Pliny the Elder

Anyone entering this? I'll be doing the 30 mile ride. Looking forward to the ride and the beer garden!

Tour of Long Beach | May 10th, 2014

snidely

In for the century with my wife. Father-in-law is doing the 30.

Focused1

Doing the metric with my friend who is a bit of a newbie...should be fun!!!

TrojanHorse

Same day as Cruisin the Conejo, which is where my pedals will be turning. Hopefully.

StephenT 

Planning on doing the metric with my 12 yr old son.

Cyclcist11023131

Going to run the Metric with my distance challenged riding buddy. He is great for thirty miles and goes downhill from there. Have been gearing up for this and am back in the clip-ins and 105 pedals. I have put in 40 plus miles all over Anaheim Hills and Orange Park Acres every other day on Single Speed Cannondale, I know these are rides and not races but a little training makes the big day easier. Lots of SAGS for a short ride, should be a social event as well. I pretty well ride most of this once a week. Lincoln/SART to HB to LB. Putz around and get lunch. Reverse. The wind will be the thing with the last part of the ride into a usually stiff headwind, picking up as it gets later. I suggest everybody pile in behind me, like they did the first seven miles in the Tour de Palm Springs. As a Sasquatch should, I pull a lot of wind....

RIRview

I know that wind quite well. I live in Long Beach, and I'll ride after work two or three times a week. The way out, from LGB to Huntington Beach is a pleasure, but I always know that I'll be punished on the way home.

Beachgrad05

I signed up for the metric and plan on enjoying the beer garden! If you see me say Hi. I will likely be in my The Unlikely Cyclist kit.

tunavic

Beer garden? Where's @TrojanHorse ?

TrojanHorse

We'll have to make our own. I just signed up for the notably beer-garden-free Cruisin' the Conejo century.

Nice work @StephenT! I was going to register my son for the 35 mile ride (cruising, not Cruz'ing) but tragically, his soccer calendar interferes yet again. He's 11. I think we'll be ready to do the 50 mile palm springs ride next year.

tunavic

@TrojanHorse here you go:

This just in! Cruisin’ will have a Beer Garden! Cronies Sports Grill from Newbury Park will host the Beer Garden. If you would like to know more about Cronies visit: Cronies Sports Grill - Voted Best Sports Grill in Ventura County

StephenT 

I hear you on the sports schedule. The 50 mile ToPS is a good ride. Here we are from this years ride.

TrojanHorse

Fantastic! is that a Tarmac or an Allez you have him on? When my son gets tall enough for a real size bike I'll put him on something nicer, but he's pretty fond of his (heavy) Fuji Finest for now.

StephenT 

My son is riding a 54cm Allez. He is quite tall for being 12. I traded in my old bike and my son paid the remaining half out of his own pocket to get the Allez. He rode the Tour de Foothills on a Trek MTB with me so it was time for a road bike. He has also ridden a few easy club rides with me - he totally loves the camaraderie and competition on those rides.

Focused1

A very nice ride today...the newbie and I completed the metric in 4:15 with an ungodly 314 ft of vertical. Anyone hear about the rider that was down at the PCH and Studabaker (i think it was?). It didn't look good. Hope he or she came out of it ok...

TrojanHorse

314 feet!

Cruisin the conejo was also today, the century worked out at 5,900 feet. Pretty lumpy. What a gorgeous day though, did it rain in LB? It did rain further inland.

StephenT 

No rain or mist for us in Long Beach. A little cloudy but it burned off quite early. My 12 yr old son completed his first metric century today. He is quite proud he did it.

TrojanHorse

He should be proud... think of all the kids out there who can't ride a bike 2 miles, much less 60.

There was a family on our century yesterday and I think the son was probably 14 or 15 moving along at a pretty good clip. Good times.

tunavic

My club rode to Oak Glen from Redlands yesterday - they had some fog, light drizzle, cold and overcast and then sun.

They should have ridden Conejo

snidely

Fun ride, but a tough day for me and my wife. Had a couple incidents that made for a really long day........10 hours 9 minutes to be exact. I ended up riding 108 miles.

Overall, it was a pretty good event. Some of the street markings and signage was lacking, so if you didn't follow the cue sheet (like us at first) it was easy to get lost. No problems once we found our way back and stuck to the cue sheet. SAG 5 & 6 seemed to be closed by the time we arrived (bummer). So we made our own SAG stop at McDonald's. Virtually no mechanical support for the ride (only at 2 of the SAGs that we made it to), and we felt we were basically on our own. At least having a floor pump at the SAGs would have been nice.

Some of the route felt very sketchy, with traffic and the areas we had to cross and ride through. Maybe if we were with a bigger group it wouldn't have been as much of an issue, but with only 2 of us we felt very vulnerable to cars.

The finish line expo was all broken down when we finally finished, but the medals presenters were still there and we did get cupcakes and a beer.

We knew there were several riders behind us, so we begged the medals presenters to stick around for a bit and we stayed to cheer in the riders we had chatted with along the way.

Challenging day, but the reward of finishing makes it worthwhile.

Hope the ToLB people send us a survey, so I can give my .02 to make next year a little better (and safer).

Beachgrad05

Did you start at the recommended start time? Curious as most rides the SAG spots and post ride area will start to clear out at a certain point. I know the 100 was challenging with the wind and hills down south. I had a friend ride who did it and she finished about 3:15pm.

My first year doing the PS Century I finished so late that there was ZILCH at the finish area as far as vendors etc and the finish photo crazy thing was already down so no finish photo for me that year.

When I did Tour de Cure LB in 2013 similar thing...we were slow and the lunch that was provided was gone. They were nice tho and had ordered in pizza for those of us stragglers which was appreciated.

snidely

We started at 6:30 with the group. But we had some tire issues that set us back quite a bit. We were over 1.5 hours later than we should have been, but my opinion is that the event should plan for stragglers. We were among many others.

Beachgrad05

I'm not sure how to address that as most of the folks helping are volunteers. Guess they could do what some do and sweep the course and not allow those too far behind to finish. I have heard that some rides do that.