ZappoMan.com - Fitness Blog

Chilly Hilly - A nice end to a big week.

February 25th, 2007

Today was the Chilly Hilly, the annual “kick off” to the bicycling season in Seattle, WA and the Pacific Northwest. This was the 34th annual Chilly Hilly put on by Cascade Bicycle Club, and as promised, it is Hilly and Chilly. The weather was rainy about 44F, a beautiful February day in Seattle. The course, is a 33 mile tour of one of our local Puget Sound Islands - Bainbridge Island, and includes a reported 2,675 feet of climbing…. So what do I do? I jump on my single speed fixed gear bike and head for the Ferry!

I woke up this morning at 6am, brewed some coffee and made myself some breakfast. My plan was to leave the house about 7am, ride my bike down to the start line, register, and get on the 7:55 Ferry. Because the Chilly Hilly takes place on an Island, there are actually two different official start lines. You can choose to start on the Island, or you can start in downtown Seattle right across the street from the ferry terminal. You ticket to ride the ferry is included in your registration. Since I only live about 5 miles from the ferry terminal, I decided to ride to and from the start line to get an extra 10 miles in for the day.

I always find it amusing when people drive their cars somewhere to get out and ride their bike. I’m not saying I judge these people… I just find it odd. Now I guess I can imagine if you have to travel more than say 30 miles out of your way to start a ride, but I saw a guy from a block away from my house, loading up his car this morning and heading down to the same place I was going to start this ride. Anyway, including my trip to and from the start line, my ride totalled 43.5 miles and 3606ft of ascent…. did I mention this was with only one gear?

As I mentioned this ride is the official “kick off” to the cycling season in Seattle, and so it is a very popular ride. Over 4,000 riders take part every year. The ferries are filled with bikes. It’s really quite a sight to be seen. The other fun thing about the ride is that there’s a very good chance you’ll see someone you know on this ride. This year, I got calls from several old friends asking if I was riding. The problem is with 4,000 riders, it’s actually hard to find your friends once you get on the island. “Just look for me, I’ll be wearing the yellow jacket…” Yeah, right… you and 3,000 other people.

Phil rode Chilly Hilly this year. But I didn’t ever catch up with him. My friend Rob emailed me and called me before the ride… but we never ended up finding each other. I ended up “riding with” Ray and his friends Trevor, Jim, Mike, and Dave.

Now, let me put this into perspective. First of all, there are 4,000 cyclists on a 33 mile course, even if every one of them was spaced out evenly across the entire course, that would mean there was one cyclist every 43.5 feet. But needless to say, they aren’t spaced out evenly across the course, since probably 1,000 of those cyclists were on that 7:55 ferry… so basically for the first say 5 miles of the course it is literally bicycles every 6 inches. It’s an amazing opportunity to practice your bike handling skills. The point is that if you want to stick with a group of riders, you all have to be careful not to get separated, as it is very easy to get stuck behind a group of slow riders who decide to stop and walk up a 2% grade hill. (Foreshadowing of things to come!)

Second of all, and I’m not saying this to draw your pity, I’m simply stating a fact here… I was riding on my fixed gear bike. This means, I have no lower gears to switch down to, and I can’t coast down steep hills at 40mph. So, let’s review my “riding partners”… Ray (former collegiate rower, fellow STPer from last year, first time on a bike this year, just got engaged last night to his girlfriend of five years, congratulations Denny and Ray!… uh… he was “tired”…); Trevor (Ray’s buddy from his rowing days, fellow Ironman, typical 40k time trial pace of say 49min); Jim, Mike, Dave (also wicked in shape cyclists who’ve accomplished all matter of feats like the Ride Around Mt. Rainier in One Day - RAMROD)… all of whom are riding state of the art road bikes with… hmm… what’s all those GEARS…

So, here’s how my day goes… ride 5 miles from my house to the ferry… about 300ft of ascent… get on the ferry, meet up with Ray, Trevor, and the rest of the gang. We all give Ray a hard time about finally getting engaged. And since our bikes are on completely different parts of the ferry, agree we will meet each other once we’re off the ferry and into a little bit. Picture 1,000 bicycles coming off a ferry in the matter of 10 minutes… they are all greeted by a half mile of 6% grade climb… 800 of these cyclists are in their lowest gear spinning at a ear piercing speed of 4.5mph. Needless to say we are separated.

We meet at the top of the hill. Ray is already exhausted. Trevor and the rest of the gang are already bored, and I’m almost getting tired of people asking me if I am actually riding a fixed gear bicycle. Ok, I admit, I don’t actually get tired of this… I come up with all sorts of responses like “gears are overrated” and “you mean I was allowed to use gears on this ride?” and the crowd pleasing “gears are for wimps!” Somewhere around mile 10 after over eight hills over 1,000 ft of climbing, and more importantly for me over 1,000 feet of descent, Ray is completely shot, and the rest of the guys are complete bored out of their minds at only averaging 15mph.

See, here’s the real dirty little secret of riding a fixed gear bike… you can’t coast down hill. Since you have to pedal, and on my bike 25mph is equivalent to about a 120 rpm cadence, and 30mph is 150 rpm cadence, if you want to go down hill at the pace of an average road bike traveling down hill, you have to pedal at a recklessly unstable speed. The point is, I don’t do it… I’m happy braking hard, pedalling as fast as I can while still being stable, and only going about 25mph down hill. This means that any one riding a road bike with you is going to fly down the hill and get half way up the next hill on momentum alone, while you’re pedalling your guts out going down and back up again.

So, our pack of riders was “pretty well distributed across the course”… I guess we were together in spirit. And every once in a while I would catch up to the lead riders… but honestly I lost Ray around mile 12 and didn’t see him again until the finish line, about 30 minutes after me, Trevor, and the rest of the lead riders finished.

For the most part, I did great on the ride. It turned out to be a lot harder than I expected it to be… but I got enough “oh my god!”’s from other riders to salve any bruises to my ego from being completely beat afterwards. After I caught up with the lead group around mile 25, Trevor and crew took delight in asking me questions that required long detailed answer at the bottom of every hill. I guess Ray hadn’t told them how much I like to hear my own voice, and so they were most surprised at my ability to continue a dialog as I plodded up the 5% grades with my 42/18 gear ratio.

I did have one moment of failure… I hate to admit, I had to stop and push my bike for about 100ft on the worst of the hills. The incident goes something like this… The hill: 17 miles into the ride, .3 mile long, 140ft of ascent, that’s a 10% average grade, but it includes a couple of stretches of 15%-18% grade… and since it’s still relatively early in the ride, the crowds are thick, and a lot of people get off their bikes and push… usually about 3/4 of the way up is when they bail and start walking. On this morning, as I was grunting and groaning, and using all my might to take that 15% grade, someone stopped right in front of me, and that was all it took… there was no way I could keep going, and there certainly was no way I could start up on that grade… so I too had to dismount and walk it. My ego was bruised, but not too badly as I noticed that a guy right next to me, was also pushing his fixed gear up the hill as well.

I actually saw 4 other fixed gear bikes out on the course today. So I’m not the only crazy out there. Back at the ferry on the way home, I chatted with a couple guys, including the guy I say on the really steep hill. He admitted he’s spent more time pushing his bike than riding it… so I definitely didn’t feel bad that I had to push it once.

My total time for the day was 2:56:35 for 43.51 miles or 14.8mph average… But my average heart rate was 133bpm or 66% Max. So it actually was a pretty solid base workout, with some nice spurts of strength training for the legs thrown in. Tonight I ran 8 miles at 8:25/mile pace to cap off my 16 hour week. But after a long day and a long week, I’m tired, and so I’ll have to save my weekly summary for tomorrow… now it’s time to do that other important thing, when you’re training for any long distance endurance sport… SLEEP.

Entry Filed under: Fitness, Triathlon, Ironman, Running, Cycling, Strength Training, fixie, single-speed, fixed-gear, exercise