly 10 days ago, I signed up for a membership in the Cacade Bicycling Club and several rides being organized by Cascade. The first one is the Flying Weels Summer Century on June 14. Then a month later, there is a double century from Seattle to Portland that I am planning to do in two days. Then there is the High Pass Challenge in September. I am trying to rope in Sanjay for the last one. And may be, may be, I can squeeze in Yaquina Wheels century in August. Let's see.

With the weather being a bit cooler than it was last week, I decided to ride up Mt Hamilton today, from east to west, starting from Livermore. From downtown Livermore, it is a about 49 miles to the summit (at about 4300 ft), which makes it tougher to climb from this side. What is more challenging is that, the final climb of about 2000ft happens in just about six miles (i.e. from mile 43). These six miles are grueling, with an average 9-10% grade, and I could not average more than 4 miles/hour during this segment. My GPS puts the cumulative ascent at 6500ft, although my legs are trying to make me believe that it is much more than that.

All the maps and profiles on Cyclogz are now embeddable. Here is, e.g. the Mt Evan's climb I did last year.

No more screenshots from Garmin Training Center.

My Cyclogz.com (alpha) went live today. The site was near-launch ready about a week ago, but I could not announce it due to performance issues I had with my shared hosting account at DreamHost. At the last minute, I cancelled my account with DreamHost and went with Slicehost, and I am very pleased with my choice so far.

I am pleased to announce the launch of Cyclogz today. This is a free site to upload logs directly from Garmin GPS computers like Edge 205, Edge 305, Forerunner 201, Forerunner 301 etc, and then share those logs with everyone. I started developing this site about three months ago as I was not happy with the features and the user experience provided by some alternatives - most notably the desktop-based Garmin Training Center, and Garmin's very own MotionBased.

Cull Canyon is a short distance from where I live, and I could not have picked up a better day to ride till the end of this road. I started out this ride during what apparently was just a Sun break, and it kept pouring through most of this 32 mile ride.

The first five days of the new year went by very quickly. I am very excited to say that very soon, I will be launching one of my pet projects publicly. This project is about managing and sharing logs and statistics for recreational cyclists. Over the past few days, I had a chance to learn and play with quite a few things like Ruby on Rails, Garmin browser plugins, YUI, and so on. The project is not quite ready for public consumption but I have most of the key peaces in place and working, and I am planning to share it with a few of my bike buddies over the next week or so to get some feedback. I have another personal goal for this project - that is to test some of my ideas about building RESTful applications. Talking REST is easier than doing REST. I have a few more issues to tackle before I can conclude!

In the midst of all this, my MacBookPro kept crashing over 5-7 times a day. As I installed too many new things recently, it turned out to be difficult to isolate the problem. After a lot of frustration and lost hours, finally, this solution worked. Syslogd was the culprit.

Not sure how to describe yesterday's Mr Frog's Wild Ride near Murphys (CA). Distance was moderate - just a metric century. Weather was nice and cool. No long climbs like I used to see in Colorado. But this ride was so unique that I heard one of the female riders commenting that the first part of the ride felt like child birth. It was tough. The ascents were steep and winding. The descents were steep and too quick to relax and recover. The pavement was rough, making the descents more difficult.

I rode up Mt. Diablo (3830ft) from home today. It was brutal. It was only 17 miles from my home to the summit, but it was one of my steepest climbs. Here is the elevation profile.

This ride is taking place this weekend (Sep 9, 2007), and I am going to miss this fabulous ride. This video below is my consolation. Closely watch this at the 19th second. You will see my bike buddy Scott in the bright green jersey.

Today I rode up the Left Hand Canyon Road. This is second time this year. As usual, the last one mile proved to be a hell, and my legs are still sore.