This guy has become a Saturday morning regular. I want to give him a quirky nickname like "Noxzema Man" because he paints his face white with sunscreen, but the Triple Crown jersey means I'm not worthy to pick the thorns out of his tires.
Special subsection for Diablo Mom:
Diablo Shoutout to BlogReaderDan - who easily recognized me just above Juniper ... because I was descending so slowly and carefully.
Then I got behind a truck that was behind a really slow descender and it took forever to get down.
Something's wrong, my new bottom bracket doesn't feel crunchy.
Did I mention I put new tires on last week?
This guy was having a hard time, but he was determined. We saw him stopped a couple times, too tired to go on, but not giving up.
This guy rode behind us for a while on Summit Road - JB said "There's no awards for keeping up with us." I said "Yeah, it's actually kind of embarrassing."
He is from Danville and he said the long descent makes him kind of nervous so he doesn't do Diablo very often.
Another driver who doesn't get it, just about GOT IT
He pretended we weren't slowing him down until he just couldn't handle it any more and shelled us like fresh edamame.
Last week there were thousands of riders ostensibly training for The Death Ride, This week there was hardly anybody,... ostensibly because they were all riding The Death Ride. Realistically, they were all just pretending to be riding The Death Ride. Hopefully, I get lots of new blog readers from linking to The Death Ride so often.
Driving out to the start, Charlie's car got rear-ended on Ygnacio Valley Road. Not too much damage but he did get jostled and thought he'd be in pain later. He rode anyway but turned around at Diablo Ranch with a headache... I made sure he was OK before I continued up.
Before the Gate, near the horse farm, I heard the unmistakable sound of a tube popping. I just put on a new tire Saturday so I must've stuffed it up... except my tire didn't go flat... I stopped to inspect and didn't find anything wrong so I kept going... weird.
New rider from work Haleh - enjoys riding but she hasn't done a Diablo effort before. She turned around before junction but said she had a good time.
I'm not sure you can call it a #SwissDismount if you fall down trying to get ON your bike.
OK major props to anybody who rides Diablo on a fixed gear... THIS GUY!
Descending was kind of spooky with the sun at just the wrong angle and bad shadows hiding the road damage... but I let'er-rip at Moss Landing as usual - Strava says my max was 66.6 km/hr. Then my front tire started to feel kind of lumpy and I remembered the tube popping thing from before the climb... got back to the truck and sure enough - I had pinched the tube on the new tire install - but when the pinched section popped, the tire bead kept any more air from leaking out - AMAZING!
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This evening I noticed that rider Cameron Piper earned a King of the Mountains Strava crown for Д Mt. Diablo NGR: North Gate to Junction
https://www.strava.com/activities/620504503#15140390738
This was during the time trial a couple weeks ago - interesting that he wanted this KOM bad enough to keep racing past the finish line all the way to Junction (another ~300 meters)... I'm not even sure how he did that because the barrier was down so he would've had to hop the bar to cross the line.
Anyway, Cameron is now only the THIRD PERSON to log a Strava time of less than 25 minutes to the Junction. Damn.
Cool and breezy down low, warm and still up higher.
JB said his bottom bracket has finally gotten so crunchy that he took the plunge to order a new one... plain old square taper spindle so he can use the same crank, but he made sure there are some triple cranks that will fit it... just in case. I don't think he's thought through all the stuff you have to do to convert to a triple.
Several really tall riders this morning too.
There's like room for another wheel under that saddle!
Oooh, a Zinn Magnesium.
Click for a laugh:
Welcome to four members of the UCLA Triathlon Club. Pretty good climbers (faster than me)... not so great at descending (slower than me).
This guy passed me descending at Junction, and then slowed me down the rest of the way.
He kept looking back at me so he knew he'd made a mistake...
I didn't want to push him to go faster than he wanted though, so I kept a big gap.
