Labor Day, cooler, but very few people riding?

Even passing by the super-popular Stanford Dish trail, there were very few people hiking up to it, far fewer than normal. Where did everybody go?
It wasn’t a “real” ride day; I had some work to get done, including taking care of a few loose end in Los Altos, but I figured why not combine work with riding? So at about noon I headed out into really weird skies, felt a few sprinkles, quite a bit of wind and rode from Redwood City to our Los Altos location, where I met up with my wife and did some transfers between the two stores (she had a car, obviously).

Along the way I saw very few people, but one did stand out. On the Robleda “roller coaster” in Los Altos Hills, that piece of road that used to be really fun before they put the stop sign in the middle of it? There was a guy ahead of me wearing, get this, a first-generation hard-shell helmet, the Bell Biker. That helmet is seriously 35 years old and probably about as effective at this point as wearing a styrofoam hat. Of course, being safety-conscious, he had a rear view mirrow attached to it. And then proceeded to blow thorugh the Robleda stop sign, and another two after it, without slowing down in the slightest. Pretty strange and pretty annoying.

Strava “warning” me that a segment is approaching and challenging me to do something about it.
The plan was to ride pretty easily, but darn that Strava and the “segments” feature. I’m heading back, about to turn right to go up Sand Hill from Foothill, and up pops a 6 minute, 6 second segment ridden by George Smith, one of our semi-regular Tuesday/Thursday-morning riders. And it started teasing me. I was actually ahead of his time, likely because I was getting favorable stop lights. So instead of “just” riding, I started pushing, seeing if I could do better than George, and somehow, I ended up with 3 seconds faster. Never mind that, looking at the fastest times for that segment, I’m seeing 4:22.

It certainly warmed up on the return, as high as 87, but that’s still 10 degrees cooler than yesterday. And tomorrow is supposed to be cooler still. I’m ready for it!






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