I’ve gotten some good hill work in over the past couple of days.  Yesterday, I took a quick tour through the Glen Artney area of Patapsco State Park.  This area is accessible by taking a right turn near the Grist Mill trailhead, and following the road under the railroad tracks.  The road forks, and if you take the left fork, it winds up some serious hills, past some shelters, and then loops back down.  At the very top, there’s a fire road that appears (on the map) to lead to Foxhall Farm Rd.  Next time I come through here, I’ll take it and see where it goes.

Today, I got a late start, but decided to ride out to Rockburn/Ilchester anyhow.  Typically when I go this way, I’ll go through the park and out via the South St entrance, then ride through Relay to UMBC.  Today, I rode up Gun Rd instead to save some time.  Gun Rd is a quick way to get from the park to UMBC, but it goes straight up the river bank, so it’s very steep.

It had been awhile since I had ridden any really steep hills like this.  I was on my mountain bike both days, and its gearing is low enough that I was able to make it up both hills in the middle sprocket.  With these kinds of climbs, it’s important to keep weight on the front wheel, because it will want to pop off the ground.  This is particularly true when carrying a load on the back of the bike.  I do this by standing on the pedals and shifting my weight forward.  When riding like this, the big challenge is keeping a smooth pedal stroke.  On steep hills, my pedaling motion tends to get jerky, as I throw my weight into the down-stroke on alternating sides.  This is tiring, and harder on the knees and hips.  I find that if I make a concentrated effort to pedal in smooth circles, I’m not as winded when I get to the top of the hill.  The important thing is to keep the bike moving forward, and if all else fails, there’s no shame in getting off and walking.

Anyhow, now that I’m on a hill climbing kick, maybe I’ll try tackling Ilchester Rd again sometime soon.

After 4 years of bike commuting from Elkridge to UMBC, you’d think I’d have found all of the possible routes, but I’m still finding more.  I consider that a good thing, because it keeps me from getting bored with any one particular route.  Also, these days I’m finding myself less willing to ride regularly on Montgomery Rd in Elkridge, because of the traffic.  That cuts down on my route options, so new routes that avoid Montgomery Rd are always welcome.  Today’s route was 14 miles and change, and moderately hilly.  I liked it, and will likely ride it again:

• Take Lawyer’s Hill Rd to River Rd
• Enter Patapsco State Park via access road, take River Rd out to swinging bridge
• Cross swinging bridge, left onto Grist Mill Trail
• At trail end, turn right onto Ilchester Rd
• Go ½ mile, turn right onto Thistle Rd
• Follow Thistle Rd to end, turn right onto Frederick
• Go 1 mile, turn right onto Seminole Ave
• Follow Seminole to a connector street (there are a couple), turn left and go 2 blocks to Hilton Ave
• Turn right onto Hilton Ave
• Follow Hilton Ave about ½ mile, turn left onto McCurley
• Follow McCurley to end.  Take trail onto CCBC campus.  Turn right onto Campus Dr.
• Follow Campus Dr awhile and turn right onto Collegiate Dr.
• Follow Collegiate 2 blocks and turn right onto Foxhall Manor Dr.
• Follow Foxhall Manor to end and turn left onto Vineyard Hill Rd.
• Follow Vineyard Hill to end and turn left onto Foxhall Farm Rd.
• Follow Foxhall Farm until it ends at Rolling Rd.
• Proceed to UMBC via either Wilkens Ave or Sulphur Spring/Shelbourne Rd.

This was the first time I had ridden on Foxhall Farm Rd since the 1990s.  It’s a nice, secluded road with no traffic.  The CCBC cut-through is a great way to get through that area of Catonsville, as it avoids an extremely congested stretch of Rolling Rd.

Google Maps is becoming a very valuable tool for plotting bike routes.  It now includes a lot of trails.  Interestingly, it’s showing an access trail between Foxhall Farm Rd and Glen Artney Rd in the park.  I’m not familiar with this trail as I never ride on that part of Glen Artney Rd (you get to it by riding through the viaduct under the train tracks near the Grist Mill trailhead), but I’m going to have to check it out.  If it’s passable by road bike, it could be a very useful route (although it looks like it could be a steep climb).

Just got my road bike back from the bike shop the other day.  I wore through my second drive train.  The bike is 11 years old now, and has a 9-speed cassette, and the new ones are all 10-speed.  To make a long story short, it seems that the chainrings for my old Shimano 105 triple crank set are no longer being made.  At the shop’s recommendation, I ended up switching to a compact double crank set.  The front derailleur and cassette also needed to be swapped out; I was able to keep my existing front shifter.

For those not familiar with compact crank sets, compared to a triple, they typically use a 50-tooth large chainring and a 34-tooth small chainring, and the cassette has a slightly wider range of gears, at the expense of slightly larger jumps between gears.  Compared to a triple, the small chainring splits the difference between the middle ring and the “granny” ring, and the largest cog on the cassette has a few more teeth.  You lose the very lowest and very highest couple of gears, but in theory, the setup is lighter, the chain lines are better and the drive train is less “finicky”.

I took my first ride with the compact this morning.  My biggest complaint with the triple was that the chain would rub the front derailleur cage in a lot of gear combinations, making them unusable.  The shifters have some extra index positions to allow for limited “trimming” of the derailleur, but with 3 rings, there wasn’t a whole lot of tolerance to work with.  With the compact, I found that I still need to trim the front derailleur, but with only 2 rings, I’m able to trim it more effectively and predictably.  Sometimes I wonder if I’d be better off with a friction shifter.  It might be old-school, but it would allow infinite fine-tuning of the front derailleur to match the position of the chain.

Anyhow, the jury is still out on the compact double, but it seems like it’ll be an improvement.  I’m still getting used to it, so stay tuned for further reports.

Yesterday morning was likely the last gasp of this winter that never was.  When I left for work, it was a nice, crisp 32°F.  Freezing temperatures are not unheard of around here in late March, but they’re not common either, and given how warm March has been, yesterday morning felt really Arctic.  Of course, today we’re right back in the 70s.

For the past few rides I’ve been riding my Rockhopper, which is my winter bike.  I took the studded tires off it a couple of weeks ago.  Even without the studs, the bike is still a tank.  It’s not too heavy for a mid-’90s steel frame mountain bike, but the combination of lower gearing and wider tires make it a lot harder to move than either of my road bikes.  I really have to work to get it up hills.  I always like when I switch to my road bike after riding this one for awhile.  It makes me feel really fast, like one of those racer dudes with the sponsor jerseys.

Speaking of the road bike, it’s currently in the shop.  They are going to attempt to convert it from a triple chainring to a compact double.  I’m not sure how they’ll do it without changing out the derailleur and/or shifter, but we’ll see how it goes.  The triple was a pain because it’s hard to keep the chain from rubbing against the front derailleur in certain gear configurations.  My only concern going to the double is that the gearing won’t be low enough to get me up hills like Ilchester Rd.  We’ll see how it goes.

I hit 9000 miles on my road bike this morning, on my way into Patapsco State Park.  I was on the service road on the Howard County side that leads from River Rd. to the Avalon day use area.  I hit 8000 back on July 12, 2011, so it took around 8 months to log the latest 1000 miles.  I think I’m logging miles faster on this bike than my other two, because I tend to take longer rides on the road bike than on the others, and my usage of it has been on the increase, relative to the other two, due to dry weather last summer and this past winter.  I knew I was getting close to 9000, but I wasn’t expecting to hit it this week, because I didn’t think I’d be riding the road bike today.  We were supposed to get rain overnight last night, and I was planning to switch to a different bike with fenders this morning.  However, the rain never materialized, so I stuck with the road bike because all of my racks etc. were already on it.

Today marks my final ride before the switch to Daylight Saving Time.  I shouldn’t have any more rides in the dark until November, so this weekend I’ll take my helmet-mounted lights off, which will lighten up my helmet.  I remember the helmet feeling heavy when I first put them on in the fall, but I’ve long since gotten used to having them up there.  Also, over the next week or so I’ll be taking the studded tires off the mountain bike, and switching from Power Grips back to SPD pedals.  Nothing like spring.  Next thing I know, I’ll be mowing the lawn and popping allergy drugs again.

So, I did a 20 miler this morning on the way to work.  That’s a good bit longer than my average morning ride.  I wasn’t setting out to do 20+ miles; it just happened.  I had originally planned to do around 16-17 miles with a few more hills, but I got a leg cramp around Ellicott City, and decided to nix the extra hills in favor of a flatter, albeit longer, route for the remainder of the ride.  I also made sure to pound some extra water during the ride, as cramps are often the result of dehydration.

It’s warming up quite a bit around here.  Morning ride temperatures will be dealt a setback next week, though, as this weekend brings the dreaded switch to Daylight Saving Time.  Starting on Monday, my rides will be an hour earlier (astronomically speaking), and it will be darker and chillier, at least for the first few weeks.

I am trying something new on my rides home this spring.  Occasionally, I will “bonk out” on my rides home.  It typically happens toward the end of my ride, just as I’m about to climb the final hill.  I’m usually able to get up the hill, but it’s not fun.  It happened to me this past Tuesday, and I happened to have a Power Bar with me, so I stopped part way up the hill and ate the bar.  That worked extremely well, and I was able to get the rest of the way home without struggling.  In lieu of the Power Bar, I’m going to try drinking Gatorade during my ride home instead of water.  My theory is that the Gatorade will keep my blood sugar up during the ride and stave off the “bonk.”  I’ve always resisted putting anything but water in my bottles, as the sugar can promote mold, and I’ll need to make sure I thoroughly rinse the bottle after every ride.  But if it reliably keeps me from “bonking,” it might be worth it.  Alternatively, since it doesn’t happen every day, I could just make sure I always carry an energy bar, and stop to eat it if I feel like I’m going to hit the wall.  But I figured I’d at least give the Gatorade a shot.  Stay tuned.

I finally broke my February curse this year.  I rode to work 14 times, twice as many as any previous February.  Granted, this is only the 4th year I’ve commuted by bike regularly in the winter.  Bad weather has sidelined me a couple of years in February, and last year it was injury.  This year, illness was the primary threat.  Around Valentine’s day I came down with a bad cold, and I am still feeling the effects of it.  I missed 3 days of work, and took the car to work a couple other days because I wasn’t feeling up to riding.  But it wasn’t enough to keep me from getting 14 rides in.  Before I got sick I had already ridden 8 days in February, and I managed to slog to work 6 more times despite not feeling 100%.

Another first for this winter:  this was the first year that the service road connecting River Rd in Elkridge to Patapsco State Park was never snowed over.  There’s usually a good 2 to 3 weeks each winter where it’s impassable.  I have lots of not-so-fond memories of half-dragging, half-carrying my bike through several inches of snow there, to avoid having to bike on US 1.  Didn’t happen this year.  Matter of fact, unless we get some significant snow in March, this stands to be only the third winter in the last century or so where central Maryland saw under 2″ of snowfall for the entire winter (I read that on a weather blog somewhere; if I can find the reference, I’ll link to it here).

So now it’s March, and spring is right around the corner.  In the next couple of weeks, I’ll be taking the studded tires off my mountain bike.  At some point this spring or summer, I would like to try commuting to work through Patapsco State Park on single track trails.  I’ve plotted out a route from my house to UMBC that is around 80% trails.  I’m not sure I would want to do it regularly, but I’m going to give it a shot and see how I like it.