Tragedy in Solana Beach

I was making the rounds at work today... We have a pretty good crop of avid lunch hour surfer regulars where I work in the golf biz, and the talk of the day was this tragic incident:

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/northcounty/20080425-1658-bn25shark7.html

As an occassional surfer (I'm not very good, BTW...), and since many of my friends and colleagues are surfers it really made me think a bit...

The crazy thing about the whole deal, was that I was listening to the book "Made to Stick"

http://www.madetostick.com/ on the drive in today.

The section I was listening to on the drive into work, "Credible", included a discussion of using statistics to help make your idea "stick". One example they used was in the form of a question:

"what causes more deaths per year - sharks or deer?"










Since all of you out there are way smarter than a caveman like me -> I'm sure you guessed correctly that it is actually deer that cause more fatalities per year.

As they said in the book - crazy to think that bambi kills more people every year than Jaws.

This example is a great example (discussed in the same section)- of the availability bias/error.

Nonetheless, my thoughts go out to the family of the swimmer who was lost today here in socal - it really was a terrible tragedy that put a damper on the folks here at work.

Chihuahua and La Revancha de Chihuahua

A week or so ago, me and the Mrs took a trip to Chihuahua for her cousin's wedding. Chihuahua? Is that a real place? Yeah, it's a real place. I reckon it is one of the largest cities in the Mexican State of Chihuahua:

View Larger Map

Chihuahua, the state, might be best known as the place where Pancho Villa was assasinated - they have a nice museum in the town of chihuahua that we have visited in the past that documents this event and the era in which he lived - pretty cool museum, if you are into that sort of thing, which I am!

Anyway, here are some pics we took of our adventure (we flew out of the Tijuana airport on a direct flight to Chihuahua - the last time we visited chihuahua, we took a more adventurous path - fly into El Paso, taxi to the bus station in Juarez, then a multi hour bus trip down to Chihuahua -> and to think, there weren't even any chickens or any of the stuff you see in the movies on this bus! :-) )

A nice snap near downtown (forgive my amateur photog skillz):

What would a trip to Mexico be without a sweet Carne Asada!

The Tios and more!

The church where the boda/wedding took place -> I've been to several weddings in Mexico (including my own!) and this was the first one I've seen that had a full mariachi band playing in the church - pretty darn neat if you ask me!!!

The Mrs. and the Novios -> it seriously took me like 30 minutes to put that dimple in that tie! LOL! I figured that was pretty good for a slacker bike racin' engineer! :-)

So that was chihuahua, and La Revancha de Chihuahua (Revenge of Chihuahua) was the bike racin' I did this past weekend here in San Diego. It seems that between the tacos de carne asada, mariscos, tamales, and one or two tecates/las victorias, I put on a kilo or two and had a bit of a rough go of it this weekend on two wheels.

Really small fields, and I was never really any threat to anyone... well, except for maybe the cow catcher mounted on the front of the broom wagon!

Seriously, though, I did experience a first in my bike racin' career this weekend-> riding in a group with deep section aero wheels with winds gusting 30-50 mph. yeah, there was some tuggin' happenin' on the front wheel, but it all worked out, and really nothing to worry too much about. I reckon the most interesting thing was pedaling around in the parking lot prior to the road race start... all the while calculating beta/crosswind angle -> "ooh, that was a big gust, yeah, probably an 80 degree beta!" :-)

No bike racin for the next couple of weeks that I'm real motivated to do - so it looks like I'll have to hurt myself riding in the backcountry of northern San Diego County on the weekends...

Can't wait!

Flanders and Catastrophic Wheel Failure

I was catching up on some of the spring classics the other morning, and mozy-d on over to


http://www.cycling.tv/


and watched the highlights of the tour of flanders. Oh, that's a bike race!

Anyway, during the race, I saw something I hadn't seen before - and that was a Saunier Duval rider (announcer said is was Gomez Marchante, but not sure if it was...) going au bloc with his head down and drilling a curb perpendicularly.

The resulting carnage was painful to watch - though, shockingly, it seems as if the rider made it through the ordeal in one piece.

The same couldn't be said for his wheel, nor his fork:

higher res here.

It looks like the fork legs de-bonded from the crown, eh? (Any better pictures/video on the net than the original cycling.tv stuff?) Lucky that no-one impaled themelves on those fork legs - but it's a good thing that the wheel passed the UCI safety tests, huh?

Say, in this case when the fork legs debond from the crown and the rim collapses, exposing sharp serrated edges, would this mean that the wheel fails the requirements of UCI rule 1.3.018:

1.3.018 :
Wheels of the bicycle may vary in diameter between 70 cm maximum
and 55 cm minimum, including the tyre. For the cyclo-cross bicycle the width
of the tyre shall not exceed 35 mm and it may not incorporate any form of
spike or stud.

For massed start road races and cyclo-cross races only wheel
designs granted prior approval by the UCI may be used. Wheels will have
minimum 12 spokes; spokes can be round, flattened or oval, asfar as no
dimension of their sections exceeds 10 mm. In order to be granted approval
wheels must have passed a rupture test as prescribed by the UCI in a
laboratory approved by the UCI. The test results must show that the rupture
characteristics obtained are compatible with those resulting from an
impact sustained during normal use of the wheel. The following criteria must be
fulfilled:

· On impact, no element of the wheel may become detached and be
expelled outwards.
· The rupture must not present any shattered or broken off elements, or any sharp or serrated surfaces that could harm the user, other riders and/or spectators.
· The rupture characteristics must not cause the hub to become separated from the rim in such a way that the wheel becomes detached from the forks.

Without prejudice to the tests imposed by the laws, regulations or customs, standard (traditional) wheels are exempted from the rupture test referred to above. A traditional wheel is deemed to be a wheel with at least 16 metal spokes; the spokes may be round, flat or oval, provided that no dimension of their cross sections exceeds 2.4 mm; the section of the rim must not exceed 2.5 cm on each side.

What is your take? It becomes hard to interpret what the "wheel" is and what the "fork" is in this case - ya know, the fork being in multiple bits and all. :-)

I always kind of wondered what would be the consequences when a bike racer hit an obstacle that reproduced wheel failure modes created by the UCI safety tests. I speculated what would happen when something like this happened when I wrote the UCI and Me article for bike.com years ago.

Now, it looks like we know for sure what happens. When will we see safety tests for forks - it looks like in the Flanders incident, the fork was the weakest link - but really, would the consequences change in this instance? I reckon not - the bike is going to go flying with all of its sharp and dangerous edges, and the rider is going to hit the deck. Not much one can do when drilling a curb perpendicularly at 45-50 kph.

I've seen wheels get destroyed like what I saw on the cycling.tv footage - folded in rim, discontinous, not ridable. I saw destruction like that during my days at brand-S in the bike biz many moons ago - I reckon we catastrophically destroyed hundreds of wheels on a test fixture we nicknamed the "bonk" fixture... cuz we'd "bonk" rigidly constrained wheels with this massive pendulum.

ahh, those were the days! I get a kick out of breaking things like that. Is that normal? ;-)

Lemond and Trek

I'm a huge Lemond Fan (I finally got to shake his hand and pose for the pic above during the 2006 Interbike show). I'm also a big Trek fan (that was my very first "racing bike" back in the day. LANCE? Hmmm.... Not so much.

So, it kind of made my gut hurt a bit when I read this:

http://www.velonews.com/article/74387/

It feels a wee-bit like Trek is compromising on some core values to me... But that's just my opinion, and I don't have all the facts on the whole deal, eh?

Anyway, I did get a chuckle out of some of the letters on VN.com:

http://www.velonews.com/article/74447

primarily the one about "LT training" near the bottom! ;-)