Three years ago I posted about something I call a Go-To ride. You can read that post to get the whole story but briefly it is a route that I tend to ride over and over again. In the picture above, I am showing the routes of two Go-To rides, the Tamarack Sprint on the left side of the picture and the Cedar-Elm Loop running diagonally from upper left to lower right corners of the picture. Both of these routes are loops and a ride consists of multiple laps around that loop, typically nine laps for the Tamarack Sprint and eight laps for the Cedar-Elm Loop. The Tamarack sprint is one mile around (with the part I sprint being 0.23 miles) and the Cedar-Elm loop is three miles around. I posted about the Tamarack Sprint a while back and I am describing the Cedar-Elm loop in this post for the first time.
What do these two routes have in common?
- They are located a few blocks from each other.
- They both involve riding the same loop multiple times.
- This:
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| The Zombie with his 1963 Bianchi Specialissima at Eroica California in 2019 |
...not me, the guy holding the bike, but the bike itself, my 1963 Bianchi Specialissima. I raced this bike as a member of the Berkeley Wheelmen during the 1970 season, rode it from Boston to Montreal in 1972, and, accompanied by my wife Agi, completed a week-long Inn to Inn bike tour on this bike in 1979. When I restarted cycling 30 years later, it was initially on this bike. Although my Specialissima has been largely replaced by more modern bikes for my everyday riding, I still love this bike and look for opportunities to ride it.
What is it about this bike that links it to these two routes? Sadly, it is that it is now impractical for many kinds of rides. There are a number of things about it that make it impractical, but the one most relevant to this post is that it has "sew-up" tires, tires that are glued to the rims, tires which I cannot change on the road. That means that if I get a flat tire, I have to walk my bike home or to where I can get a ride home. When I first got my eBike, my Orbea Gain, I had a similar problem. Because of the carbon rims and tubeless-ready tires, I did not know how to change its tires and so I developed my Emerald Hills Go-To ride as a ride where I could walk home from any point on the ride. Unfortunately, this route would not work for my Specialissima because of another aspect of its impracticality, its lack of low gears. Because the Emerald Hills ride is in my neighborhood, it is extremely hilly and there is not a snowball's chance in Hell that I could complete it on my Specialissima. That is why I drive to my old neighborhood in San Carlos to ride my Specialissima.
Before developing the Cedar-Elm loop, I rode my Specialissima on two routes in San Carlos, the Tamarack Sprint and the Neighborhood Go-To Rides. (Both of these rides are described in the same post from 2019.) What motivated me to develop the Cedar Elm Loop is that I have recently been finding that my body is responding well to long Zone 2 rides. (Zone 2 rides are easy, low intensity rides.) Although I have gotten better at completing hilly rides while staying within Zone 2, that requires low gears or eAssist, both of which my Specialissima lack. Both the Tamarack Sprint and the Neighborhood routes are too hilly to complete as Zone 2 rides on my Specialissima. Therefore, to accomplish the two goals of enjoying my delightful Specialissima and completing longer rides in Zone 2 required finding a flatter route that stayed within walking distance of where I parked my car and the Cedar Elm loop was that route. Eight laps around that loop gives me a ride that is 24 miles long and takes me two hours, a respectably long ride. Although I have not yet done so, I could generate an even long ride by simply increasing the number of laps.
Doesn't riding around and around the same roads over and over again get boring? After all, I have said that I find it intolerably boring to ride my trainer for rides longer than 30 minutes. In fact, I find riding laps outdoors much less boring than riding on my trainer indoors. As proof of that, back in Houston, a large fraction of my rides were on the Rice Track, a third of a mile course which meant that even a short ride could involve 35 laps. I wouldn't want all of my rides to be on the Cedar-Elm Loop, but for one ride a week or so, the delight at riding my Specialissima makes up for a less than exciting route. Besides, the city of San Carlos is rather pretty, further reducing the potential for boredom.
