Category: Off-season

  • Clingman’s Dome 2x plus Waterrock Knob

    Today’s ride may very well have been my toughest road ride ever (last week’s 9 hour mountain bike race at Oak Mountain may have been a smidge tougher). I’ve done rides that were much longer with twice the total climbing, but this one was particularly difficult because I was trying to go for some really…

  • Gatlinburg Day 1

    Do you know how much I love riding in the true mountains? We got in last night at 11:45PM, and I knew that my 700x23c racing tires would be no match for potentially slick icy roads up here so I spent another 30 minutes changing both tires and putting on some good 700x25c all-weather tires…

  • Lover’s Leap, Bluff Park, Alabama

    Beautiful overcast fall day today for my commute home from work. I wanted to head up to Bluff Park instead of my normal commute through Vestavia Hills. A little more than an hour into my ride, I found myself exploring the Lover’s Leap rocks up in Bluff Park with the cool inscription shown below (and…

  • End of the season maps

    Lots of fun maps from the season. All of these maps cover routes between November 1, 2010 and October 30, 2011. Quick summary- Flying: 3,900 mi. Driving: 17,300 mi. Biking: 17,600 mi. Total: 38,800 mi. Zoomed in view of the Birmingham routes – Hoover, Vestavia, Homewood Biking near Birmingham Biking in Alabama from Birmingham north…

  • End of the Season Statistics and THANKS

    First, a huge thank you to everyone in the cycling community and to all who have been following my racing this year. I’ll expand this thank you at the end of the post, but I wanted to thank everyone up front first. These statistics all run from November 1, 2010 until October 30, 2011 –…

  • The Double Oak Way 1500 (aka fun in the off-season)

    The Double Oak Way 1500ft climb (medium version)Huge version (5.9MB) 3D map of the complete Double Oak Way 1500ft climb The Double Oak Way climb has been a favorite of mine since I first rode it a couple years ago after somebody at Tuesday Worlds mentioned that they had rode their motorcycle up it the…

  • Gatlinburg to Clingman’s Dome

    How is that for a scenic view and ride profile? It took just over two hours to do the 22 mile climb out of Gatlinburg up to the Clingman’s Dome parking lot – and then only 42 minutes to make it all the way back down! That works out to an average speed of 11mph…

  • Dauphin Island Ride

    Yesterday I took two of my programming students to the University of South Alabama just west of Mobile for a programming competition. The competition involves a 5-hour session where we cannot make any contact at all with the students. What is a biking professor to do for those 5 hours? Well, let’s see, I’ll go…

  • Fall Commute

    I biked home from work early today to make it ahead of the rain. Even though the lighting wasn’t good, the fall colors were absolutely amazing. I had my old camera with me and got to do one of my favorite things to do while riding a bike — taking pictures! These pictures below are…

  • Fall Commute

    I biked home from work early today to make it ahead of the rain. Even though the lighting wasn’t good, the fall colors were absolutely amazing. I had my old camera with me and got to do one of my favorite things to do while riding a bike — taking pictures! These pictures below are…