When Switch rolled by at 6:10am to pick me up I was just finishing up on some of my preparations. I have a very slow leak in my rear tire but I check it every day to see how much air it looses and to see if I can determine the cause of the leak. Nothing so far and since it only looses about 10-15 lbs of air a day, I feel pretty safe riding on it. Once I finished my final checks, we rolled out. At 6:15 in the morning it is still dark these days and every morning the darkness extends by 2-3 minutes. Right now the first 30 minutes of our ride will be with bike lights on.
Given that it is Wednesday morning, we should probably do what we used to always do on Wednesdays... we made a bee line for Page Mill Rd - it was time to bring back Page Mill Wednesdays! Our route to the top of Page Mill goes down Main St., across foothill and up Burke, right on Chapin, straight onto Robletta, right onto Elena, left on Natoma, right on Black Mountain, right on Altamont and left onto Page Mill about 1/4 mile from the entrance to the Palo Alto Regional Park. Then you begin the long slog up the winding road. About 1/2 way up you reach a mile stretch of road between gates 3 and 4 where you really separate the riders from the wannabes. No amount of lycra is going to make this easy. Right now, I'm a wannabe! Between gates 3-4 is a section named 'The Naked Lady' you spend a solid 90 seconds buried deep in prayer. The more appropriate name should have been 'The Confessional' :) Once you've climbed The Naked Lady, the next major milestone is gate 4 - nothing ever looks better than to watch gate 4 pass you by no the right. While the road still has plenty of uphill left in it, you know that the heavy lifting is all behind you now and it gets a lot easier except for 2 smaller sections of road still to come.
On the way up Page Mill this morning, I stopped to take this picture of the sun rising above the peaks of the foothills of the east bay. Pretty sweet and it looks soooo much better in real life.
Sunrise over the San Francisco Bay from up on Page Mill
Once past gate 4 the ride was pretty relaxed to the top and nothing much happened after that. But the most exciting part of the ride was about to come... The descent! To get from the bottom to the top of Page Mill (by the water fountain prior to the open space preserve at the top... took about an hour. However, to go from that drinking fountain back down the hill is a much different story! Mark and I were feeling like it was time to jam and that is what we set out to do... so we took off together, put on our clear sunglasses, move our hands into the drops, zipped up our jerseys and got ready for the thrill ride of a lifetime.
The first 1/4 mile of the top section is flat and windy but then you make a dropping left turn and start to pick up speed... serious speed. From here on out it is all break, rapid accellerations out of the turns and hanging on for dear life. This goes on for a few minutes and then you hit a small rise as you head towards the brink. All of a sudden, the road takes a pretty steep downward pitch and you have a series of sweeping turns where you can get some serious speed. The whole time you are scanning the road for your line through these turns - you have only a split second to steer clear of loose gravel or dirt that will cause the skinny tires to loose traction instantly. These mid-course corrections need to be made at 30-40 mph without throwing off you balance.
As you are going through this series of turns you get to the left hand turn at gate 4 - now you are heading into the steepest section of Page Mill and the Naked Lady is the beginning of a series of 5 S-turns that have you shifting your lean from right to left and back again with only 1-2 seconds between each apex. The last of these S-turns is the most fun (and the scariest) and ends with a right hand turn that is in the trough before a small rise. Going through the apex of this right-hander, you start to get extra traction from the bike. It has all of it's downward momentum that has to shift directions upon hitting the rise. Because of this you can carry a lot more corner speed into and out of the turn since the tires, you, and the bike are being pushed into the pavement hard by momentum. It is quite a thrill especially because you can't see around the turn and you can't see past the rise so the road reveals itself to you a little bit at a time and you just have to have faith that you will make it through even though you don't believe it as it happens. You don't have time to think - only to react and you are praying the whole time there are no obstructions in the road in front of you. Wow! That was a rush! It is just like the feeling you get on Top Gun (now Flight Deck) at Great America - the feeling of being on a super smooth, super precise steel roller coaster. This section is sure to get the endorphins flowing for a little while.
Next you are going to pick up a lot more speed on a sweeping left and long gradual right but you need to be super careful to get on the brakes as the road straightens out. You are heading into the first corkscrew. It is a right hand hairpin turn that dropss about 20 feet from entrance to exit of the turn. You must decelerate from 35 mph to 10 mph in a short period and set yourself up perfectly to make it. Lots of people don't! Then you sprint out of the turn for 100 yards to the next left hand hairpin corkscrew. Again, it is hard on the brakes and getting a good setup. This one is much easier since you are going a lot slower and the drop of the corkscrew is much less. Then another sprint out of the turn into a section of Page Mill that will soon turn up for a somewhat extended climb. If you get out of the saddle and sprint up the hill you can keep a lot of your road speed up the rise. Eventually you come over the rise and drop into a series of hard rights and hard left turns where you begin to pick up a lot of speed again. and it pretty much stays that way until the hairpin turn at the Palo Alto Regional Park.
By the time Switch and I hit Altamont, we had completed the 5 mile descent of Page Mill in just around 9 minutes! That is screaming fast to average 30+ mph on a winding technical descent. I don't want to do that too often and I certainly wouldn't want to do it any faster but every once in a while you just have to try it! Descending at high speeds is a skill that you learn over a long period of time. You must have a lot of faith that your tires will hold on the pavement, your bicycle can handle the forces and remain stable and you have the confidence in choosing your lines so that you have maximum control over the road and the bike. These things can only be learned by testing the waters a little bit at a time and watching others who are good at it. One word of caution - do all of your braking before you enter a turn. Bike tires, like care tires, have a traction coefficient and any braking you are doing reduces the amount of traction you have for turning. This is bad!
As always, every ride, especially a descent like the one on Page Mill, ends at Peets Coffee & Tea on State St. There you get to relive your experience with your riding buddies, plan your days and catch up with all of the locals who can be found there.
Every Ride Counts!
Jon
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