Archive for the ‘Cycling’ Category

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DTV Delivers

Thursday, May 7th, 2009

Big news.

Universal Sports, which is part of NBC, is going to show the entire Giro d’Italia live! I’m guessing that because Lance is riding the Giro, Universal Sports figures Americans will be interested. Down here in San Diego, the local NBC affiliate broadcasts several digital channels over the airwaves. They have their main channel 39-1, that shows full-1080p high definition TV. They also have 39-2, a weather channel, and 39-3 shows Universal Sports. Neither is HDTV, but I’m not complaining. The Tour de France is always on cable, so I have to go to a friends apartment to watch it. I’ll be glad to watch this on my very own couch.

My mornings suddenly got much earlier for the next month.

Update May 9: The Giro is being streamed live online, not over the air. It is just a commercial-free stream of the Italian coverage (with inconsistent English commentary) on the Universal Sports website. I guess I read what I wanted to read. I’ll take it however I get it.

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My Eddington Number is 48

Friday, January 30th, 2009

A couple days ago I was browsing the internet on astrophysical topics, when I came across Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington’s wikipedia page. He’s best known for the Eddington limit, which describes the luminosity limit of a star as a function of its mass. Near the bottom of his page linked above, there is a description of the “Eddington number,” which for any person is the greatest number of bike rides they done which have been that at least that number in miles long. From the wikipedia page:

The Eddington Number in this context is defined as E, the number of days a cyclist has cycled more than E miles. For example an Eddington Number of 70 would imply that a cyclist has cycled more than 70 miles in a day on 70 occasions.

This is very similar to the Erdös number and the h-index, which measure a scientists publishing impact. I don’t have an Erdös number, nor an h-index, but I do have an Eddington number. And since I have a nice GPS database of my rides, I figured I could easily calculate it.



Above shows two Eddington calculations, in miles and in kilometers. The curved blue line is x=y, and it’s curved because the y axis is using a logscale. Where the blue line intersects the Eddington lines is my Eddington number. The downward arrows show my actual integer Eddington numbers (48 for miles, 74 for kilometers), while the upward arrows show that 49 and 75 aren’t above the blue line, and thus aren’t my Eddington numbers. Since the definition is in miles, my true number is 48, but the kilometer calculation shows that the number is also a function of your unit.

Unfortunately, I don’t have records before I got my GPS, so my true Eddington number is surely larger.

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No More Tunnels

Saturday, January 3rd, 2009

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By far my favorite place to ride my mountain bike (that is reachable without driving) are the single track ‘tunnels’ that are typically reached through Peñasquitos Park (although they aren’t actually inside the park, they are on non-park city land). They are called ‘the tunnels’ because for most of their length they are covered by low bushes and trees just over head height. There are four of them that total a few miles in length and vary in technical difficulty. Until about a month ago, they were somewhat illicit and not patrolled, now they are very expressly illegal. During the rainy season I think it’s perfectly reasonable to close them. Muddy and wet ground is especially susceptible to erosion, and nature doesn’t need human help to erode the ground during the rainy season. The ditch my bike is pictured in above was fairly level ground the last time I was there, less than a month ago (*).

(more…)

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Tour of California Disappointment

Friday, December 5th, 2008

Below is the map showing the just-released 2009 Tour of California stage 8 route. And I’m disappointed. I thought the stage would end on the top of Palomar Mountain, but it is simply going to pass over the top, circle back around and finish in relatively boring Escondito.

Just like when the race goes through the Bay Area, I am familiar with much of this route. The race starts in Rancho Bernardo, and heads east on Highland Valley Road. That road has several nicely steep sections that kick my non-professional racer butt. I’m sure that the pros won’t charge up those hills so early in the race, but their pace would drop me, no doubt.

They go up the hard side of Palomar which is a world-class climb. It is every bit as hard as the Tour de France cols I’ve climbed. In February the top of Palomar can be quite cold (sometimes it even snows) so the temperature changes along the route could have an effect on the race.

I wish the race organizers would have given us the grand spectacle of a mountain-top finish. I am grateful, however, that they’ve finally dipped below the Los Angeles divide.

Oh, and I can’t forget to note: parts of the race go through Indian reservations, so the racers can get their gamblin’ on, if they feel like it.

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Gateway Cycling

Wednesday, August 20th, 2008

I recorded the BMX races last night out of curiosity. (I’ve included some HD screen grabs of crashes for your enjoyment; click on them for the full size image.) BMX has been introduced to increase the interest of young people, those who like Xtreme sports. NBC even has a BMX crashes compilation for you to watch while you drink your Mountain Dew or get another tattoo.

This is the first year BMX is being contested at the Olympics and I’m conflicted about it. While I support any kind of cycling, in order to introduce this kind of cycling, the Olympic Organizing Committee cut two track events (the men’s 1000m and women’s 500m time trials) to make room for the BMX events. This was done to conserve the number of cycling events. According to this page there are 18 cycling events. Swimming has 34 events. So increasing the number of cycling medals wouldn’t have given it a ridiculous number of medals (unless you think swimming has a ridiculous number of events, which I in fact do). Granted, Olympic cycling isn’t as popular as Olympic gymnastics, and that only has 14 medals, but at least gymnastics takes place on different equipment. The cycling events range from 40 seconds to over six hours on four different kinds of venues that require very different types of skills and strategies. Each medal rewards a clearly different set of accomplishments. All but two of the swimming events are in the same damn pool (the 10K open-water swim is new this year) with the same equipment, only the strokes and distances change, and the distances vary by far less than cycling. It’s not clear that adding BMX is a net gain for cycling in the Olympics, and they could have very easily increased the number of cycling events, in my opinion.

Of course, cycling has the Tour de France every year, while swimming has ?

I think the best thing that can happen is if BMX becomes a kind of gateway drug into cycling. Get the young ones into the sport and then push them into the real hard stuff, like the velodrome and road cycling. Then they’ll really be hooked and there’s no going back.

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