I rode the High Pass Challenge yesterday. This is one of the toughest rides organized by Cascade.org, with the ride starting from Packwood (WA), and going upto Windy Ridge, a mere four miles away from the crater at Mt St Helens, with views of Mt Rainier and Mt Adams (?) along the way.

The ride is approximately 112 miles long, with a cumulative climb of over 7500ft. It was a killer. I bet there were a number of riders finishing this in under 6 hours. But I took 8 and half hours and survived.

I have another exciting milestone to announce for Cyclogz. After several hours of marathon coding over the last few days, I added automatic geotagging support for Flickr photos. Now, I can see my ride photos with the rest of the ride data, conveniently on a map. With this update, geotagging is a simple process of letting Cyclogz know the rider’s Flickr ID. Cyclogz will search the rider’s photos, geotag them automatically, and generate a slide show. At this time, I am not saving the geotagging data back to Flickr, but I will get to that soon.

Here is an example

STP Day 2 – Slide show

When I got up this morning, my legs were not feeling so well, and so I expected a slower finish today. For the first twenty miles, I managed a paltry 14.5 mph average. But thanks to a Red Bull, and a few yummy slices of Banana Bread at the aid station in Vader (WA), helped improve the average so much that, at the end of 6 hours and 1 minute, I crossed 100 miles – the best time for a century ride for me so far. However, due to frequent stopping during the last 5 miles, the average fell back to 16.45mph.

It took 6 hours 23 minutes to complete the 105 mile long ride today.

There were more rolling hills today than yesterday – but no sustained climbs. As a result, I also managed to complete 100,000 ft of vertical climb for 2008.

With 9500 other riders, from Seattle to Centralia (WA), 100 miles, 6 hours 13 minutes ride time, 7 hours 30 minutes elapsed time.

This is my fastest (and flattest) century ever. My previous century a month ago (Flying Wheels Century) took an hour more, but it also involved more climb.

Getting ready for tomorrow’s ride from Centralia to Portland.

With today’s Cayuse Pass and Chinook Pass ride, I finished riding 1000 miles in exactly two months. This involved 32 rides, 56000ft of climb over 77 hours on the saddle (not exactly happy with the saddle time). Here is a screen shot from my ride diary at Cyclogz.

Here are some of the most interesting rides done in this state so far.

Steven’s Pass: On May 31, 79 miles, 4972 ft climb. From Startup to the Steven’s Pass and back, along Highway 2.

Blewett Pass: On June 8, 54 miles, 2879 ft climb. From Cle Elum to the pass and back.

Cayuse Pass and Chinook Pass Pass: On July 4, 64 miles, 4343 climb. From near Federation Park to the Chinook Pass and back, along route 410.

Flying Wheels Summer Century 2008: On June 14, 101 miles, 4164 ft climb

Issaquah to Monroe: On May 25, 66 miles, 2186 ft climb, mostly along route 203.

Mt Adams Country Bicycle Tour: On June 28, 58 miles, 5300 ft climb, near Trout Lake.

So far, I like the quality of cycling here. There are a lots of hills, in fact, I can’t get pure flat rides near where I live. There are few long climbs like the above. Rain does bother sometimes and I may need to invest in another rugged bike to ride on wet roads. On the plus side, I don’t need to worry about too much heat.

I needed to remind myself this morning that I should not stop getting out even if there is a 40% chance rain in the forecast. When I started from home this week, there was a slight and annoying drizzle, but I decided to ignore it and give it a try. It turned out to be great for most of the ride today.

I found about Cayuse pass and Chinook pass along route 410 a couple of days ago as I was searching the list of mountain passes in the state of Washington. Since I moved here a couple of months ago, I already tried Steven’s Pass, and Blewett Pass. I wanted to get some more miles before the STP next weekend.

Here is the ride profile from Cyclogz.

I started this ride about a mile before the Federation State Park along route 410. This is approximately 13 miles after leaving Enumclaw, WA. When I started riding, there was a slight drizzle, but it faded away in a few miles. From here I rode along 410 all the way up to the intersection of routes 123 and 410. Cayuse Pass is at this intersection, at approximately 4700ft. I then took a left and continued along 410 till the Chinook Pass, at approximately 5400ft.

From the Federation State Park till about mile 21, the climb was very gradual – mostly under 4%. After crossing the Mt Rainier National Park, the climb got a bit steeper – ranging from 6-8%. Along the way, the views of Mt Rainer were fantastic.

The weather patterns along the route were very interesting. Up until 27 miles, it was cloudy to partially sunny. From then onwards it became very very foggy with poor visibility. I could barely see 50-100 ft ahead of me, and my green vest kept me visible. From there, the fog continued all the way to the Chinook Pass, with a couple of Sun breaks in the middle. For the last 3 miles, the fog was so intense that I did not have a sense of direction or the switchbacks that I did climb. The slow levels along the road also increased. There was enough snow to put on snowshoes on the side trails.

The decent was great, and I could manage a modest 35mph for the first few miles. The descent tapered off after about mile 42. From there I had to start pedaling again. For about 10 miles during the descent, I got caught up in rain again, this time it was more intense.

Route 410 has wide-enough shoulder for biking. As far as water/food stops are concerned, Green River was the last place to buy things. There was a grocery store and a few coffee places in Green River. After that there were no stores along the way. There were a couple of resorts, which may have stores to buy water and energy food.

It is going to be a busy cycling season for me this year. After moving to WA nearly 10 days ago, I signed up for a membership in the Cacade Bicycling Club and several rides being organized by Cascade. The first one is the Flying Weels Summer Century on June 14. Then a month later, there is a double century from Seattle to Portland that I am planning to do in two days. Then there is the High Pass Challenge in September. I am trying to rope in Sanjay for the last one. And may be, may be, I can squeeze in Yaquina Wheels century in August. Let’s see.

With the weather being a bit cooler than it was last week, I decided to ride up Mt Hamilton today, from east to west, starting from Livermore. From downtown Livermore, it is a about 49 miles to the summit (at about 4300 ft), which makes it tougher to climb from this side. What is more challenging is that, the final climb of about 2000ft happens in just about six miles (i.e. from mile 43). These six miles are grueling, with an average 9-10% grade, and I could not average more than 4 miles/hour during this segment. My GPS puts the cumulative ascent at 6500ft, although my legs are trying to make me believe that it is much more than that.

Here are the ride details from Cyclogz.com.

And, here are some pictures I took along the way.

All the maps and profiles on Cyclogz are now embeddable. Here is, e.g. the Mt Evan’s climb I did last year.

No more screenshots from Garmin Training Center.

My Cyclogz.com (alpha) went live today. The site was near-launch ready about a week ago, but I could not announce it due to performance issues I had with my shared hosting account at DreamHost. At the last minute, I cancelled my account with DreamHost and went with Slicehost, and I am very pleased with my choice so far.

First things first. DreamHost is a great choice to get started and try out things. I opened an account with them nearly two months ago. I had a chance to deploy Cyclogz.com to realize how performance intensive Cyclogz is. Cyclogz gets its data from GPS devices, and this data tends to be voluminous. It is also JavaScript heavy since most of the processing happens on the client side, and it needs to load lots of JavaScript from the server. The performance constraints of the DreamHost’s shared account made me rewrite several features and kept me continually tune those for speed. At the end, I ran out of any more ideas to speed up things. I did sign up for a DreamHost PS account, but the waiting list to get one is too long (4+ weeks as of yesterday), and so I decided to look elsewhere.

What I liked most about DreamHost was their control panel, and the number of apps that I could install through the control panel with a single click. What I hated most was the performance, and their FastCGI model for Ruby on Rails. It was slow, with pages taking upto a minute to download. That’s when I signed for a 257MB/257MHz PS account. Two days ago, DreamHost support told me that I won’t get a PS account for at least a month as they are waiting for new hardware. That’s when I decided to look elsewhere. I went with Slicehost.

Slicehost surprised me. Initially I was reluctant to try it since I did not want to spend my time setting up everything on a barebones Linux slice. Following the instructions at the Slicehost wiki, I spent last night setting up Apache2, Subversion, Rails, WordPress, and bbPress on a barebones 256MB Ubutu slice. The instructions on their wiki were very useful. I messed up my slice a few times, but was able to rebuild the slice and start all over again. My slice has been running quietly for the last twenty four hours, with a three-instance Mongrel cluster behind an Apache web server to power up Cyclgoz.com!