Monthly Archives: June 2017

Jun 18, 2017 |

Tour de Blast 2017

After deciding not to do the full Flying Wheels route this year, I wanted a substitute, and I decided to journey south to Castle Rock to ride Tour de Blast. My wife came along to ride the 30, and planned to do the full 82.

We left Friday afternoon at 2:30, and spent a full 4 hours getting down to Castle Rock. It’s quite a ways even if there is no traffic, which of course never happens around here any more. As much as I hate getting up early to ride, I would almost prefer to do that and miss the traffic. We stayed in the TimberLake Inn in Castle Rock and had a decent mexican dinner that night.

We woke up the next morning at 6AM, and I had a wonderful meal of a chocolate brownie clif bar, some blueberries, and a glass of water. I’ve been eating low (er) carb, and I’m still trying to figure out what I want to eat before a ride and didn’t plan well ahead of time, so it was whatever I could find it the store.

We left the hotel at around 7 and got to the start at maybe 7:25, parking in the baseball outfield. Then it was a walk to pick up our packets, a walk back, and I headed out.

Well, not quite; I spent a lot of time trying to decide what to wear and what to carry; the ride has a reputation of cold (and wet) at the top, and even though the forecast was decent it tends to be windy up there. I settled on arm warmers, no leg warmers, summer gloves, and I couldn’t decide on whether to carry my stuffable vest or my stuffable jacket, so I ended up carrying both. Plus phone, cheez-it’s and electrolyte tablets.

The ride profile looks like this:

I like to break rides into sections so I can keep them straight in my mind. For this ride there is:

Warmup – the first 18 miles or so, which has a little over 1000′ of up.
Elk Rock climb – 2200′ of up over 7.7 miles
Descent + Johnson Ridge climb – 1650′ over 5.7 miles
Descent + Elk Rock backside – 1400′ (ish) over about 8 miles
Return to start: 3250′ down over 27 miles.

Here’s a 3d view of the route:

Warmup

I am just warm enough as I spin out of town with my stuffable vest on. We have a little flat, and then slowly start to climb up; there’s a lot of road in the 1-2% range, with a few kickers in the 6% range. I pass quite a few people, but since this is a three-route ride (there is a 30 and a 52 variant), that doesn’t really mean much. My legs feel decidedly meh and my stomach is a bit weird, but I’m okay overall. I’m trying to climb at about 175 watts, which is a pretty good “all day” pace for me generally. I push it up to 225 on one of the kickers, and feel a little bit better, which is a good sign.

At 15 miles we hit the first rest stop; I have drank maybe a third of my two bottles so I just keep going. Right near the 20 mile mark, we hit the start of the Elk Ridge climb.

You can always tell when the highway engineers got involved when you are riding in the mountains, because the gradient is typically arrow-straight. You wind around, you go over bridges, but the gradient is very constant, at about 5%, with a little over and a little under in places. I start at about 200 watts but decide that’s a little too high, so I drop down to about 180, and average 181 watts for the whole climb. My vertical meters per hour is a disappointing 550, but I do have a couple of significant climbs in front of me.

The climb itself is okay; the road itself is chipseal but they nicely decided to leave a little margin on the shoulders uncoated, so there is generally smooth surface to ride on. The bridge are big and long and provide either beautiful views or slightly scary heights depending on your perspective.

I pass people, people pass me, and I spent a bit of time chatting with those who are close to my speed. 70 minutes or so later, I hit the Elk Rock rest area. My stomach is still feeling a bit weird on my electrolyte drink, so I fill up my empty bottle with water, have a couple of potatoes with salt, skip the grilled hot dogs, and head back out.

Johnson Ridge

A short bit of up and I find myself on the Elk Rock descent. It’s a nice descent, broken in two by a short and easy (2%) uphill section, with a couple of sweeping turns. Most of the time I spend in the low 30s, spun out in my largest gear, and 8 miles doesn’t take that long at that sort of speed. I’m now back down to 2500′ and will need to climb up over 4000′.

Johnson ridge is named after David Johnson, a geologist who was on the site when the mountain erupted on May 18th, 1980. It provides – weather permitting – a spectacular view into the crater.

But first we have to get up there…

I felt pretty good on the descent, but as I ramp up for the climb, that feeling dissipates, and I am left with some nice low-grade nausea. Nothing really seems to help; water makes it worse, electrolyte drink makes it worse, cheez-its (which I generally tolerate very well) make it worse. The only thing to do is to stop drinking and keep climbing.

This climb is harder than the Elk ridge one, as the grade is often in the 7-8% range and touches 9-10% in places. I whine to myself, suffer, get passed, suffer, get passed some more, and keep going. My butt is a bit sore, my back/shoulders hurt, my stomach is upset, my pulse is pounding in my head, my head aches a bit, and my tinnitus is acting up.

The only thing really keeping me going is the knowledge that I have an out – my wife is planning on driving up to the observatory after she finishes (which she already did), so I have the option of hanging around and waiting for her. An estimated 35 hours later, I finally top out (actually, looking at the data, I climbed the 1650′ in 54:33 @ 553 meters / hour and 171 watts, so pretty much the same pace as the first climb. Did not feel that fast.

I walk up to look at the mountain (covered in clouds), and head to the food tables. I carefully get off my bike, take a drink (nope, still feel sick), text the wife (a really poorly worded “At top. Probably done”), and chance half a banana. Nope, still feel sick. Start composing my ride report, and decide to call it “Tour de Fizzle”.

Sit around in the sun a bit, talk to one of my friends about my new bike, sit on a bench, and finally am able to get some fluid down without feeling horrible. Wait for the wife, and wait some more.

Elk Rock Backside

Finally get cold and am feeling better, and decide I need to get down off the hill, and hope my wife stops when she passes me on this section. This descent is fast, my arms are shaking because I’m cold so I can’t steer very well, and my wife passes me headed up maybe 2 minutes into the descent. Sigh.

A couple minutes later I drop farther into the valley, it warms up maybe 15 degrees, and I stop shivering. Down, down, and down, and I’m back in the valley between the ridges, and it’s time to climb up. Coat off and put away, arm warmers off and put away.

This first part is the steeper part of the climbs; I saw 8% on the downhill and expect it to be pretty bad coming back up, but I set a power target of 150 watts and climb @ 5-6 MPH and it’s really not that bad. I pass a few, get passed by a few others, and finally reach an intersection that marks the end of the steeper part. A short descent, and then it’s onto the longer but flatter upper section.

This is supposed to be easier, but I feel worse than the first section, and I’m climbing at a seriously slow 130 watts. I stop a couple times to rest, and then see my wife pass me going the other way, and when I don’t see the car at one of the pull-outs, I know that my lack of good instructions means she went back to the starting point to wait for me. I stop a couple more times, and the last time my background nausea asserts itself, and I sit there trying to control my stomach for a couple of minutes. Successful, I get on the bike and continue the upward grind. I am climbing at a breathtaking 340 meters/hour.

Finally we top out again, and I pull into the Elk Rock food stop for a second time. Nothing looks good and I don’t really need water and there’s no cell service, so I can’t text my wife, so it’s back on the bike and heading down. At least it’s a descent, and I descend all the way down to the site of the first food stop, pull over, and text my wife that I am starting down and to come and find me. And she does, meeting me at the 72 mile point, which ends my ride for the day. A bit of jerky (which I stupidly chose not to stuff in my pockets) and a full coke zero, and I feel somewhat human. Just in time for the 4:30 drive back, which thankfully I did not have to do.

Stats etc.

71.6 miles and 7001′ of up with a moving time of 5:45 and an elapsed time of 7:00. So, slow and with more than double the time off the bike I would expect. It ended up as an “Extreme” suffer score of 230, but I think the only time I’m suffered more on the bike was the time I climbed up Cayuse in 100+ temperature.

Overall, the ride is okay. I liked it much better than High Pass Challenge because it doesn’t have all the flat section. Will I do it again? Well, it’s a long trip to get down there and a long trip back, and that does deaden the experience a bit, but maybe.

Jun 16, 2017 |

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From carb-optimized to fat-optimized: a brief summary

(I’ve written this from a cycling perspective, but I think the basic idea – going from a carb-optimized metabolism to a fat-optimized one – has a broader application).

For those who don’t know me, I’m a fairly typical recreational cyclist; in season I’m riding 3 times a week, generally anywhere from 75 miles to 120 miles, with a few goal events (I tend toward hilly events, such as RAMROD, Passport 2 Pain, and my very own Sufferin’ Summits).

Over the years, I’ve mostly used a low-fat diet; one focusing on low-GI carbs (brown rice, whole-wheat bread, etc.) for my normal diet, and one with high-GI carbs before, during, and after my rides.

That has worked okay, more or less, with a few issues:

My stomach is often not very happy with a slug of sugar-based nutrition drink during a ride (I have fructose intolerance, which may be part of it).

I generally feel tired when I get to about 4 hours on the bike. Not leg tired, but just a general overall feeling of fatigue.

I have a really hard time not snacking between meals. This was not helped by having candy readily available at work, but even without that, I still had a hard time not snacking.

I also had a related problem. I ski and teach skiing during the winter, which means that I have no weekend time for rides from December through mid-March, and a lot of chance to snack after skiing. Those combined with my work snacking, and in early 2016 I was at 178 lbs, about 6 lbs above my traditional adult weight of 172 lbs.

Some of you may be saying, “that’s not that heavy for an athlete”, and that’s true, but I did not like the trend.

I read a book on nutrition that had been sitting on my Amazon wish list for a year (reference below), I asked a few cyclists at my company about their experience with a lower carb approach. And I did a lot of research about nutrition and metabolism in general; if you want to talk about insulin, glucagon, ketosis, I can go on for quite a while, and I can also talk a bit about the current state of clinical measurements (HDL, LDL, LDL-P) and their relation to cardiovascular disease. Oh, and the experience of indigenous people such as the Inuit and what happened when they started to eat a western diet.

My conclusion was that I was eating quite a few carbs in my diet and not much fat, which meant that my body was going to be optimized towards using carbs as a fuel source. My other conclusion was that eating the carbs was contributing to my snacking, because a) the insulin response to the carbs would tend to drop my blood sugar back down and b) the lack of fat wasn’t making me feel satisfied after a meal.

So, it was time to experiment. I’m not somebody who likes to make giant changes in my diet all at once, so I focused on lunch, especially at work. Here’s what I was eating before:

Monday: Burrito day. A whole wheat burrito, black beans, rice, chicken breast, cheese, guac
Tuesday: A half sandwich; chicken/turkey breast, cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, pickles, mustard
Wednesday: See Tuesday
Thursday: Taco salad day. In a tortilla bowl, black beans, rice, chicken breast, lettuce, guac, olives, cheddar cheese
Friday: See Tuesday

Just writing that, wow, that’s a lot of carbs. And wow, my cafeteria is boring.

Here’s what I switched to:

Monday: Mexican day. Black beans, half chicken & half pork, onions, lettuce, cheese, guac
Tuesday: “Barbecue day”. Either brisket or a half chicken with cole slaw, and a tiny square of cornbread
Wednesday: Salad. Greens + tomatoes, cucumbers, peas, kidney beans, red bell pepper, sugar peas, olives, mozarella balls, eggs, and chicken thight. All topped with an oil/balsamic vinegar dressing.
Thursday: Mexican day repeat
Friday: Salad repeat

Gone are tortillas, bread, rice. Added in are more vegetables, and considerably more fat (pork, brisket/whole chicken, chicken thighs, salad dressing)

The change was surprisingly easy, with the hardest part being changing my perception of fat. And I noticed an immediate effect on how I felt at work; I was less tired in the afternoon and I stopped snacking totally (it did help that the snacks moved out of my room).

I switched out my sugar-based hydration drink with an electrolyte one (Nuun has bothered my stomach and I don’t like plain water on rides, so I’m using Hammer’s right now), and went on a few rides.

And hated it. I means, seriously hated it. I was not running out of energy per se, nor did I have much hunger, I just could not put out any power to save my life. I played around with food with different levels of carbs before and during (I still think a carb recovery drink makes a lot of sense after a long ride), and it has gotten better but I don’t think I have that part figured out yet. More about that later.

That was working well, so attacked my breakfast next, which was a bowl of granola with fruit. I added an egg (sometimes two) in the morning and reduced the granola, and that’s where I am right now. I honestly probably need a bit more fat in the morning but it is so hard to change ingrained habits. I also changed my dinner patterns a little, trying to focus more on the protein/fats and the vegetables and less on the carbs. Also still a work in progress.

Oh, and for snacks at home, I’m eating cheese, home-made jerky (time to make a new batch…), and a fair bit of nuts. I’ll have some popcorn now and then, and maybe some chips.

One thing to stress is that, with the exception of paying attention to my snacking habits at work – where I have a “drink a glass of something first before you eat” rule – I’ve put pretty much zero effort into limiting my portion sizes. I just eat what seems decent, and stop when I am done.

Results:

My expectations weren’t very high; I would be happy if I got down to my usual weight and felt a little better on the bike.

What happened is that in about 3.5 months, I lost a full 10 pounds of weight, clocking in at 168 lbs this week. My summer shorts fit nice and loose, and today I pulled on a pair of 501s that I hadn’t worn for about 9 months, and they fit fine.

On the bike, I’m feeling strong but I feel like I might be missing a bit of my top end. On the other hand, last week I took 33 seconds off of my PR on a 7 minute climb and some of my riding friends say I’m faster, so maybe it’s not as big as I think, or maybe it’s just different. I have definitely felt less tired after a few hours on the bike, and my stomach is much happier on the bike.

References:

For a lot of reasons, low-carb is still fairly controversial and a number of sources say that its not healthy and you’ll grow a third arm or something. Much of that is due to the evolution of thought around the role of cholesterol levels in the blood, from “cholesterol = horrible” to “HDL / LDL” to “hey maybe LDL as a measure doesn’t work, how about LDL-P”. Remember that dietary guidelines have a *huge* lag time behind current research, and there is lots of out of date advice out there.

If you read anything, read a copy of “Why we get fat” by Gary Taubes. He may not have the whole story from a biochemical standpoint, but his overall presentation is very good. If you like lots of details, read his “Good Calories, Bad Calories“, but be prepared to bone up on your biochemistry.

Joe Friel – author of many training books for endurance athletes – has written some very interesting blog posts about low carb. In “Aging – My Race Weight“, he details an experience very similar to mine. Read “Becoming a better fat burner“. And read the comments on these posts as well.

If you are looking for research into low carb and performance, there is a decent summary here. Note that most of the investigation has been purely around performance, and the results seem pretty clear that low carb does not increase performance and may take a bit off the top end (perhaps in some people, perhaps in all). What the studies miss are the things that I really care about; if I don’t have to eat as much on the ride, I avoid the stomach issues that I’ve had over the years, I (hope) that I will have less trouble with low energy during the ride, and the obvious performance advantages of less weight.

If you want more details and/or references, please let me know in the comments.

Jun 9, 2017 |

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The DeWaltCast – Portable Chromecast Audio

I have recently updated my custom late 1990s multi-room music system to the 2010s with the installation of a Chromecast audio in my main equipment system. It is exactly what it should be; easy to use, easy to understand, and cheap.

But I was noticing recently that while it works fine when I’m in our upstairs kitchen/dining/living room area, I don’t have the option elsewhere. What I really wanted was something I could take out to the back patio for a bit of background music. I could have bought any of a number of small chromecast audio speakers, but they all required AC power, and in my stupidity I did not add a convenient outlet near my patio when I redid the basement.

I did some research, but I couldn’t find what I wanted, which was a system that would run either on battery or AC and didn’t have rechargeable batteries. I did some searching and researching, thinking about how I might buy a small boombox system, but the ones I found all used disposable batteries. Then I finally remembered that I already own the basis of such a system.

A DeWalt DC011 Jobsite radio. It is rugged, has an aux input (and a charming CD case on one side), but the really nice part is that you can plug a DeWalt battery pack into the back and not only will it use the battery pack to play the radio, it will also charge it whenever you plug the radio into an AC outlet. And I just happen to have a couple of 9.6 volt packs from a DeWalt drill that I recently deprecated in favor of a nice brushless Makita that I picked up. My radio is much, much dustier than the picture but still works okay, except that the optical encoder for tuning doesn’t really work.

The sound is okay, and I’m not looking for high-fi for this application, so that is fine.

This should be a very simple project; I just need a source of 5 volts to run the chromecast and a place to put it.

Nicely, the front is held on with 8 screws on the front and 2 on the rear, and then it just pops off. I expected it to be cheaply made, but the design is really pretty nice; instead of soldered wires between the boards there are real connectors. The only thing I find curious is that the battery charger is a hefty 4″x5″x1.5″ fully enclosed metal box at the bottom of the case, which explains a bit why the radio is so heavy.

A little bit of snooping has me a bit confused; there are nice red and black wires from the battery to the main board, but where I would expect a power cable to run to the radio, I see a 5-conductor ribbon cable instead.

I pull the power supply board and start tracing the back.

The filter capacitor is very obvious, and it turn out the the 5-conductor ribbon cable *is* the power supply cable; 3 conductors for positive and 2 for negative. A quick check with the meter shows that there is is no power across the filter capacitor, which makes no sense at all.

I look a bit closer, and realize that the whole board has a nice clear conformal coating on it, another sign of the build quality. I scrape it off the leads of the filter capacitor, put my meter on it, and find about 10 volts when on battery power and 14 volts when running on AC. That is a goodly amount of voltage. I make a little power take-off harness and solder it to the terminals of the filter capacitor, and then reinstall the boards back in.

To get to 5 volts, I go searching. I want a buck converter that gives me 5 volts. The internets say I need around 250 mA, which pretty much any converter will give. There are hundreds of choices, but I settle on one from Xiny:

Like pretty much all of these, it’s made in China, but it appears to have reasonable build quality. I will just need to attach the wires, plug in the USB cable to the chromecast, and then run the audio to the aux.

While waiting for the buck converter, I hook up the Chromecast. I pull the aux jack out of the mount, plug in the cable, and temporarily plug the USB cable into power from the supplied wall wart. It fires up and starts working correctly. I hot glue it to the side of the case, and start to lay out the cables the way I want them…

Power

With that all sorted, all that is left was to hook up the power and close up the box.

I attached the incoming power to the screw terminal block on the left, tested that it really was giving me the 5V that I expected, and then plugged in the USB cord.

Finally, I tucked the power converter into a spot in the case and glued it in:

I plugged in the front panel & speakers, put it on the box, powered everything up, and started ‘casting to it. And sound came out the speakers.

*Most* of the sound was the sound of music. But there was a background of sound that was there even when the music was not playing. It was motorboating. There was a popping at about 8 Hz that would go for about a second, then stop for a few seconds, and then repeat.

Maybe it was the power, maybe it was the radio section of the radio interfering with the comcast. It would have been really smart of me to test all of this before I hot-glued it all into the case, but I pulled it all out and started eliminating causes. It is not the location of the chromecast or the short cable that hooks to the aux jack. It is not a ground loop. It pretty much has to be the 5v dc-dc converter.

I tried the usual hacky things. Capacitance on the unregulated input did nothing. Capacitance on the 5v output did nothing (well, it popped when I hooked it up, but nothing else). I put a scope on it, and could see the pulse train from the 5V output.

This was not entirely unexpected; one of the great things about our world is that there are lots of cheap components out there, but unfortunately this is also one of the problems.

I let it sit for a day, and then decided to try hooking the input to the battery instead of the power supply output to see if that made a difference. And the noise went away.

Unfortunately, the reason it went away was that instead of hooking the battery voltage – nominally 9 volts – to the input of the converter, I hooked it to the *output* of the converter, and pretty much immediately fried it. Worse, I had the chromecast plugged in at that point – because stupid – so I toasted the chromecast as well. I may try to pop it open and see if I can salvage it later; it seems to be cycling power on and off rather than just being dead.

Which led me to ordering another chromecast, and a different converter board. This time I got smart and found a board that people had been using to run a chromecast in their car.

In typical “explosion of search terms” fashion, this is the:

Yeeco DC-DC Buck Voltage Converter 10-24V 12V to 5V 1.5A Step-down Volt Transformer Stabilizer Voltage Regulator Module Vehicle Car Isolated Power Supply Switch Inverter Board with 5V USB Charger

The cool part of this device is that it’s actually an isolated design, which means there is no ground-to-ground connection between input and output.

In due time, the Yeeco showed – along with the new Chromecast audio – and I hooked everything up, and it worked very nicely. The components were stuffed in the case:

Then the case was closed up, and I was finished.

When in operation, the source electronics are silent – or at least more silent than the electronics on the amplifier. When you first turn it on, there is a short bit of noise as the Chromecast audio wakes up, which I’m calling a feature rather than a problem.

So, there you have it; for about $50 you can add ‘castability to an old boombox. Or, you can add another $40 if you don’t pick the right components and hook up the wires incorrectly.