I've been wanting a wide angle lens for a while, so I finally bought one so that I'll have it with me in Europe next week: the Canon EF-S 10-22mm f/3.5-4.5 USM. Previously, the widest I had was 17mm, and those last 7mm make a huge difference. A friend of mine has this same lens, and after using it in January, I realized that a wide angle lens would make a lot more sense for me to buy than a super-telephoto lens.

My first chance to use this lens was at the second Dick Lane Velodrome Festival of Speed of 2008. You can see all the pictures of the Dick Lane Velodrome Festival of Speed here. Most of them were with the 10-22mm lens, and it should be pretty obvious which ones aren't. The edge distortion isn't too bad, and I really like the effect. I'll probably use this lens more than I initially planned on!

Given the amount of training time I lost at the track due to the broken collarbone, I probably won't be riding in the last FoS of this season, but I plan on keeping up doing ~200 miles a week throughout the year so hopefully next year I'll be taking less pictures and riding around in circles more! I did go mountain biking this morning for the first time since my wreck, and while it was only 1:10 of ride time on a familiar trail, it convinced me that I'm healed enough to start doing more serious mountain biking in places I haven't been. (And by the time I'm back from Europe it'll be 4 months since I broke it which is plenty of time to heal.) Hopefully I'll be able to drag Ben out so we can get back in the habit of mountain biking every weekend and increasing the mileage each time.

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.

I've been participating at DP Challenge off and on for a while now, but my images have rarely finished in the top 50% of challenges. (here's my profile there) Photography is a very subjective thing and the end result of everyones votes can be surprising! I was fairly confident with my entry into the Bicycles II challenge:

but as voting went progressed, it swung around between 4.9 (more typical for me) to 6.8 (a possible first place!). Could I win for once? After the week of voting, I ended up in 15th place out of 135, which is in the top 10%! That works for me. I like first place and tenth place better than mine, but if it was up to me, I would have given myself third :)

Hopefully I'll start doing this more regularly, if only they'd offer and RSS feed of new challenges!

I figured that starting off on a fixed gear or a full suspension mountain bike might not be the best thing for my still recovering collarbone, so I decided a few weeks ago that I was going to get a road bike. I researched around online and narrowed it down to a 2008 Roubaix Elite Compact. All Shimano 105 except the brakes and cranks, about what my budget was, and I like the way it looks. However, when I got to Outback Bikes to buy one, they had some 2007 models left over... So I ended up picking up a 2007 version of the Roubaix Comp Compact for a few hundred dollars less than they were selling the Elite for. This one has Shimano 105 brakes and cranks, and slightly nicer wheels. Another great deal on a bike from Outback (I got my full-suspension mountain bike in a similar situation there a few years ago). I'm going to try a few laps around the block later today and hopefully the doctor on Monday will say that I'm good to start seriously riding outside again! Hopefully those ~1000 miles I've done on the trainer will pay off...

Yeah, I broke my collarbone this weekend. I'm going to the effort of typing this up here, so that when people want the whole story i don't have to laboriously type a shorter version on AIM or something.

Saturday morning I got up around 6:30 to head up to North Georgia with Christopher, Kurt, and a pack of people I didn't know. It was pretty overcast with a chance of rain, but we felt chance was in our favor. We met up in a Waffle House parking lot, and the caravan of ~6 cars full of bikes and bikers headed up to Ellijay, GA. As we got closer it started raining, and by the time we got to the trailhead, it was absolutely pouring. Usually, we don't ride in wet conditions because it damages the trails, but the day's ride consisted of gravel fire roads and rock trails with stream crossings, so we wouldn't really be doing any damage.

It took a while for everyone to get suited up, but we finally got going: fire roads and trails uphill for miles. Several of us, me included, thought the pace of the leaders was a bit fast for what was going to be a 4 hour ride, but we all stayed fairly close and I don't think anyone was going slower than they wanted too (and a few people had a race to compete in the next day). It was very wet and while we were completely soaked before we started, somehow we got even wetter. This was my first mountain ride in the rain, and while wet, it was actually pretty nice. On a sunny day, I'm usually pretty hesitant to go through mud or make a stream crossing, but once I'm gross, it's a lot easier to do those things without thinking about it.

Halfway up the elevation gain, there was a great view of the low clouds in the mountains, but unfortunately I left my cameraphone in the car due to the weather (and my weatherproof GPS does't have a camera). The 3 of us in the back told everyone else to go ahead, and we started up the second half of the climb about 5 minutes after them. And what a climb it was! See the profile below:

While going uphill was very hard, the downhill was actually worse. It was still raining, and that combined with the mud my front tire was throwing up made it very hard to see. The 3 of us were flying down a gravel road when I noticed that I was catching up to them. This seemed like a good thing, but it turned out that I was going way too fast. I barely saw the outline of a sharp right turn in front of me and as I started to brake, I realized that there was no way I was going to be able to stop or make the turn, and was faced with an easy decision: drop the bike or launch myself off a cliff. While both tires were locked up and skidding, i kicked my back wheel to the left and dropped my bike on the right side. It stopped me pretty quickly and hurt extremely bad. While just glad to not be off the cliff, this still wasn't fun. I could feel the scuff marks on my back from the gravel, but after sitting still for a few seconds to catch my breath, I realized my collarbone was broken. I gave it a good whack to try and align it properly while the adrenaline was in full force and before the pain or reality really set in, and we then started to worry about me going into shock.

Doh! We were on the top of a mountain in the middle of the woods in the cold rain with no way to get out and no way to stay warm. Thankfully, a lost car pulled up a few minutes later. The guy I was with stashed my bike in the woods and the helpful family up there for some fishing helped me into their car. They were lost as well, but I pulled out my GPS and it gave us directions to the closest emergency room, the North Georgia Medical Center. Over an hour passed and we made it there. They dropped me off and went to fix a flat tire on their car and that's the last I saw of them. So there I was, alone in the ER, wearing spandex, soaking wet, and covered in dirt, without a wallet or phone. They took some x-rays, got my arm in a sling, and suggested I see an Orthopedic surgeon in the next few days, noting that it's a simple fracture that didn't separate. Not 20 minutes later, Kurt and Christopher picked me up at the ER after finishing their ride and we headed back to Atlanta.

After further inspection, the bite valve of my camelback is gone, and my helmet has a huge split in it, so it possibly saved my life. (Wear your helmets kids!) All in all, this is really annoying because I can't really ride for 2 months, it's hard to sleep, and really only being able to use my left hand is not fun, but it could have been a lot worse! While I missed out on the last 2/3 of the ride (which apparently is all awesome, technical, downhill with lots of stream crossings), I'm relatively well off with such a simple injury. Much worse could have happened if I hadn't been thinking, and of the very large number of my friends that have broken a bone biking, many of them needed surgery and metal plates or screws in their ankles, wrists, or collarbones. Health insurance is a good thing (16 pain pills were $3), and hopefully my bike will find it's way home! (I think the guy that hid it drove up the mountain to pick it up after he finished riding.)

So much thanks to everyone that helped, especially the many of you that I don't know. It's going to be quiet on here for a few weeks and I won't be e-mailing much, but I'll be back typing and riding as soon as possible!

Typically as people learn to fix things about their bike, a few things still usually mean a trip to the bike shop: bottom brackets, headsets, hydraulic disk brakes. Every bike has the first two of those, and my mountain bike happens to have the later. (Thankfully, they've yet to need to be serviced.) There are two reasons that people stay away from fixing bottom brackets and headsets: One, they are scary and important parts of the bike and doing something wrong with them can cause you bodily harm while riding or damage to your frame. Two, they need their own special tools.

I've need to do a lot of bottom bracket replacement on my bikes, both replacing old ones and moving ones between frames so I picked up a Park Tool BBT-22 and stick to bottom brackets that this tool will work with. Everything I ride is square taper, and the only bottom bracket that won't work with this tool is the on in my track bike due to it's adjustable chainline (this BB needs it's own special $50 tool but it should stay in that bike for a while). The BBT-22 is only about $20 and gets the job done pretty easily.

Headsets however, are a lot more trouble. There is one kind of tool to remove them, and another kind of tool to install them. Neither of which I had or wanted to pay for because I almost never need to do this kind of work, and buying tools for these things is just silly. This was fine until the headset on my mountain bike started to feel sticky. I pulled the fork out and found out that unfortunately, the headset was a semi-cartridge headset. These are better than cup and cone headsets because they don't require adjusting to work correctly, but worse than cartridge headsets because grit and water can still get into the bearings pretty easily and to repack the bearings, you really have to remove the entire headset and soak things in degreaser first instead of just popping out the bearings. This meant it was headset tool time!

I didn't want to buy big expensive tools when other things would do... For removing headsets I used a piece of copper pipe and a hacksaw per this example. $5 for the copper, and with a few smacks with a hammer my headset was out. I cleaned things out with WD-40 until both the top and bottom bearings spun smoothly with no gritty sounds, and repacked them with grease. Then for re-installation, a rubber hammer was all I needed! I put the opposite side of the frame on a wooden block outside, put in the headset, and just gave it a good smacking and that was it. Some people say that this is not enough to get a headset fully seated, but it's close enough for me. With a press like the park tools one, it is possible to over-tighten a headset and damage it or your frame, so usually even with these it remains too loose and takes a few miles on the trail to get fully seated anyways. Hopefully I'll go riding tomorrow and will get to test it all out!