MTBGuru blog

The topographic map type you can select on MTBGuru uses map data freely available and served up by Microsoft Research Maps (MSR Maps), the former Terraserver. The data originates from the USGS, is in the US public domain and the fact that it is readily available online is a great service by both the US government and MSR Maps. In fact, in most other countries there is hardly any free (both in the copyright and the political sense) topographic map data available.

The USGS data is recently now also accessible and served through an API by mapping company MyTopo.com. MyTopo.com has its own rendering of the map data, featuring generally nicer looking map tiles and using more recently updated data. So we thought it would be a good idea to offer it as a new map type on MTBGuru’s pages. You can check out the difference in the screenshots below; first, the MSR Maps/Terraserver map:

And this is the MyTopo version:

(Quite a bit easier on the eyes and the shading gives a nice perception of depth.)

Both MSR Topo and MyTopo will be available as a map type for the time being - but over time we may want to phase out the former altogether. The MyTopo maps come with a smaller number of zoom levels though but that doesn’t seem to be much of a drawback (it’s basically only the highly zoomed out levels which are missing).

Since we’re talking USGS data, topographic data for other countries generally still won’t be available - however, in this regard MyTopo does offer another fine improvement: it additionally offers map data from Canada (originating from NRCan):

Check out this graph:

The three traces (speed versus distance) originate from GPS tracks taken between the same point A and the same point B, on different occasions, using three different transportation modes: driving, cycling and public transit (bus+train).

It is pretty obvious which is which. You can even recognize and identify traffic light stops, sections of freeway, bus stops, bus versus train rides (and also - ahem - speeding).

Which makes one think that it should be possible to algorithmically deduce the trip type and nature from just the GPS data, with pretty good accuracy. There will be problems though (fast trail runner or mountain biker?)…

We’re already a month underway and I still need to figure out which races I want to do in 2010 - not that I really need to do any, but they’re sometimes too much fun to pass on. Alas, there is so much out there, and so little time - which I guess is a good thing. As I tend to forget the various calendar url’s and sites, below is a list of links, mostly for my own reference (hence a bit of a Norcal bias) - but they could be of general usefulness…

mtbcalendar.com
Very nice (Rails-based) community-based calendar site, covering a huge amount of events, pretty much everywhere.

norcalmtnbikeracing.blogspot.com
Excellent site focusing on Northern California events

www.prerace.com
Very useful US based race calendar site - nice thing is it also contains road races and e.g. xc ski events.

www2.mtbracenews.com/calendar
Another good one…

www.usmtb100.com
The National Ultra Endurance (NUE) series of 100 milers.

www.usacycling.org/mbnc
USA Cycling calendar

Also, the ultra racing forum on bikepacking.net is something to keep an eye on, there are some amazing rides being staged - the new, awesome and particulary grueling looking Arizona Trail race comes to mind!

My plan? To do a bunch of local events (e.g. Sea Otter, CCCX, Coe), a still-to-be-decided 100 miler, throw in some tri, xterra or road events for good measure and I’d love to do a bikepacking event as well, but we’ll see how far I get - so much to do, so little time…

In the previous post we mentioned that barometric altitude sensors will generally give you a more accurate measure for altitude and total elevation gains than a purely trilatered GPS elevation signal. That would be true if the barometric sensor is periodically or continuously recalibrated, and if you don’t happen to be hit by some crazy weather system (see Mike B’s comment below).

A question now is, by how much? The barometric sensor is accurate because it is possible to very precisely measure small differences in air pressure. Slow drift has the potential to mess things up - the reason for the recalibration-caveat - but on short time scales (and at a constant temperature) altitude changes can be measured as accurately as to a few feet. GPS trilateration without some kind of ‘augmentation’ can’t beat that, says Wikipedia; such augmentation schemes generally make use of ground stations to improve the GPS signal, and there’s a whole garden variety of them.

Rather than keep this a theoretical discussion, I was curious to see how well one of the most common GPS devices out there without barometer would perform: the iPhone. I don’t know whether the iPhone does GPS augmentation, but I can imagine it does, since the thing obviously does communicate to cell phone towers. And so I set out to collect some data and compare an iPhone 3GS with my Garmin Edge 705 (which uses a barometric sensor for elevation with automatic and continuous/periodic recalibration).

The iPhone doesn’t come with a native GPS application, but there are of course a gazillion of apps that could come in handy - I found MotionX GPS to be a very impressive GPS application, and one of the best ways on the iPhone to record tracks, statistics and display them on maps (for the record, we have no connection whatsoever to MotionX or its creators). You can download the raw track data off the phone, nicely wrapped in GPX format - of course, I don’t know how the raw iPhone data looks like and what kind of algorithms or filtering (if any) MotionX performs on these track data, so it should be understood in the discussion below that there may be MotionX idiosyncrasies at work rather than just iPhone 3GS ones.

The first data set was taken on a ride in Santa Teresa County park in San Jose - the route is an out and back on rocky, techy, yummy singletrack (featuring Stiles Ranch and Rocky Ridge, for the connoisseurs), with plenty of small up-and-downs typical for mountain bike rides. The blue (top) trace shows the Edge 705 data, the red (bottom) the iPhone data, taken simultaneously.

Totals:
Garmin Edge 705: elevation gain 1797 ft, loss 1786 ft
iPhone 3GS: elevation gain 1476 ft, loss 1536 ft

The iPhone data is not terrible and actually looks a bit better than I’d expected, but still deviates over 15% for the totals; and this for a short 10 mile ride. Since this is an out-and-back, the curves should look symmetrical - the Edge data is looking very nice indeed, the iPhone data drifts off quite a bit.

The graph below shows a subset of the same data, but plotted against time rather than distance (about a seven minute section).

The Edge has a setting to impose ‘adaptive’ data recording meaning some points (which do not differ much from the previous ones) are thrown out, to save memory; this setting was used here. The iPhone doesn’t have such feature, but it does have another interesting one: ‘accelerometric assisted GPS’ - used for this data set - another form of GPS ‘augmentation’, though I’m not sure how effective this is (another experiment would be required).
Interesting to note on the graph is that the sampling rate of the iPhone is generally a bit higher, except in large ‘voids’, where a lot of the signal is missing.

A second data set was taken, this time during a 17 mile car drive, in order to see if there was anything specific to the previous data - in particular, what effect the relatively low speed of mountain bike riding has.

Totals:
Garmin Edge 705: elevation gain 690 ft, loss 704 ft
iPhone 3GS: elevation gain 301 ft, loss 294 ft

The iPhone seems to deviate even more now (-50% on the totals, the curves differ more) even though the elevation profile of this track is generally ‘gentler’ - what is most different here in this track are the moving speeds (50 - 60 mph) so this probably says the GPS trilateration process isn’t fast enough and can’t keep up with the barometric sensor.

Of course, a third way of extracting altitude/elevation data not requiring any altitude measurement is to overlay the tracks after they’ve been acquired (longitude and latitude on the earth’s surface) on digital maps or digital elevation models (DEM’s), but that’s opening up another can of worms (interpolation, etc) - which is maybe something for another occasion.

Time to revisit a familiar topic: since a few months we’re using a different algorithm to extract elevation data from uploaded GPS tracks. Without going into too much mathematical detail (which can be quite entertaining though), it consists of a discrete exponential smoothing filter followed by simple thresholding. There are more refined and better filters possible (trigonometric bandpass filters etc), but it is simple, and with only two parameters (RC constant and threshold), it seems to work pretty well for the typical data that gets uploaded to the site.

This data is generally recorded by GPS devices, and usually of decent quality already in its raw form. The best devices combine barometric sensor readings with the trilatered elevation (z-coordinate) from the GPS satellites, the latter typically being used to compensate any slow drift of the barometric sensor (for instance due to weather changes). Nevertheless, even for raw data of such relatively high quality, calculated totals for altitude gain and loss during rides have been a source of doubt and confusion for many people. And this goes both ways: it’s being felt as being either inflated, or underestimated (though mostly the former).

Something people generally do tend to trust, are the totals the device itself displays at the end of the ride - perhaps because of the more tangible nature of the process? But that number is of course also the result of some internal (and unknown) filtering algorithm. Now the issue is mostly for mountain bike rides on rather chunky terrain (technical, many short ups-and-downs), or for very long mountain bike rides (100 milers e.g.), where small errors may accumulate to very large ones - for road rides and other ’smooth’ tracks there was never much deviation with the old algorithms or ground for discussion.

So back to filtering, which I’ll now try to explain using simple, non-engineering terms. You basically want to get rid of two things: spiky noise in the elevation signal - say points in the datastream that look like they jump up and down for no good reason (but do so because some tiny atmospheric disturbance is messing up the signal of the GPS satellite a bit, or a cosmic ray that happens to impact a chip in your device, etc) - and secondly, slow drift in the signal. To understand where the latter may come from: imagine you’re riding on perfectly flat terrain, which means your total elevation gain should be zero - the sensor data may however still show small changes in elevation from point to point (because of subtle changes in air pressure due to weather conditions that confuse the barometric sensor, or because the circuit in your device is rounding off the numerical values and does so with small errors, etc), and when you add this all up, it gives a non-zero total.

An electrical engineer will say he has both high frequent (the spiky stuff) and low frequent noise (the slow drift) in the signal and he’ll want to get rid of it using a ‘bandpass filter’. The ‘band’ is the part of the signal that is of interest, which can be considered a meaningful measure for elevation changes, and all the rest is noise that needs to be filtered away. Our current algorithm (the exponential smoothing, basically a low-pass filter, followed by thresholding, which is a simple form of high-pass filter) is an implementation of this idea - by no means the best or most refined - but it seems to work well enough: in my experience from the last months (many tracks from a Garmin Edge 305 and 705), the totals calculated by the site match up with the ‘trusted’ totals displayed on the unit itself, mostly within a few percent.

Of course, for units that generate lower quality data (older, less accurate GPS receivers, no barometric sensors, etc) the simple filtering will not magically crank out the right answer, but I figure those who really care about things like how much altitude they’ve gained will get a better device eventually!

Here is a link to the script we use to process the GPX files - if you can run Ruby on your system, you can try it out for your self. The two parameters in our filter (RC constant = 40ft and threshold = 3ft) received values we found to work well but they can of course be played with…

A happy 2010 and new decade to everyone, and we wish you keep the passion burning, for whatever it is you have some! 2009 for me was a ‘grand cru’ year for riding: I think I rode more than I was hoping to, explored new places, as well as many familiar ones - with towards the end of the year a little reminder not ever to take things for granted. And we got plenty of inspiration by fantastic trips and rides I see posted on the site all the time (Plymmer’s unparallelled Coe explorations or Skyline35’s awesome photos and trip reports come to mind). Here’s twelve pics, one a month, to hand a proper farewell to the year.

January offered plenty of evidence of why it’s great living in the golden state: you could chose to go snowshoe or ski in the Sierras with your sweetheart, or ride some trails with her in balmy and sunny conditions.

February was wet at times, but that’s what makes the abundance of rocky creek crossings and streams in Henry Coe interesting.

Spring! That means: more Coe riding - we were able to enjoy and gawk at a spectacular display of wildflowers in March… and of course the riding rocks.

April is Fort Ord and Sea Otter classic time. I love this annual bike ‘circus’, and though I don’t venture out to the Fort that often, each time I look at the trails I see a lot worth loving!

My Moab-pilgrimage happened in May this year… I need this place, for spiritual renewal, or something. Or it could be for the incredible riding experiences, vistas, vibes, the overwhelming light and sound spectacle of a thundering desert storm (I hit quite a few of those this time around), and finally fulfill an old promise/resolution: ride the slickrock with my dad. Unfortunately in May there was also an immense loss - I didn’t know Anthony personally but had learned about Moab and was ‘primed’ to it, and many other places he visited and rode, through his lens.

I met new and awesome people in June - that’s what trail work days are really good for. Take Paul for instance, who devised this fantastic ‘devious’ Coe epic that I thoroughly enjoyed. The high lasted for days after!

Summer time - this means Tahoe riding season, and the chunky granite goodness that comes with it. Magical moments in July, and we were delighted with the new (to us) stuff we were able to discover…

In August I tackled one of the challenges I set myself for the year: do a ‘hard’ (i.e. with ‘technical’ course) 100 mile endurance race. It was harder than I imagined and I found myself in strange places (physically and mentally), but that’s of course what makes it interesting and worthwile. Oh and the high afterwards, it lasts for weeks!

(photo credit: anonymous friendly trail runner from Bend)

The sunny season is winding down, summer travels are being wrapped up: this means Coe - scorched by the long hot days - comes back in my sight. I had signed up for a local race in September - the first one held here in ages - and to my own surprise won the sport class. Yay to yet another new experience, though I thought I’d gotten too old for that; I still think the rest of the field probably took a wrong turn somewhere…

(photo credit on this one: sir C. Kortman)

October brought some new and needed rain to the Bay Area, enough to fill up China Hole in Coe and make it a crystal clear refuge from the occasional Indian summer heat…

A beautiful fall day in November was lit up by some improvised trail work and fun…

Finally, December brought some injury and illness, enough to make me fully appreciate all the good days. And there were plenty this month too, in very magic places…

Cheers, and here’s to 2010, and the ‘tens’ (’noughties’ sounded akward, seems it’s not improving much yet)!

So far I’ve never quite experienced mechanical failure of catastrophic nature on the trail - good, I’ve had my share of flats, torn sidewalls, broken chains, vaporized brake pads, bent rotors, minor crash damage and a pretzeled wheel (but that was in college and there were two of us on the same bike). But today my lucky streak kind of ended.

The day after our onerous excursion in Coe, I found myself in south San Jose with some hours to spend before the sun would go down, and I was thinking - what better recovery ride from Coe than a nice short sunset ride in Coe? So I headed to Hunting Hollow with the Red Rocket (my Salsa) and had just started to pick up some speed on Coyote Creek road, as I experienced some trouble with the rear shifter; no worries, a few quick shifts up and down to jog the chain in place I thought but all of a sudden the chain locked up; this was accompanied by a loud crunching sound, after which my drivetrain halted driving anything… turns out half of the rear derailer cage had sheared off and disintegrated, due to what looked like some twig or stick getting caught up in the cassette and/or pulley wheel (and me greatly exceeding the force that one should put on the chain in such unfortunate conditions).

Even worse, derailer parts had caught, scratched up and damaged a few spokes, and my Salsa derailer hanger thingie was bent beyond hope. Those spokes are made out of polyphenylene bensobisoxazole fibers (aka plastic wires), and I was impressed by how well they held up - the wheel was still perfectly true and certainly useable, but I didn’t care much for the only idea that could save my ride today: trying to make a temporary singlespeed out of my Salsa. Reasons for this: (a) this is Coe, the place is just not ment for singlespeeding, (b) I was only a few hundred yards from the parking lot, and (c) I didn’t have a chain tool with me.

And thus was my sunset ‘ride’ over. After I’d completed the most pointless drive I’ve done in recent history and gotten back home, I decided to seek opportunity out of this unwanted change, and improve the bike’s bling a bit further: say hi to this Redwin Red cutie.

A power sensor has always been on my gadget wish list, as a bona fide bike geek should. However, the prohibitive cost of such things and their non-portability has always kept it in quarantine there. Portability may not matter to some but it does a lot to me as I’d love to experiment with singlespeed vs geared, 26 vs 29, road vs mtb etc -and swapping wheels or crankset doesn’t really work here. Of course, the main requirements are accuracy and consistency - this means so far I’ve been stuck with the - non-portable - crank or hub option. I could give the iBike the benefit of the doubt (a device that basically measures wind speed and inclination and hence the power demand, in order to estimate the power put in), but it just doesn’t cut it for me (it may be great in conjunction with a second power sensor on the bike though).

What would work well for me is a sensor that can be either mounted (a) in the shoe (b) on the cleat or (c) in the pedal. And which produces an accurate and consistent signal, of course. I’ve been thinking about this for a long time and was about to embed some piezoresistors in a shoe or cleat myself, but it now seems a very promising effort is underway - and close to market. In fact, a number of such approaches have been tried out or are being developed; the late Microsport Technologies tried a sensor integrated in a shoe, the Brimm Brothers are working on a cleat sensor, but the Metrigear Vector, presented at the latest Interbike, looks now to be the first one to launch. It seems to be based on silicon piezoresistors (which I always thought would be better than traditional strain gauges, since they’re more sensitive and you can more easily measure the different components of the force vector), in conjunction with an accelerometer to measure cadence/crank position (the latter is an absolute requirement for pedal/cleat/shoe based sensors), and is integrated in the spindle of the pedals. Bikes and MEMS, right in my backyard!

Metrigear is also a local (to me) startup, and led by a guy that climbs Kennedy in 30 minutes flat - though he used a crossbike ; ) - so they must be serious about their cycling! The device is ANT+ compatible, so it will work with e.g. a Garmin 705 as head unit, it will come initially as a modified set of Speedplay pedals (mainly for road) but is promised to become available in different types later. Dan Connelly (from low key hillclimb fame) is doing a nice job in discussing the device in more depth and there is lots of chatter and talk about this on the Wattage Google/usenet group. There are still many questions, about the battery, durability, sealing, signal processing and availability etc but I’m for sure hoping this works as well as advertized!

My last few rides have been a bit different from the usual routine, to say the least.

First, the Mont Ventoux, or: le Geant de la Provence, aka de Kale Berg. What more is there to say about it? It rises 5200 ft straight out of the valley in 13 miles, it’s both a pro and amateur cyclist magnet, it has plenty of history (from Petrarca to Tom Simpson), the first part of the climb features the hot, humid, bug-infested forest and then follows the often cold, wind swept moonscape higher up…

I was staying nearby this big boy on a family vacation, so the temptation was obvious – a few weeks ago the riders in the Tour had battled it out here and the images of the brutal climb were still fresh in my mind. I wanted to do it together with my dad, but after some consideration it was clear this was a bit ambitious for his current level of training (and it’s not a good place to risk your health). So he decided to play support team car for me in the beginning and do the ride starting from Chalet Reynard on his mtb.

The first few miles are very pleasant, a nice road through vineyards with a mild grade. Then, after a tight corner, the road turns into the feared forest, and features a steep, relentless grade with long, demoralizingly straight stretches. It feels the climbing goes on forever but when the grade flattens a bit (meaning 6-7% instead of 9-10%), you know you’re getting close to the Chalet Reynard. This relative ‘plateau’ offers a nice breather to recover before the last couple grueling miles are served up. We were lucky in that it was a nice, clear day without much wind, so at the Chalet, which is located at the treeline, the weather conditions were near-perfect. And so the final push to the summit ensued, passing the Simpson memorial and with the last switchbacked corner dishing out the steepest grade of the day – I finished in just under 1 hour 40 minutes (starting from Bedoin).

One of the fun things (for those who prefer to do their suffering with others): you won’t be alone; I actually sometimes felt to be in an amateur event or race, so many cyclists are doing this any given day. There were even photographer dudes taking shots of you with their SLR’s that you can order online, and this on a random tuesday afternoon in mid-september.

After summitting I rode down a bit to hook up with my dad and joined him up again on those last couple miles of the climb. The descent into Bedoin was quite a blast and a nice reward.

A few days later, it was time to head home, though I had a slight detour in mind; I wanted to meet up with my former mtb- and ski-buddy Markus who now lives in Switzerland. In a former life, we both roamed the trails in the Bay Area and surroundings with the Mountainbike Schweinehunde. The bilingual town of Biel/Bienne in the Swiss Jura would be the rendez-vous point, and he had round up a few friends to explore and ride some of the best local trails.

Our host Patrick, living in Biel/Bienne, guided us to the Col de Chasseral and the namesake summit, one of the highest points of the Swiss Jura, starting by bike from his place. The climb was long but of a gentle grade, mostly on fireroad/doubletrack and paved road.

On clear days the Chasseral gives you fantastic panorama’s of pretty much the entire Swiss (and French) Alps. Not so today, as we were greeted by strong winds and sweeping clouds on the summit – we hid for the cold in the chalet and had some hot drinks and food.

The descent, following the ridgeline of the Jura, was memorable: a very technical, rocky upper section, followed by a mix of rocky double- and singletrack, here and there very tight, fun and technical. We were fortunate to have our host, guiding us around through the maze of trails that exist here, and serving us the best bits. A few short climbs and rolling sections later, it was time for the final descent back into Biel: a blast of a trail hugging tall cliffs on two sides at some spots – hence its nickname, Geiss Rucken (sp?) – or the ‘goat’s back’ – and ridiculously tight switchbacks! Fun, entertaining, challenging, and the best excuse for having a couple of beers with friends, what more does one need from a ride?

Then, after the long trek back to the Bay Area, I found out about a local mountain bike race. And this in my most favorite local place to ride, Henry Coe. No way I could pass on this, if only to do my bit to help draw attention and funds to this awesome place, which is still under threat of closure due to the California state budget woes. My jet lag actually helped me to appear fresh at the start line, and you can read here how things went down (pretty well, in fact)… now, a few days later it seems that there finally is some good news for the parks - though I’m not going to underestimate the capability of myopic politicians to wreck things and will hold my breath some more before crying victory.

Since quite a while I’ve been looking for a good excuse to check out the riding and fabled trail systems at our neighbours in the north - Oregon.

Enter the inaugural High Cascades 100, which had a very appealing premise: one huge loop, pretty much all singletrack. Ok, that one loop actually included two sub-loops (Swampy Lakes), but few would whine about that, since it was supposed to be a very fun sub-loop.

We were greeted by a brisky 34 degrees at 6.15 in the morning on the Wanoga parking lot, hence I put on a jacket; and decided last minute to ditch the small camelback and go with bottles, as the forecast predicted high seventies max and we’d pass aid stations every 20 miles or so. From the start, I mainly remember a huge dust cloud and riding the first mile or two pretty much blind, just following the wheel(s) right in front of me. A fine way to wake up and get the adrenaline going! It must have been quite dry here lately, as sand and dust proved to be a bit of a constant today. More about that soon!

The first singletrack descent (near the Mount Bachelor parking lot), and I decided to take a soil sample. Not sure what exactly happened, but having clumsily overcooked a corner sounds plausible. No harm done though, except to my stem clamp, which apparently felt like it needed to slip a few degrees to the left to absorb the impact. I was too hasty (or lazy) to get my multitool out of the crevasses of my seat bag and rode on with a slightly tilted handlebar until I met a volunteer – with tool in hand – who happily adjusted it for me.

More downhill singletrack then, leading to the aptly named Lava Lake. Race promotor Mike Ripley had promised sharp lava rocks and he did deliver. In eager anticipation, I had inflated my tires to a rather high pressure, which did prevent me from flatting indeed, but proved to be not quite the best choice in the traction department. And did I mention there was sand, and lots of it? It took me quite a while to get the hang of this terrain but the descent to Lava Lake went by uneventfully (a good thing) and was a lot of fun – I didn’t waste too much time at the first aid station, but about a mile out I noticed my right shoe cleat had been unthreading itself and was about to come off. These sort of things never happen, except during races. So I ended up having to dig up that multitool after all.

The first major climb – singletrack alternating with rugged doubletrack, technical in spots and sandy on many others. I felt pretty strong at this point and went out hard, though I would have probably been better off pacing myself better. This climb led us to Kwohl Butte, from which we would descend along a four mile section of what Mike Ripley had called ‘moving lava’. My visualization of red glowing molten earth sucking up unsuspecting mountain bikers into a tectonic abyss luckily didn’t prove to be entirely accurate; steep sandy stretches littered by tons of loose jagged black rocks turned out to be more to Mikes point. It was tough going, bouncing all over the place on the boulders, and constantly being on the brink of wiping out in the sandy corners, but I actually quite enjoyed this section of trail. I had decided to use a Cane Creek suspension seatpost on my hardtail, and here I was very glad I had done so.

The first real pain of the day came to me on the connector to the Swampy Lakes area – a three mile or so slog climbing through at times steep sandy hills. It hardly registers on the elevation profile, but it felt pretty bad. Next up was the Swampy aid station, and I must have done something wrong there, since I felt terrible during my first 20 mile long Swampy loop that ensued. Hydration-wise I was doing quite well, so it must have been food: maybe that peanut butter sandwich didn’t go in well? I got passed by many here as I was limping along. The 1500 foot climb out felt like double that, but eventually I dragged myself back into the aid station.

There I noticed what had been missing before: banana’s! I had been getting sick of my diet of overly sweet gels, blocks and energy drinks, but I didn’t have trouble devouring the banana’s so I stuffed some more in my jersey pockets for the road. Was it the banana’s or a placebo effect, I didn’t care, but my second Swampy Lakes run went by in a blur, and I felt great – on the descent I was fully in the zone and passed a few folks, and then I cleaned the entire climb. At mile 80, I knew it was in the bag. But we weren’t quite there yet…

A quick ripping descent and then a few miles of dirt road connector back to Wanoga would lead to the final ten miles, a loop on Funner and Tiddlywinks trails. Unfortunately, this dirt road connector featured a couple of sandy hills that wouldn’t have looked bad in that Dune movie. When finally the Wanoga station came in sight I was happy to tackle Funner and get things over with. My happiness wore off quickly as I was pondering the prospect of the final 3 mile, 1000ft climb on Tiddlywinks, but in the meantime I managed to enjoy and clean most of Funner’s drops and rocks. The final four miles were a house of pain for me – I probably was exceeding my maximum daily dosage of suffering – but like all things would also end, and soon enough the finish line was looming. Hurray and the finisher’s growler was mine!

The volunteers here were awesome, the event was very well run, a great course and the area and trails well worth the trek from Cali…