This is my repost from the NorCal forums. I thought some of you SS/Fixed riders might enjoy it.
My gearing is 55/22 for 66ish GI, for anyone interested. The Old La Honda climb averages 7% for 3.3 miles. It's a benchmark climb for the San Francisco peninsula. Everyone down here seems to know their time.
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We're having floors installed this week, so I took a half-day to go home and pack. So I packed up, left work at 12 and headed to Old La Honda!
So I took my single speed commuter over to OLH to see if I could climb it. I finished BoO last weekend, but I had been feeling kind of burned out. The ride to the start was fun, definitely a change of pace. I had to watch myself, even up Sandhill. I was worried about my HR, but without a computer, clock or HRM, I just pedaled as easy as I could.
That's my pretty SS at the bridge. Ramon had told me his SS ride up OLH had been hard, so really didn't know if I'd finish.
The climb was hard. It wasn't brutal. My gearing is 55/22 (carbon drive) for 66 gear inches. I did use my Iphone in my commuter bag to time my ride. It wasn't exact, but I came in just under 30 minutes. I could have pushed harder with my legs, but the weak link in my engine was my lower back and my hands. Man, did my hands hurt from trying to rip the brake hoods off the bar.
I could have pushed harder, but without the HRM I kept trying to be controlled. I was waiting for the other shoe to drop, but the good part about OLH is that it is a pretty consistent grade. The other shoe never came, and when I saw the 2-mile mark painted I knew I was good to finish. That last bit before the final turn was rough, both steep and the poor road condition.
Finish:
I was feeling good at the top, so I turned left, climbed the final six or seven hundred feet to then descent page mill.
Scary: It's hard to see on the iphone pic, but the bead on my stock Bontrager RaceLite tire completely separated. It sounded like a gunshot, and coming to a stop between gates 3 and 4 on a flat front tire, half off the rim, was an adventure. I was lucky to keep it upright and that there wasn't a car to prevent me from going straight to the left side of the road.
This was also where I learned that I need 80mm valve tubes for these rims. I had 48mm with me, and I could just get enough CO2 into the tube to see that the tire wasn't going to hold. So, no tire, soft tube = long wait for a friend to give me a ride home.
Hopefully this is my bit of tire/rim/tube drama that seems to be hitting everyone lately. An hour wait wasn't bad, considering the blowout on -10%. Could definitely have been worse.
We need to have more SS rides. Despite the tire issue, I LOVE the ride. It's such a change of pace. Mellow, non-pedaling downhills, challenging climbing, easy spinning on the flats. It's not the fastest overall pace, but there's something great in the simplicity of it. The road doesn't care that you have only 1 gear.