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!

Right before I left for my Europe trip, someone posted about the 20th Annual Covington Century on FM. I thought it might be a good first century (100 mile bike ride) for me to do because they claim it to be the "fastest and flattest". Prior to that posting I'd been riding 6 days a week usually between 25 and 35 miles with some longer rides on weekends, but I was going to be off the bike for 2 weeks to to Europe so eh, we'll see. I got back from Europe on Tuesday, and 25 miles on Wednesday morning felt pretty good so I signed up for the century and planned to catch a ride with Roger down there.

5:45am on Saturday we started and had exchanged money for registration packets, applied sunscreen, and eaten PowerBars by the start of the ride at 8am. The first 2 miles was a very slow start with the kids that this ride was raising money for leading the pack, but once they pulled off things started to pick up. Roger, Jase, Jenny, Chris, Anna, and I all stuck together for a while and we skipped the first rest stop 10 miles in because the crowd was still pretty big. Over the next few miles, things got a bit more spread out and at some point Roger, Jenny, Chris, and I lost Jase and Anna. We stopped at all the rest of the rest stops and I alternated eating a banana with eating a pbj sandwich and a few shot blocks. I tried to alternate my Acceleraide with Poweraide and water that was provided at the rest stops, but Acceleraide is really a lot better so it was gone pretty quickly, which turned out to be my only real mistake for the ride.

At the turnoff to do 80 miles or 100 miles, Chris and Jenny pulled off. It was 95 degrees or so and riding that far in the sun just isn't fun! Roger and I kept on going and ended up meeting up with Anna two more rest stops out (she did the 80 option so at that point we both had 20 miles left to go). We rode with her for a few miles, but my arms and shoulders were getting pretty sore at that point and I knew that I needed to speed up and finish or I wouldn't make it, so I pulled off. I kept downing Poweraide and after 5:52:23 moving time I finished the 102 mile course. (We probably took ~45 minutes of breaks.)

After riding that far, it's understandable that one would feel pretty bad, but everyone else was eating huge plates of free spaghetti and the though of food made me sick to my stomach. I dealt with it until I got home where my body "removed" about 1.5 liters of Poweraide and I felt a bit better. Acceleraide is multiple kinds of sugar, salt, protein, etc, while Poweraide is just very sugary water, and it turns out that by drinking so much Poweraide, I'd induced a sugar stomachache similar to kids on Halloween. It's now 14 hours later and I feel fine, but up until now it's been pretty rough.

All in all, I'm glad I did it, and 17.4mph moving average isn't bad for a first one! I hit 46mph at one point on a big hill, had a 155bpm average heart rate (84% of my max which is a little high), and my average cadence was 74rpm (which is about right, though I'd like that to be a little higher). Hopefully some people will post their pictures soon.

It's 7:15am on Sunday now and I'm craving some chicken fingers and fries, and I'll hopefully be back on my morning rides tomorrow or Tuesday!

I had a run in with the ground today on my road bike about 7 miles in and had to miss the rest of the 30 miles. It wasn't my fault and nothing got too damaged on the bike, but the rear derailleur hanger was badly bent and the cable housing on it was destroyed, so the drivetrain didn't really work at all and I had to get San to come pick me up. I was worried I might need a new derailleur but I went by Outback Bikes today and as usual, they took care of me. $5 later I have a new cable and housing, the hanger is straight again, and the derailleur is all in one piece and didn't need replacing. (Hoorah for free service after buying a bike from them!)

Lessons learned today:

• It turns out there is a special tool just for straightening bent derailleur hangers! For $60, you too can have this tool to fix this one type of bike problem that should almost never happen. Now I just need one of those and a tool for the crazy bottom bracket in my road bike.
• Chances are almost 100% that if your bike is not of the current model year, the bike shop that sold you the bike will not have any replacement derailluer hangers in stock, even if it's last years model.
• If you are riding with people and their quick release levers are turned in such a way that they might grab on to someone elses levers or cables, suggest to them that they adjust them instead of just not worrying about it!

I carry a GPS with me on long bike rides and pull the resulting trace into Google Earth and Garmin's MapSource software. Google Earth is nice for looking at, but doesn't provide much useful information, and MapSource is pretty awful to look at (and will only run in Windows so I have to boot up VMware) but does provide elevation maps (as well as the ability to load maps). I recently started using a bike computer with cadence, and a heart rate monitor, and the last missing piece of information was total elevation gain over a ride. This information is nowhere in MapSource or Google Earth.

I can get GPX format (The standard interchangable format for GPS information) files out of MapSource and it's just XML, so after trying several tools online and several programs I downloaded that didn't work, I wrote a quick python script to get me the info I want. Hopefully this will help someone else:

from xml.dom import minidom

file = minidom.parse('./file.gpx')

min = 1000000
max = 0
gain = 0
loss = 0
last = 0

for node in file.getElementsByTagName("ele"):
        cur = float(node.childNodes[0].data)
        if (cur > max):
                max = cur
        if (cur < min):
                min = cur
        if (last != 0):
                if (cur > last):
                        gain = gain + (cur - last)
                elif (cur < last):
                        loss = loss + (last - cur)
        last = cur

print "max: %.2fft" % (float(max * 3.2808399))
print "min: %.2fft" %  (float(min * 3.2808399))
print "gain: %.2fft" % (float(gain * 3.2808399))
print "loss: %.2fft" % (float(loss * 3.2808399))

So for my 43 mile ride on sunday:
max: 1110.63ft
min: 773.16ft
gain: 3328.98ft
loss: 3232.78ft

Getting those numbers were a lot harder than it should have been! Good ride though..

I had my last set of X-Rays yesterday and while it's very obvious where the break was, it's mostly healed and I can perhaps try some mountain biking again soon! I posted about my new road bike exactly a month ago, and in that month I've put 500 miles on it. Every morning during the week except Wednesdays I ride for ~2 hours, usually with a few other people, and on weekends I try to do ~3 hours twice. Sunday I rode out to Stone Mountain and did a lap around it before coming back, usually it's just a turnaround point, and in the mornings I've followed green arrows marked with "safari" (turned out to be ~25 mile tour to 8 parks with some hunting for the route at each one), gone on known routes such as the Outback Bikes Wednesday night ride route, and come up with a few of my own including one that is definitely going to be a regular route and put online somewhere. It's great to not be stuck inside on the trainer any more!

In related news, the Faster Mustache race team had our first organizational meeting last night. We're doing very well in lots of races: everything from 3rd place in an expert levels trials competition, to taking the vast majority of top 10 finishes in sport level mountain bike racing, to winning both our category and overall at a 24 hour mountain bike race in Conyers, GA. However, sponsorships have been very slow! If you'd like your name on our website, it only takes $25 and for $250 and up, you can have things like: your company linked to from our website, your logo on our jerseys, your logo on our tents and banners at races, etc! Please get in touch with me if you'd like to know more about sponsoring our team! Just email team@fastermustache.org! Every little bit helps because the team covers 50% of entry fees for people that commit to 10 races a season, and races cost between $20 and $100 a person to enter.