MTBGuru blog

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

The Wildflower is for triathlon what the Sea Otter Classic is for cycling: one of the largest events of their kind in the US (and world) and to some extent the non-official opening of the (summer) season.

We’re heading off down south - the event takes place in the scenic and sparsely populated area around Lake San Antonio in Central California - and you can expect to see (at least) the cycling leg published on MTBGuru soon!

Last year’s transition zone, after the race

Technorati Tags: Wildflower triathlon

Up until now, when you created a trip on MTBGuru, there were two different default privacy settings in use:

• When you had created the trip using ‘Add a Trip‘ in the sidepanel, the trip was by default ‘Public’, with comments disabled.




• When you had created the trip using ‘Upload GPS Data‘, or out of one of your GPS files in ‘My GPS Files’, the trip was by default ‘Private’.

The thinking behind this was that when uploading straight GPS files, the user’s privacy would be better served by keeping the default setting of the resulting trip and the data private; this as opposed to ‘Add a trip’ where by default the user would ‘publish’ or add the trip to the public MTBGuru trip base.

On the other hand this was all quite confusing, so we just implemented a new and better way of tackling this:

• When you now create a trip using ‘Upload GPS Data’, instead of the ‘Create Trip’ button after the upload you will be presented with two ‘Create Trip’ choices: [Public] or [Private] (see screenshot below). As you need to select one of either to create the trip, there is no need anymore for a ‘default setting’.







• Creating a trip using ‘Add a Trip’ remains unchanged and still results in a default ‘Public’ setting; comments are enabled by default now as well (screenshot below).

Of course, afterwards you can still change trip settings on the fly, as before.

And if you want to switch a whole set of your trips at once from Private to Public or vice versa, you can make use of the ‘Choose Action’ feature and the checkboxes on ‘My Trips’, as was previously possible as well (screenshot below).

It looks like it’s the month of Henry Coe: this weekend is the official Backcountry Weekend, in a couple of weeks the opening of the new entrance at Dowdy Ranch will be celebrated during a ROMP/MTBR/IMBA Coe Epic weekend on May 12-13, and Tom Stienstra from the San Francisco Chronicle recently wrote a column about Coe and the opening of Dowdy Ranch.

Henry Coe State Park is the Bay Area’s backyard wilderness and it’s a dream of a mountain bike destination - at least if you’re the type that likes to throw in a bit of adventure in your bike rides. The Backcountry Weekend is sold out (due to overwhelming interest from both hikers and bikers, the park set up a lottery and ticket system, to limit the amount of campers in the Orestimba wilderness area), but the ROMP/MTBR event on May 12/13 is open to everyone.

Thanks much to ROMP and IMBA for the great work they’ve done in the park, building trails and tirelessly campaigning for access here and elsewhere - please support these organizations!

Technorati Tags: Henry Coe, mountain biking

Last friday I got this message from a bike friend:

He was planning on doing a ride with a few folks in Henry Coe State Park the next day, and the 10k from the picture was referring to *10000 feet of climbing*.

Henry Coe is notorious for its steep trails, and 10k feet of climbing in over 40 miles sounded like… a good challenge, though of the rather nightmarish kind.

It turned out to be one of the greatest and toughest rides I’ve ever done - the Durango race was perhaps a bit harder but that was mainly because of the weather conditions and altitude. Some of the climbing on our ‘Kitten ride’ was brutal and relentless and we had to hike-a-bike more than we’d hoped for. A lot of the downhill on the other hand was fantastic and my Yeti was great on this - though a bit heavy and with a non-ideal gearing for the steep climbs (largest cog in the back only 32 teeth), it was coasting like a dream on the rollers and felt awesome on the fast, winding descents. The two thoughest climbs, Mac’s Corral and Vasquez, felt like they would never end though.

As per Jeff, a very nice stretch of the legs indeed!

Route below, and here are links to the trip page, to a thread on MTBR discussing this ride, and to a gallery of pictures including ones not found elsewhere.

Henry Coe by the way is listed as one of IMBA’s ‘epic ride’ destinations.

(This is a bit of a cross-post from my personal blog.)

“There’s no doubt: it’s a drought”, says the San Jose Mercury News, but the cold monsoon that poured down Laguna Seca today around noon felt like it wanted to violently contest that point. Luckily for us cross country mountain bike racers, the weather during the early morning hours was near-perfect for racing: a few light sprinkles at the start, partly cloudy later on, with a race course in excellent, fast shape. The light rain during the previous night may have taken out the sting of the sandy sections, as they appeared less severe than in previous years.

When the downpour started, we were already enjoying post-ride goodies and could easily find shelter in the nearest booth (Titus in my case), a good occasion to check out for instance the new Titus El Guapo up close and personal.

Others were not so lucky though: the road race supposedly was halted, and other events had to be postponed or cancelled. And the riders tomorrow will probably witness the return of the mud bogs (non-existent today).

The cross country race today was a whole lot of fun, and below is a caption of the MTBGuru trip page I just created.

18.8 miles and 2900 feet of hills and thrills!

New this year are the BMX races and the Super D race (sort of a cross-over between downhill and cross-country mtb). And tonight there is an ‘adventure race’, mashing up mountain biking, kayaking, trail running and orienteering.

We’ll be there tomorrow morning - early, way too early!

Have fun everyone, and we’re hoping the weather will be better than what is shown here!