What is a Go-To Ride? Let me begin by apologizing for the name, it really should be Go-To Route, but I have already used the term Go-To Ride so often I don’t feel like I can change it now. But a Go-To Ride is, in fact, a route (or at least usually, see below.) Collections of good routes for cycling are very common, almost every bike club has one. One that was particularly useful to me when I moved to California was that of the Stanford University Bicycle Club. Often such routes include variations signaled with phrases like “If you want to extend this ride…” A Go-To ride is all of that but what distinguishes it is that it is a ride I do over and over again. My familiarity with such a route allows me to do a ride without having to think about where to go, a real advantage when my enthusiasm is low. I find that the variations of a Go-To Ride add some flexibility without significantly diminishing the advantage of not having to think too much about where I am going. However, there is one situation where I do try to minimize such variation, and that is when I use my speed on such a ride to assess my Form (my ability to ride long and/or fast.) Because I repeat my Go-To Rides so often, they are natural candidates for such a test, but only when ridden on the exact same route. Thus, for some of my Go-To rides I have one or more variations which I flag as “canonical” and it is those I use to assess my Form.
Although I did not use the term Go-To Ride back in Texas, I certainly had such routes. The ride which I have repeated most often by far was there. It was the Rice University Bicycle Track ride. Typically that ride would consist of two miles from my home to the track, 35 times (more or less) around that third of a mile track, and then two miles back home. I repeated that ride almost 600 times. (That works out to about 20,000 times around the track.) Now that was a Go-To Ride! When I moved to California in 2017 I missed those rides and coined the term Go-To Ride to help define what I needed to do to settle-in here.
To a large extent, Go-To Ride is a self-defining categorization - my Go-To rides are the ones I end up repeating over and over again independent of my expectations when I proposed them. In a post from a few years ago I said the following: “In my second post from California, I described my Go To ride, … the Alpine Ride. Since then, I have developed other Go-To rides which I can do depending on my training needs and mood.” Although the title of that post, “Go To Sprint” referred to one ride I named The Tamarack Sprint, the post also discussed another which I named The Neighborhood Ride. Interestingly, the first failed the “self-defining” criterion in that I only ever rode it six times, whereas the second, mentioned as an afterthought, ended up being the most frequent ride I did during the three years I lived in San Carlos. Here are the routes I rode most often while living in San Carlos:
| Ride Name | Number of Rides |
|---|---|
| Neighborhood | 250 |
| Alpine | 140 |
| Alpine Cañada | 30 |
| Peninsula Bikeway | 40 |
| Tamarack Sprint | 6 |
When I moved from San Carlos to Emerald Hills, I blogged, somewhat tongue in cheek, “My Go-To Rides Must Die!.” What was not tongue in cheek was that my move meant a significant change in the rides that I did. Here are the most common rides I have done in the year and a half I have lived in Emerald Hills:
| Ride Name | Number of Rides |
|---|---|
| Trainer | 70 |
| New Alpine | 30 |
| New Alpine Cañada | 30 |
| Emerald Hills | 30 |
| Lake Loop | 15 |
| Huddart | 10 |
New Alpine and New Alpine Cañada are almost the same routes as the similarly named rides from San Carlos except that they are about a mile shorter and have about 100 feet less of climbing relative to the old routes because I no longer have to ride to the start of the route; I now live on the route. At the time I announced my need for new Go-To rides, I blogged “The move provided new opportunities for go-to rides. Shortly after the move, I went on a ride with my son (another advantage to living closer) and he showed me one of his go-to rides, a beautiful if hilly hour long ride that has now become a ride I do weekly.” That ride I named The Huddart Ride (because it went to Huddart Park) and although I did ride it 10 times, it turned out to be too hilly to ride every week. Lake Loop is a route/Go-To Ride I have already blogged about, though perhaps I should say failed Go-To ride because I did not end up riding that route as much as I had expected. The problem was that it was not actually an easy ride. At the time, I described it as follows: “If I use the lowest gear on my Volpe and deliberately keep my pace as slow as I can, the ride home, while not effortless, is not too bad.” Not too bad, perhaps, but not easy enough as it turned out. The surprise winner of this schedule is not a route at all. Because I was unable to find a route that qualified as an easy, recovery ride, I set a trainer up in my bedroom for that purpose, so “Trainer” has become my most commonly repeated Go-To ride. Way back when I lived in Houston, Texas, I blogged about purchasing that trainer. My initial review of that trainer was not positive. I had no complaints about the trainer itself but because riding it was hot and boring, it failed to fulfill the role I had planned for it and for the first few years I only rode it only a handful of times. That changed a bit when my wife became ill. I dared not leave her alone to go for a bike ride but was able to maintain a bit of fitness with the trainer. However, it was only upon moving to Emerald Hills it really came into its own. The problems of boredom and overheating are less when it is used only in the context of providing an easy, recovery ride.
That brings me, at long last, to the Emerald Hills ride, shown at the top of the post. I mentioned this ride in my last post. I described how, to accommodate my new all-carbon eBike, “I developed a Go-To ride that stayed within walking distance of my home” mostly in case I got a puncture, something which, at the time, I was unprepared to fix on that bike. So that seems like an unpromising start to a Go-To ride. Now that I am comfortable repairing such a puncture, why would I continue with this ride? Because it is the prettiest of any route I have ridden. What started out as a route forced on me by my ignorance has become one of my favorites, but one I can only ride on my eBike; it is too hilly for me to complete routinely on any of my other bikes. Even with the assistance of the eBike, it is a fairly Intense ride, more Intense than my (New) Alpine ride, having the same amount of climbing in half the distance, with many of the climbs significantly steeper than anything on the Alpine ride. It is shorter than the Alpine ride, typically taking me about 65 minutes to complete compared to 110 minutes for the Alpine ride. All that said, it fills a similar role, what I call a Pace Ride, a general training ride, neither too easy nor too hard.
What makes the Emerald Hills route so pretty? I could just show pictures but frankly, I am not that good of a photographer of scenery (few people are) and my pictures would not do it justice, so words will have to do. Much of the beauty of this ride is a direct result of it being so hilly. Around almost every corner (and with the winding roads in my neighborhood, there are a lot of corners) there is a great view. One view so common it might be underappreciated is that looking east. From the relatively lower elevations at the beginning of this ride, Silicon Valley looks almost like a forest. From higher elevations, a view in that same direction becomes one of San Francisco Bay and the mountains of the East Bay, including Mount Diablo and Mount Hamilton. A landmark, nothing special compared to the Seven Wonders of the World but quite charming in the context of our little neighborhood, is the Easter Cross, a massive structure at the top of a hill. I see it twice, once from farther away and then again when I reach the highest point on the ride. As I continue, I reach the top of the ridge and now, rather than looking east, I am looking west, out over Portola Valley where, depending on which corner I am rounding, I see the beautiful valley itself, the local cyclists training on Cañada Road far down below, or Crystal Springs Reservoir. I go right by our neighborhood’s local winery, Clos de la Tech, whose ambition it is to use our hills to make the finest Pinot Noir in the world. Finally, I get a peek at the business side of the climbing rock of Handley Rock Park.
One additional advantage of this ride is its flexibility. There are plenty of opportunities to shorten the ride or reduce its hilliness on a day I find myself more tired than expected. One additional point: notice that right in the middle of the loop that makes up my route is Emerald Lake, the location of my Lake Loop Ride. Thus, the Emerald Hills ride might be thought of as the Lake Loop Ride on steroids. Finally, this for the pedantic: besides Emerald Hills this ride visits the cities of Redwood City and Woodside as well. All in all, despite its unpromising origins, the Emerald Hills ride has become one of my favorites.
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