My ride to San Clemente today was a huge suc­cess. My mom woke me up at eight in the morn­ing to ride my bike to break­fast with her and my lit­tle brother. To be hon­est, I was a lit­tle ner­vous about going to break­fast as I wanted to head to San Clemente first thing in the morn­ing. But I also knew that I needed break­fast and who was I to turn down spend­ing time with my fam­ily, so I went along with them. The ride was only five miles total, and it served as a great warm up ride, as it loos­ened the legs quite well. I had a big break­fast with bacon, avo­ca­dos, eggs, pota­toes, and toast in order to last me for the ride up to San Clemente. After break­fastI raced home to pack what I needed for the ride to San Clemente.

I first slipped into my brand new cycling  jer­sey and shorts, and imme­di­ately felt naked. They were so tight on my body, and I felt oddly exposed in com­par­i­son to the loose shorts and t-shirt that I usu­ally wear while rid­ing. Its funny that I can wear a speedo and feel com­pletely com­fort­able, but once I put on a cycling jer­sey and some cycling shorts I instantly feel naked.  I then went to pack my food. I filled my cycling water bot­tle with reg­u­lar water for hydra­tion and I also decided that I would need a “recov­ery” drink with sugar, carbs, and salt, just incase the ride was dif­fi­cult. So I got a bot­tled water and added some crappy red crys­tal light pow­der mix to it just in case. The mix seemed pretty crappy as crys­tal light always tastes hor­ri­ble, it had about six car­bo­hy­drates (which is noth­ing) but it did have five grams of pro­tein and fiber, which I fig­ured would be some how ben­e­fi­cial if I ever needed to drink it. I then opened a cliff bar and slipped it in my back pocket so that it would be ready to eat when­ever I needed it. As stu­pid and as dan­ger­ous as it is to ride with head­phones in my ears (I think it’s also against the law), I rooted my i-pod head­phones through the jer­sey so that I could lis­ten to my music while I rode. Since it was a sunny day and that I could very well be rid­ing for quite awhile, I applied some sun­screen so I wouldn’t come back red from sun­burn. I put on my hel­met and cycling sun­glasses and at 10:00 I set out on my journey.

Rid­ing with the new shorts and jer­sey was a com­pletely dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ence. While I did feel com­pletely naked, and awk­ward in the unfa­mil­iar attire, they totally changed my rid­ing expe­ri­ence for the bet­ter. I was able to feel the wind much bet­ter with my legs, which helped me sub­con­sciously develop bet­ter ped­al­ing cadences and thus go faster. The tight jer­sey and shorts made me more aero­dy­namic and helped me slip through the air much bet­ter than my loose shorts and t-shirt. Most impor­tantly, the padded shorts kept me com­pletely com­fort­able for the whole ride, with them I felt like I was glid­ing along on a cloud. I remarked ear­lier that after an hour or so, I instantly want to get off my sad­dle, but with the cycling shorts on it, it was exactly the oppo­site, I felt like I could ride forever.

I started out at a com­fort­able but brisk pace. I aver­aged about 22 miles per hour for the first ten miles of trails that I was very famil­iar with. Instead of track­ing mileage, which I usu­ally do, I set my com­puter to sim­ply show the time and speed that I was rid­ing at. I did this because I planned to stop and hydrate/stretch every 30–40 min­utes, plus I had a piano les­son at 2:00 and if I got too far with­out reach­ing my des­ti­na­tion, I would have to turn back in order to make the les­son.  I made my first stop at around 10:40 stop­ping just before I got onto PCH. As I was rid­ing I real­ized that I for­got to stretch. Of course going long dis­tances with­out stretch­ing would be a death sen­tence as it was just ask­ing for me to pull a mus­cle, and be sore for days on end, so when I stopped I imme­di­ately stretched the ham­strings and quads. To my sur­prise both mus­cles were really loose, and I was imme­di­ately thank­ful for my five mile warm up ride to break­fast with my mother. I took a quick sip of my water, changed the playlist on my ipod, and con­tin­ued my trek down PCH.

PCH is a fun, but chal­leng­ing road to ride on. It’s fun because the ocean scenery is beau­ti­ful, and there are a lot of fast descents and tech­ni­cal turns to it. It’s chal­leng­ing because for every descent there seems to be a climb twice as high on the other side, and some por­tions of it don’t have bike lanes mak­ing it incred­i­bly dan­ger­ous to ride in.  Nar­row beach streets with cars parked on one side pre­sented an extreme risk of hit­ting me with a car door if they were to open up, while the cars dri­ving on the other side of me had the poten­tial of clip­ping me as I rode. Regard­less, I cruised down PCH aver­ag­ing about 20 miles per hour. Some por­tions of it I reached speeds of 29 miles per hour, while on the numer­ous climbs I went as slow as 12 miles per hour. Since I was try­ing to man­age my pace and energy, I had a lot of dif­fi­culty with the climbs. It seems like the only way to go through a climb pain­lessly is to go fast, and the only way to go fast is to use up all of your energy on the climb. See­ing as how I didn’t have the option of run­ning out of energy before I hit San Clemente, I had to use my lower gears for all of the climbs which made them longer, more painful, and slower than if I put more effort into them, but I didn’t over exert myself on the climbs which was very important.

At 11:20 I stopped in Laguna Beach, mak­ing great time as I had left my house at 10:00. My legs where get­ting a lit­tle tired from all the climbs that I had, but I wasn’t gasp­ing for breath or any­thing so I was still in strong form. I took another quick sip of my water, changed the playlist on my i-pod once again, and called my house just to tell them how things where pro­gress­ing for me. I got on my way once more, this time slowly as I was hav­ing dif­fi­culty clip­ping in on the hilly Laguna Beach road, but after a minute I was clipped in and ped­al­ing away.

I have never rode my bike past Laguna Beach before, so the next por­tion of my jour­ney was unfa­mil­iar ter­ri­tory. I slowed down my pace just a tad  mainly because I was unfa­mil­iar with the area and wanted to take in the new scenery. Plus I didn’t want to push myself and unknow­ingly ride in the wrong direc­tion, only to find out that I went the wrong way and have to turn back. The ride was beau­ti­ful as I breezed through the rest of Laguna Beach and into Dana Point. There’s some­thing about quaint beach towns on beau­ti­ful sunny days, that always gets me and today was cer­tainly no excep­tion. As I hit the end of Dana Point I ran into a lit­tle bit of trou­ble. PCH began to turn into a high­way and I acci­den­tally went into what was vir­tu­ally a free­way, where cyclists and pedes­tri­ans where obvi­ously pro­hib­ited. I didn’t go too far, and didn’t actu­ally enter the high­way por­tion of the road, but it was embar­rass­ing and I got honked at a few times. I turned around and made my way back a cou­ple of blocks and turned down a road which lead to a state beach. There I was directed to an awe­some bike path that was a straight shot to San Clemente and ran par­al­lel to the Amtrack Sur­fliner rail­road tracks. The path was beau­ti­ful as it ran right along­side the coast, it was com­pletely pro­tected from cars, and it was wide enough for me to ride com­fort­ably on. I saw a pack of rid­ers in front of me, and to my sur­prise I was able to push myself to 25 miles per hour to pass them. A few min­utes later the path ended, and to my delight I was greeted with a beau­ti­ful sign which read “Wel­come to San Clemente”.

At 12:00 I pulled into a nearby plaza where the Metrolink stopped and I checked my odome­ter which read 477.7 miles. In two hours I rode 37.7 miles to San Clemente, not too shabby con­sid­er­ing that I made a wrong turn onto a high­way, and had to stop quite a few times at stop lights and the like. I called my par­ents to pick me up (as there was no way I was going to be able to ride back in time for my les­son), and I found a bench to rest at which over­looked the coast. I took some video footage to prove that I actu­ally made the ride to San Clemente, then drank my red crys­tal light water bot­tle, which actu­ally didn’t taste as bad as I thought it would, and then I delved into my cliff bar.  I spent the remain­der of the time relax­ing in the bril­liant sun, enjoy­ing the cool ocean breeze as it gen­tly cooled my body. I felt euphoric, accom­plished, and hon­estly a bit tired. The only thing on my mind was how I would have to ride to San Clemente yet again, the next time though, I would have to ride back to my house. All in all, I had a blast rid­ing to San Clemente. I did much bet­ter than I thought I would, as I wasn’t as tired or as sore as I usu­ally am after two hours on the sad­dle, and the fact that I wanted to ride even more, just proved that the trip was all worth it.

In order to have this site bet­ter reflect my sex­ual per­for­mance I ordered my crack IT team to work around the clock in  to make it faster.  After hours of research, devel­op­ment, and hard labor, the team finally imple­mented their changes today and the results are phe­nom­e­nal.  The amount of load time between the home­page, and the page that allows me to add new posts has decreased dra­mat­i­cally. Of course, just surf­ing through­out the var­i­ous pages has also improved quite a bit.

A huge round of thanks to Owen Kue­merle and Alex Guichet who col­lab­o­rated to change to a bet­ter web host in order to help make the site faster. Now if only they got to work on shav­ing a few inches off the width and height of the main page, then this site would be a per­fect rep­re­sen­ta­tion of my sex­ual capabilities.

Until then, enjoy the much faster patrickmcn​.com

I went to REI today to pickup  some spare tubes and some CO2 car­tridges in prepa­ra­tion for my San Clemente trip. I was hon­estly sur­prised by how much every­thing cost. Two spare tubes cost 6 dol­lars each, the CO2 car­tridge and its adapter cost 20 dol­lars, while an extra car­tridge cost another dol­lar.  Once tax and every­thing was added in I ran up a total of 36 dol­lars, kind of a lot to pay for some rub­ber and nat­ural gas.

One thing I’ve real­ized about cycling is that it has an incred­i­bly high price of entry. Most of the low end bikes run around $1,000, more if you want some­thing faster. Ped­als and shoes are around $150 for the low end shoes and ped­als. Hel­mets can come in at ungodly prices around $70 dol­lars. While a cycling short and jer­sey combo runs $100 at the least. Oh and I almost for­got the speedome­ter, spare tubes, hand­pumps, sad­dle­bag, water bot­tles, and cages can all add up to $100 col­lec­tively. When all is said and done get­ting into cycling costs at least $2000, and for the enthu­si­asts it can be a lot more.

I find it hard to bal­ance cycling and a bud­get as I’m not the kind of per­son that con­stantly likes to buy the lat­est and great­est of every­thing. My com­puter is still using an an old ATI Radeon X1900XT from about five years ago, my cell­phone is ancient, and when it comes to mak­ing pur­chases I rarely buy any­thing unless I absolutely need it. With that being said, it’s so tempt­ing to lose con­trol of these sound spend­ing habits with cycling. There’s so many things avail­able that can poten­tially improve the bike’s per­for­mance. Whether it be a new com­po­nent group, wheels, han­dle­bars, seat­posts, sad­dles, etc there’s just a ton out there. Yet I have to remem­ber that it isn’t the bike that deter­mines how well some­one rides, it’s the guy who hap­pens to be on the bike.

With that in mind, I real­ized that the rea­son for cycling’s high cost of entrance is because of the long term invest­ment cycling pro­vides. A decent, well main­tained bike can eas­ily last ten years. Once you have a hel­met, jer­sey, shoes, etc, there’s really no rea­son to pur­chase too many more of them. This means that the only things that con­stantly cost a cyclist money, are the patch kits, tubes, and  CO2 car­tridges used to replace flat tires and I would esti­mate the cost of those to be $60 a year at most.

Despite this, I still feel as if I’ve spent too much money on cycling. I look at brand new aero­dy­nam­i­cally designed triathlon bikes, and instantly yearn to buy one. I look at high per­for­mance wheels that cost $2000 a set, and try to fig­ure out how long it would take me to save up for them. I almost feel as if there’s no stop to the things that I want to pur­chase, and because of that I know that all of the money I spend isn’t going to do much to sat­isfy me. What’s worse is that it’s not like the bike I have already is bad either it’s just that  any­one can get their hands on high per­for­mance, pro­fes­sional grade com­po­nents if they have the money to swing it. Because I have that option avail­able I’m always tempted to look into what’s best. But until I become a pro­fes­sional racer, who puts down 10,000 miles on the bike a year, I know that I have to be happy with bike that I already have. At the moment I’m only rid­ing on week­ends, and my level of per­for­mance hardly neces­si­tates a $5,000  on the lat­est and great­est bike.

In other news my prep for San Clemente is going well. I’ve put in two really strong rides this week­end. One long twenty eight mile ride on one day, and a fast sprinting/climbing ride, the other day. If I am able to get some more rides in before school dur­ing the week, I’ll be in shape to make it to San Clemente in good form.

When rid­ing my bike, I sel­dom have a set des­ti­na­tion for where I want to go.  Sure, I have a  rule that I will never ride the same trail twice in a row, but aside from that most of my rides are decided by how the weather is, how much time I have to ride, and how I’m feel­ing on the sad­dle. This kind of rid­ing has its’ advan­tages and dis­ad­van­tages. On the plus side, these rides often help me dis­cover new routes, or places when rid­ing on the bike. How­ever, they do not serve as the best train­ing runs because it is  hard to pace one­self on an impromptu ride. When rid­ing I am con­stantly bat­tling between how hard I should set my pace, as obvi­ously I don’t want to find myself run­ning out of energy twenty miles away from home, but I also want to return  feel­ing as if I put a solid effort into the ride, and the only way to do that is to main­tain an aggres­sive and chal­leng­ing pace.

Need­less to say I don’t think it’s harm­ful to set a goal every once in a while for my rides, so I’m try­ing to set up a monthly goal of a place that I want to ride to.  For­tu­nately, there are many great cities that I can visit, and tons of chal­leng­ing ter­rain that I have to cross to get to them, so I have a feel­ing that these rides are going to be greatly ben­e­fi­cial in improv­ing my abil­i­ties as a cyclist. Plus I think I will love the inevitable dis­cov­ery of new things on the way to the des­ti­na­tions. My first des­ti­na­tion is San Clemente. San Clemente is the south­ern most city in Orange County, and is an unrec­og­nized gem in Orange County’s beach cities. While Hunt­ing­ton is pop­u­lar, New­port Beach sophis­ti­cated, San Clemente is unas­sum­ing and peace­ful. It is this min­i­mal­is­tic approach that makes the city so beau­ti­ful and enjoy­able to escape to every once in a while.

Accord­ing to google maps, San Clemente is located about twenty five miles from my house, which really isn’t that bad of a dis­tance. How­ever, once we fac­tor in some of the trails that I have to take just to get to PCH and ride down the coast all the way to the city, I think it will be closer to thirty or thirty five miles. Unlike most of my rides in which I often ride ten or twenty miles, stop to drink a sip of water, and turn around to head home. I think I’m going to have to pace myself much bet­ter than I usu­ally do. My longest ride to date was a fifty mile one, with a guy that I met  rid­ing on one of the trails. The expe­ri­ence was fun, but in the last fif­teen miles, I totally ran out of energy and barely made it home. Once I hit PCH, which is a solid fif­teen mile ride mind you, I am going to have to keep myself hydrated, and well nour­ished for the remain­ing dis­tance that it takes to get to San Clemente.

Another thing that I strug­gle with is sad­dle dis­com­fort. After about an hour and a half of rid­ing, my back usu­ally gets a lit­tle sore, my focus dimin­ishes, and I start want­ing to get off the bike. I have my first pair of bike shorts, and a new jer­sey com­ing my way, so hope­fully these will help with my sad­dle dis­com­fort. Depend­ing on how I like the jer­sey, I may ride with just the jer­sey with tubes, water, and food in my back pock­ets, or I might ride with my usual back­pack of rid­ing neces­si­ties. Regard­less of which I choose, I look for­ward to hav­ing to pace myself for the ride as I think it will make the expe­ri­ence much more enjoy­able for me.

I plan to ride to San Clemente on Octo­ber 25^th depend­ing on how the weather is coop­er­at­ing, and how that week plays out. If not that week, than I will likely do it the fol­low­ing week on Novem­ber 1^st. The main rea­son why I am not doing it this week­end is the fact that I need to put in some more miles on the bike so that I’m in decent shape to make it to San Clemente with­out ruin­ing all of my knee lig­a­ments from over exer­tion. I’m still not sure whether I will ride home from San Clemente, or whether I will have some­one pick me up from there, but I guess I’ll fig­ure that depend­ing on how I feel after I make it there.