Last year my bike trip was to Santa Fe to ride mountain bikes. This year, I flew to Portland, OR for a long weekend of road biking with 2 friends from Atlanta that have moved there: Paul and Austin. I flew out from Atlanta last Friday evening, and the bike crazyness began! First thing Saturday morning Paul and I picked up a rental Fuji Roubaix ACR 2.0 from the super nice guys at Waterfront Bikes. The bike was brand new and fit pretty well, and had pretty white bar tape that I knew wouldn't stay that way for long.

Saturday: Forest Park

From Paul's house, the three of us rode west out of Portland and zigzagged across Forest Park. Part of the loop involved crossing 2 pretty big bridges with traffic, and they were by far the biggest bridges like that I've ridden across. (The bridges in NYC have separated bike lanes.) We got some great views of the city, 2 big climbs, and 2 huge descents, and didn't work too terribly hard. Afterwards, we grabbed tacos from one of the many cheap and delicious food carts in Portland.

• 34 miles, 2500 ft, 2.5 hours
• GPS Trace: Forest Park

Sunday: Hood River

Sunday morning is was raining pretty badly in Portland. We found a route out of Hood River, OR on mapmyride.com and loaded up the car. Once there, we got a small break in the rain as setup for the last stage of the Mt Hood Cycling Classic was getting set up. Our plan was to get back and see the last 30 minutes or so of the pro men's circuit, but we ended up missing it by a few minutes. This ended up being a pretty awesome route, but it would have been more fun if we weren't getting rained on half the time. The long slow uphill for the first half was followed by a long slow downhill for the second half, and both had great scenic views of rolling hills covered in nurseries and orchards. Mt. Hood would have been visible the whole time if we weren't buried in the clouds. For surviving, we rewarded ourselves with food and beer at the Full Sail Brewing Pub in downtown Hood River, OR.

• 50 miles, 3800ft, 3.5 hours
• GPS Trace: Hood River

Monday: Sandy River

Paul had to work on Monday, and I was pretty beat from Sunday's ride, so Austin and I set out on a longer but easier ride out Portland to the East on bike paths. The ride was nice and pretty flat until we got out to Sandy River, where there were a few short climbs and a few great windy downhills. There were no real views, but lots of miles and lots of changes in scenery: from toothless meth heads on the bike path to Alpaca farms in the hills. We got a bit turned around riding back into town but with some pointers from a local on a bike, we made it to downtown Portland for massive burritos from another food cart.

• 70 miles, 2600ft, 4.5 hours
• GPS Trace: Sandy River

Tuesday: Larch Mountain

On Tuesday, Austin was back at work but Paul was able to sneak out for a ride, and a ride it was! We drove east to a home depot parking lot around 250th street, hopped on our bikes, and headed up the road to Larch Mountain. This was a continual climb up to the overlook at 4056ft, which took us 2.5 hours. The skies were clear and after a short hike-a-bike to the top, the view was great: we could see all of the big peaks in the area: Hood, Jefferson, Rainer, St. Helens, and Adams. After a handful of photos, we headed down the mountain at ~30MPH, getting back to where we started in under an hour. More burritos afterwards, and my legs informed me that they did not want to ride any more bikes.

• 47 miles, 4400ft, 3.5 hours
• GPS Trace: Larch Mountain

The End

What an awesome trip! 200+ miles, 13,000+ feet of climbing, and over 15 hours in the saddle including biking to dinner a few nights. I had a great time hanging out with Paul, Austin, and friends, and it was nice to be away from the internet and on a bike instead for 4 days. Based on the weekend, I liked Portland better than San Francisco, but Paul thinks the winter weather in Portland makes it a bit less desirable (weather this weekend was pretty close to perfect). There's more photos here: Road Biking in Portland, OR, though unfortunately I didn't snag any of the great views on Day 1. Waterfront bikes was surprisingly glad to see the bike covered in mud splatter and "well used", and Tuesday night I hopped on a red-eye back to Atlanta. Up next will be a mountain biking trip somewhere new and exciting. Track Racing tonight anyone? I kinda hope it gets rained out...

Last year, I told my friend Jim that I would join him for a bike event in Athens, GA as part of Twilight Weekend 2009. A friend from college came in town that weekend so it threw a wrench in the plans and while I got some awesome photos of the races, my bike unfortunately stayed in Atlanta.

Given that Twilight Weekend happens every year, I promised to make it this year and things ended up working out that way! A few months ago, while perusing athenstwilight.com I noticed the "Twiathlon": a 5K run, followed by a 100K bike ride, followed by a tour of the Terrapin brewery and some free beverages. Jim and I have a habit of suggesting ridiculous bike related things and then following through on them, so we signed up for the Twiathlon and Jim reserved a hotel room in Athens for Saturday evening. We also conned our friend and fellow FM:Race team member Bob into joining us (and driving us there!).

Early Saturday morning we strapped our road bikes to the top of Bob's car, hopped in, and drove through the rain to Athens. This was Not Good. The weather forecasts called for rain all day, and we discussed abort conditions as we pulled into Athens. After parking in my terrible "secret" parking place and registering, we moved to FM:Race Dan's order-of-magnitude-better "secret" parking place ~100ft from the finish line and geared up to run. The rain subsided a bit, and we stood in the drizzle and laughed as other runners tried to find cover as if they would somehow remain dry throughout the event.

At 8:30am the 5K Race began, and Jim, Bob, and I stayed together at a sub-7-minute pace as Jason Spruill sprinted off in the distance to try and win something. Jim and I were shooting for sub-25 and we told Bob that he had to do the same thing, so off we ran. Bob slowed down after the first mile but managed to come in at 24 minutes and change, and I stayed with (IRONMAN) Jim until the last little hill where he started to inch away for his 22m32s finish, a personal best for him. I came in at 22m44s which was a personal best for me because it was the first timed 5k I've done, and I thankfully didn't feel the need to quickly empty my stomach like the guy right in front of me wearing a grass skirt. Here's my watches view of the race. It was raining for most of the run, and after the finish we walked through some lighter rain to the cat-5 crit course to see our teammate Justin after he managed to stay with the pack in his first crit. Go Justin! Rumor has it our friend Jon got 4th place in what was also his first crit, but the official results aren't up yet.

Back up at the secret parking lot, we changed from wet running clothes into soon-to-bet wet bike riding clothes and assembled our crew. Me, Bob, and Jim in FM:Race kits on road bikes, Dan in a FM:Race kit on a tandem with one of his kids, and Jason along to keep us honest about keeping the pace up. We barely made the start at 10am and rolled out under cloudy but dry skies on a very very wet 100k worth of road. Our primary tactical focus was beating Dan's wife and 2 younger kids that were doing the 50k, but Jason quickly learned that he could attack on every hill and Jim would try and stay on his wheel but wasn't quite able to keep up. Bob and I had never run before biking and our legs were very confused, but we all managed to hold together as somewhat of a group for most of the ride, including pacelining at 30mph in pouring rain. Terrible, and not something that I'd willingly do in the future. Here were are at the driest point of the ride somewhere around the middle:

This event, the "Terrapin Wake N' Ride" wasn't a race (and while we beat Dan's family, they had to bail a few miles before the end and get picked up due to general terribleness of the conditions), but there are some super sweet prizes and Bob may have won something very fancy. Everyone has the option of taking a 50k or 100k route, and along the route are several checkpoints. Each checkpoint gets you a poker card (we got bonus cards for running the 5k), and at the end of the ride, they give out prizes to people with the best hands. I ended up with 2 pairs, but Bob managed to get 4 7s. Hopefully he'll get a phone call this week once they tally everything up! Here's how my watch saw things.

By the end, we had been riding in pouring rain for 45 minutes (after ~3 hours of slightly less wet riding) and were all pretty wet and miserable, but Bob and I somehow convinced Jim to let us enjoy one free beer at Terrapin in the colder but slightly less wet inside. Then it was back to Athens (riding bikes in the rain slightly buzzed with empty beer glasses in our jersey pockets) for some hot showers and learning about mining silver and copper on the History Channel. To prevent Jim from killing and eating us, we suited back up in our matching FM:Race work shirts (see Bob's), found our way to the race course, accidentally ran into our friend Kazz, and acquired some burritos. The only thing left to do was to find a place to enjoy the races from 5pm-10pm, and a $5 donation to charity got us primo seats (actual seats!) on the inside of the second section of turn 3. Given the weather and potential for beers, I left my nice camera at home but the point-n-shoot shows what our view was like for the evening:

Highlights included not seeing any crashes but seeing the coordinated look of shock from people on the other side of the turn that saw a crash outside of our field of view, having Kazz yell at us as she rode in the pace car during one of the races, and the general awesomeness of drinking beers while watching bike racing. Shortly before the end of the pro mens race, we walked back to the hotel, absolutely destroyed a few Dominos' pizzas, and slept up for the early Sunday morning drive back to Atlanta. Here's the rest of the photos. Jim had fun.

Watching crits in the rain isn't as fun as when it's dry, and I don't plan on riding that much in the rain again, but running in the rain was a lot less terrible than expected. The only things that would have made this better is if it didn't rain the entire time and some of our teammates were in the evening crits, but hopefully both of those will happen next year!

Yesterday, cyclists gathered in Dahlonega, GA for the 21st annual Six Gap Century. For some reason, Jim and I decided we would participate, though on the drive up at 4:30am on Sunday neither of us could figure out why. What could be more fun than 100+ miles climbing over 6 gaps in North Georgia totaling over 11,000ft of elevation gain? Probably a lot of things...

With a "our only goal is to not be so slow that we get cut off and are forced to do the 50 mile route" mindset, we started the loop at 7:30am with either hundreds or thousands of other people on bikes. Things started out pretty slow and, well, stayed that way. We made the cutoff point with plenty of time to spare and for pretty much the entire time that the sun was up, we rode along the course:

The crowds thinned out and at some points we were the only two people that either of us could see, and for the vast majority of time the time rode pretty close to each other so that we could try and figure out why we were doing this ride. I took off the front on the two timed climbs, if you can call 8mph taking off the front. Jim got to the top of the 10k and 5k climbs just a few minutes after me. These two climbs were pretty ridiculous, enough that some people were walking faster than others were riding, and at 8mph I was _flying_ past some people. Heres what the elevation profile looked like overall:

Jim and I finished before the sun went down, with less than 10 hours of wall time and I came in at right under 8 hours of wheel moving time with Jim a few minutes more. Not bad considering he hasn't really done anything since his Ironman Triathlon a few weeks ago, and I haven't really been on a bike much at all over the past 3 weeks due to the crazy rains in Atlanta, and the fact that we took our sweet time. Overall, Jim and I share the sentiment that we're glad we did this once and don't really need to do it again. The only "terrible" part were the rolling hills at the end of the course because each of our computers and my GPS all had different total mileage numbers and each time we thought we were going to come around the corner to the finish, there was another rolling hill to climb.

We finished off the day with a Bloomin Onion and some grilled meat at Outback Steakhouse and headed home, meeting our two goals for the day: 1. finish the 100 mile route and 2. eat a Bloomin Onion. I also didn't have any nutrition related issues which caused problems the last two 100+ mile rides I completed.

I won't be doing this ride next year, but given my policy of "pay to ride one century each year and don't ride the same one twice" I'll probably end up doing a flatter century like MACC One Love or something else, and maybe I'll set a finishing time goal too. Today, I'm feeling pretty good aside from some minor leg soreness, and it's kinda neat that I can do a ride like this without any real planning or preparation other than finding someone to drive up there with!

The stats:

• 105.8 miles on the bike computer
• 7:58:54 time on the bike computer
• 10607 ft of climbing on the GPS
• 7169 calories burned according to the heart rate monitor
• 905th of 999 6-Gap finishers, with several hundred that did not finish
• 9:42:34.426 finishing wall time. Fastest was 5:22:17.679, slowest was 12:54:53.980
• 311 of 999 in the King of The Mountain timed hill climbs
• full results!

The big news this weekend for Atlanta was a few inches of snow. I took the opportunity to see how the helmet cam works riding in the snow. It turned out alright, but theres definitely a snow getting stuck to lens issue:

Snow Ride in Atlanta from Chris Kelly on Vimeo.

I also took some pictures of the snow around my house and am pretty happy with how a few of them turned out. Up next this week was Georgia Rides to the Capitol 2009. I piled up my gear yesterday, and headed out this morning at 7:15am in the 21F weather to Ride up to Roswell, GA with a few people, then turn around and ride back with a few hundred. 47 miles later is was about 37F outside. Here's the route:

View Larger Map

And the first real try of using my helmet camera during the day in good weather: (Next video I post will be something significantly more awesome, hopefully from some mountain biking.)

Georgia Rides to the Capitol 2009 from Chris Kelly on Vimeo.

Another year, another Christmas. Monday evening was spent at my Mom's parents with a bunch of cousins, Tuesday was dinner at my Parent's house with San, my brother, and Jenny, Wednesday was dinner out with San's mom and some of her relatives, and today San and I just took it easy, had Chinese food for dinner, and watched Day One (which is definitely worth a watch if you're into history or the whole Nuclear thing at all). I got in a long road ride yesterday to and around Stone Mountain, and today finally biked up from home to the start of the Silver Comet. Riding back from there, I stumbled across Glock USA, a neat wooden section of the PATH that I didn't know existed, and a view of downtown and midtown that I hadn't seen before.

As for the spoils of Christmas, it was a pretty low key year which is a good thing because there's just not a whole lot of things I need! Among the assortment of snacks, books, movies, and bike tools, there were a handful of surprises including 2 of a bike tool that I needed two of :). My parents gave me some furniture for the back yard a few weeks ago, and the biggest surprise was a Canon SD1100 camera from San. I've got plenty of huge camera things (specifically a 40D with all the fixins), but my mountain biking pictures from the iPhone often leave a bit to be desired (ex: here). So hopefully lots more pictures from places where the big camera is just too big! I'm also looking forward to putting CHDK on it and seeing what all it can do.

On the giving side of things, I did get some things for other people:

• my dad got a Harmony One Remote
• my mom got a gift certificate to go scuba diving with the whales at the Georgia Aquarium
• San got tickets to see Cirque du Soleil's Kooza in Atlanta in January (and a handful of other things)
• my brother and Jenny got a Wii Guitar Hero controller, some CDs, and a Mini Gorillapod

And in other news, there's a lot of exciting hardware stuff now installed for ithought.org and I'm wrapping up my first year at SugarCRM, but more on those after some more enjoying the 5-day weekend.

It's that time of year again: In a few weeks, we at Faster Mustache are putting on our 4th annual 24 hour urban relay! Head on over to 24.fastermustache.org to pre-register to guarantee your spot, as this is the cycling event of the year in the south east, and the only event of it's kind in the world.

September 6th and 7th at Johnny's Pizza on North Highland. Take it easy on a 6 person team and just have a good time doing at least one lap a person (~10 miles or so), or go for the solo win which will take 300+ miles of riding! Trust me, the prizes are worth it!