We’re experiencing a server problem - this is a quick note to let you know that we’re working to get everything running again - please bear with us…
Update:
This turned out to be an upstream issue - i.e. pretty much out of our control. Thousands of other sites were affected as well - if you’re interested in the details, read here. Things seem to be working again now - our apologies for the inconvenience.
We’ve added a link to the trip page in the embed code that you can use to publish a map on your own site. See screenshot below - ‘Trip details’ will redirect you to the actual trip page.
A busy weekend is coming up here in Northern California: the Tour of the California Alps, aka the Death Ride, is starting tomorrow morning early in Markleeville. A bit later and a hundred miles from it the Downieville Classic mountain bike race will be on. Two great events to look forward to.
Last year’s Death Ride course (same as this year’s) is shown below. Check out the trip page for GPS or KML data of the ride!
It came a couple of weeks early for the National Holiday (July 21), and a couple days early for the Flemish Holiday (July 11), but the Tour de France today ended up being a Belgian party: Steegmans and Boonen 1 and 2, in a stage finishing in Gent (where yours truly was born).
Thanks to Versus (the former Outdoor Life Network) the Tour can be watched on TV here in California - at a safe distance from the crappy weather Northern Europe seems to be enduring now. And as usual, excellent blog coverage and link collections can be found on Ken Conley’s spare cycles.
Summer’s really here now and lots of great outdoor events are taking place or are on the agenda.
For instance, the Great Divide Race - the world’s longest non-stop mountain bike race - is currently ongoing. The premise is simple but brutal: the start is at the Canadian/US border, the finish at the US/Mexican border and in between are countless miles of dirt to be ridden, following a route snaking along the Continental Divide in the center of the Rocky Mountains. The first one to arrive wins - there are no stages, and in good mountain bike race tradition, the participants have to basically be entirely self-supported. An ‘armchair analysis’ of the event this year can be read on Dave Harris’ blog, an endurance mountain bike racer, who also has published a whole bunch of other very interesting articles on his site.
Or, how about the Climb to Kaiser race, a grueling 250km road bike race starting in Fresno in California’s Central Valley with as ‘highlight’ the ascent of Kaiser Pass in the Sierra’s at 9200ft - this took place last weekend and you can read a report on Matt Turgeon’s site.
Of course, other continents have their share of challenging events too: the Transalp mountain bike stage race in the European Alps and the Cristalp come to mind. And the upcoming Tour de Jotunheimen in Norway (430km) looks like an epic adventure of mind-altering proportion.
As for yours truly, I’m considering signing up for the E100 (tagline ‘mind over mountains’), but I’m not sure whether my mind will be up for that…
This blog may have been taking a break lately, but we haven’t: we were for instance busy checking out the awesome trails near Chamonix in the French Alps! If you want to know more, check out this trip, or go visit Ian Mill’s 10fifty.com site (he’s been guiding for years in Chamonix) - if you need to rent a bike over there, go to the Zero G shop, they have excellent stuff (like the almost-new Stumpjumper I rented).
Meanwhile, it’s great to see that a lot of MTBGuru users have been quite busy themselves:
- The guys and gals from AIDSlifecycle.org, riding their bikes from San Francisco to Los Angeles, raising funds for the good cause along the way.
- Slow Way Around: the ‘Slow Travelers’, a couple from the UK, are undertaking a great bike/camping adventure throughout Europe.
- Lots of new and exciting looking routes from all over the world are being posted (for instance, the Scottish Highlands, in and around Calgary, down under in Australia, in France, etc).
This is all very inspiring and great to see - and sometimes a bit overwhelming: so many great trails and routes to explore, so little time!
This has been overdue for a while, but we believe we’ve squashed enough bugs to finally ditch the beta! And that black font in the logo was getting old too.
So it got time for a new logo. The background image is still (roughly) the same - anyone recognizes the typical profile of the horizon (hint: it’s in the San Francisco Bay Area)?
It’s also exciting to see the rate of new trips being created increasing (trip id numbers are now over 1500), with some very interesting examples that we’ll feature in a later post - finally, new features are coming your way, too!
Here in the US it’s Bike to Work week - today is Bike to Work Day in the San Francisco Bay Area and I’d say all bike geeks should bring out their GPS so they can analyze their commute! At our workplace we had awards for the longest commute, the earliest arrival, the most creative ‘alternative’ way of commuting etc.
This may all sound silly to people in many other parts of the world, who commute most of the time by bike or public transportation, but I’ve seen these events get bigger and more successful each year here in the US, so I can only applaud the organizers - just making drivers here more aware of the existence of cyclists on its own is a great feat.
Even stronger I applaud the organizers of the Bike Away from Work bash, tonight in Gordon Biersch in downtown San Jose, where you can celebrate your bike commute and the end of your work day with the appropriate beverages!
Technorati Tags: cycling
When you’re creating or editing a trip, your browser shows you an ‘edit view’ of the trip page - its URL is reflecting this. Obviously only you (the trip owner) can see such ‘edit view’ and edit your trip, and this presented a bit of a problem: when people wanting to share their trip with others just copied and pasted the URL (of the ‘edit view’) from their browser’s address bar, the page that URL directed to wasn’t visible to others. The rather clunky solution we had for this was the ‘View Trip’ link in the sidebar, that toggles the page to a ‘view mode’ which is visible to others.
Simpler is better though, so we added a snippet at the bottom of the trip page (shown in both edit and view mode) which makes sharing the trip and trip page URL obvious (screenshot below). It also includes a link to post to your del.icio.us bookmarks (we may add other bookmarking services later). Thanks midtoad for the suggestion! Other suggestions are always welcome, at mtbguru@mtbguru.com.
Here’s the details on the bike leg of the long course, which I rode as part of a relay team, helping out a co-worker in need.
There’s nothing like the feeling of a three hour time trial with seemingly persistent headwinds and a couple of nasty grades towards the end kicking your ass! My respect for triathletes has even increased: the headwinds in combination with the no drafting rule (we’re time trialing after all!) made the first, supposedly easy, 20 miles a sufferfest; the following, rolling and mostly descending 20 miles were a welcome break but the sting was definitely in the end, with a succession of hills that are made to hurt. And then biking is only one third of the story…
Kudos to everyone who was racing - there were a (shorter) mountain bike course on Saturday, and an olympic distance course on Sunday as well. To any other GPS geeks who were out there: it would be great if the other legs and races would get uploaded!
The camping, expo and related festivities were a lot of fun, and made for a memorable weekend.
Technorati Tags: Wildflower triathlon
