Bike Room

I’m remodeling the house I’ve lived in for the last 15 years or so, and with this comes the opportunity to revisit the bike room.  I’ve ceded most control over the decorating decisions for the upper floors to my lovely wife, with the understanding that the decisions in the basement and garage are largely mine.  The theme for the garage is bike room, and I’ve decided to paint it with a theme of some of my favorite and most historic cycling team jerseys.  This is a work in progress, as I’ve now painted it with red, yellow, and celeste.  But I’m super excited by it, and I think it’s coming along nicely.

In fact, I have been so excited by this little part of my project that I've lost sleep on several nights just thinking about what jerseys to include, layout, etc.

I'm planning on including the following:
- Tour de France Yellow and Pois Rouge
- World Champs Stripes around the room at the post in the wall shown above
Around the Walls:
- Coppi Bianchi
- Merckx Molteni and Faema (he gets two)
- LeMond La Vie Claire
- Hampsten 7-Eleven
- Badger Renault
Rest of the ceiling this side of WC stripes:
- Giro Pink

Core Routine

Here's a link to a good core routine.

Orthostatic Heart Rate

I read somewhere at some point about using the difference between resting morning and standing heart rates to assess fatigue level.  Today, I finally found out that it's called Orthostatic Heart Rate, and also found a nice little article explaining it.

I use the following protocol:

Upon waking up, remain lying down, take my resting pulse for 30 seconds.  Stand up using the minimum energy required and take my standing pulse for another 30 seconds.  The difference between these will be my orthostatic rate.

Bike Infrastructure study on Copenhagen

A great Bike Infrastructure study on Copenhagen with Data Visualizations on the Guardian recently came out here.

A Couple of Books for My List

Rough Stuff - Cycling in the Alps

The Comeback - The Greg LeMond Story

North Cascades Highway 2018

My annual pilgrimage was successful this year.  I was able to set some personal bests on the way up, and the road was clear for about 22 miles.

Looking down the Skagit river as it wends its way towards Puget Sound.

Back down the plowed highway.

Bike and snowplow.  The last little bit up was only as wide as this plow - about 8 feet.

I kind of wished I had dragged cross country skis up with me.

As it turns out, the DOT ended up connecting the plowed sections the following week, and I got up there for the last weekend it was available.  

Spring and the North Cascades Highway

Here is a handy link to the WA DOT Twitter where they post updates on progress of the plowing of Highway 20.