End of the season maps

Lots of fun maps from the season. All of these maps cover routes between November 1, 2010 and October 30, 2011.

Quick summary-
Flying:	3,900 mi.
Driving:	17,300 mi.
Biking:	17,600 mi.
Total:	38,800 mi.

Zoomed in view of the Birmingham routes – Hoover, Vestavia, Homewood

Biking near Birmingham

Biking in Alabama from Birmingham north and eastwards

All bike routes (racing, training, and commuting) for the year

Biking (racing, training, and commuting) all over the southeast

Biking (racing, training, and commuting) all over the midwest

Biking in Nicaragua for our June 2011 Nuevas Esperanzas board meeting

All of our driving to/from races and/or family vacation spots
Lots of fun maps from the season. All of these maps are for one year (November 1, 2010 – October 30, 2011). 38,824 miles consisting of 3,940 miles flying, 17,314 miles driving, and

Roundtrip flight from Chicago to Nicaragua in June 2011

Everything all on one map – annotated

Screenshot of my website (topocreator.com) for creating these types of maps.

Crossroads Classic maps

We just got back from a longer than expected trip that included 5 days of racing, 2 days of riding in the mountains, and one funeral (in Florence). One of the things I like about TopoCreator, which I am trying to rush into a real beta phase this week, is the ability to overlay a bunch of routes on top of each other to generate maps like the one below that shows all 8 days worth of riding and driving.

Crossroad Classic riding and driving

As another example, here are my rides back in Birmingham from Thursday through Sunday.

The last four days of riding back home in Hoover

July training and racing

Back from our long trip to Wisconsin to visit family and race the 2011 Tour of America’s Dairyland, we have settled into a really nice routine back here in Birmingham. In the mornings, Kristine goes for a run while I am still waking up and feeding the kids breakfast watching the live coverage of the Tour de France. Then when Kristine gets back from running, I usually go for a 2-4 hour ride to finish in time to watch the second replay coverage on versus of the day’s Tour de France stage in about the same spot where I left off the morning live coverage.

On today’s ride, I set two new KOMs (fastest lap in my neighborhood plus the Verdure climb). Check out the map with annotated gradients on the elevation profile. Also, I named a loop on the ride after “Tornado” Tom Boonen who had to abandon today’s tour stage because of injuries sustained in a wreck two days ago. Also, I named one of the sections after Bradley Wiggins, who broke his collar bone in today’s stage.

Annotated map of a Hoover climbing route

Then, in the afternoon, I sometimes go for another ride – e.g., yesterday’s Twitter ride with Jamie Butler.

Twitter ride with Jamie Butler – lots of climbing!

Ok, enough procrastinating, back to work! Almost forgot, two upcoming races I am really looking forward to:

July 15-17 – Huntsville racing
July 20-24 – Georgia cycling gran prix
July 30 – (hopefully) Presbyterian Invitational

1,000,000 ft on the way into church

1,000,000 ft route – click to enlarge – climbs annotated

Elevation profile for today’s commute to church (click to enlarge)

On this ride into church this morning, I reached 1,000,000 ft of climbing for the year. I marked the map with a red X where I think I was at the time. I guess I must have been missing climbing while I was racing in Wisconsin because during this week I have set the following milestones:

* New shortest distance for 10,000 feet of climbing (52.3 miles)
* New shortest time for 10,000 feet of climbing (3 hours and 35 minutes)
* New weekly climbing record – 55,849 feet over 360 miles
* Plus, reaching the 1,000,000 ft mark for the year (measured from Jan 2nd)

I am winning the Studio Velo KOM competition on Strava, and here is a screenshot of the current standings showing me crossing the 1,000,000 ft mark.

Studio Velo KOM competition – 2011 results (click to enlarge)

You can see all of my rides for 2011 on one page at this link: http://www.strava.com/komchallenge/brian-toone-2919/results/overall

The return ride after church was very hot – see temperature graph below – it was in the 90s by the end of my morning ride, too.

Temperature graph for my return ride home. VERY HOT!

Here is a screenshot of the weekly climbing leaderboard on Strava.

Strava weekly climbing leaderboard

Here are super-hi res topo maps that I made on topocreator of the route and another one zoomed in on the Double Oak climb.

Topocreator map of the entire route – 40ft contour intervals – click to enlarge (6.6MB).

Zoomed in view of the Double Oak way climb and roller coaster section at the top. Contour intervals are 20ft. Click to enlarge

Finally, if you made it this far in the post, I post all these graphs, stats, etc… because I want to remember these things later, because I enjoy the technical aspects of making the maps, posting the blogs, calculating the stats. It certainly feels like bragging, but that’s not my intention. I figured others might be interested to see details of the rides that I do (especially others not from this area who might wonder how I can climb so much in “Alabama” and people in Birmingham who would like to recreate these adventures themselves or with me – email me, let’s ride!)

New (not really) monster

Recall the Birmingham Monsters post that I created a few months back. Well, there is a new monster in town! Not really, as I have done the climb several times, but today I grabbed the stats on it so that I could include it with all the other monsters. My rough definition of a monster is any climb which exceeds 20% for some portion of the climb. Also, a related statistic is the Scanuppia Distance (which is the cumulative distance traveled on the climb where the gradient is greater than or equal to 17%, which is the average gradient for what is arguably the world’s toughest climb – the Scanuppia).

iBike data for the Stoneleigh Dr – Oakdale monster

---------Oakdale via Stoneleigh Dr ---------
Dist:        1.78 mi (0:11:04)
Energy:     176.3 kJ
Cals Burn:  168.5 kcal
Climbing:     548 ft
Braking:    -13.6 kJ (-7.7%)
          Min   Avg    Max
Power       0  265.5   508  W
Aero        0   34.3   575  W
Rolling     8   17.6    55  W
Gravity -1149  182.5   467  W
Speed     4.4    9.6  30.2  mi/h
Wind      0.0    8.6  33.0  mi/h
Elev      356    605   864  ft
Slope   -15.6   5.72  27.2  %
Caden      30   70.7   101  rpm
HR        125  143.0   158  bpm
NP 287 W; IF 0.957; TSS 16.9
5/27/2011 11:48 AM
84 degF; 1013 mbar

Here is a table with all the monsters sorted by Scanuppia distance. Note that today’s monster (Stoneleigh Dr) has the highest max gradient of all the monsters.

Climb	Distance	Climbing	Scanuppia	Max %
Double Oak Way	3.77 mi	883 ft	0.42mi	23.9 %
South Cove Dr	0.26 mi	229 ft	0.26mi	24.3 %
Hugh Daniel Brae Trail	1.97 mi	614 ft	0.26mi	19.4 %
Southcrest	0.56 mi	299 ft	0.22mi	24.5 %
Vesclub – Vestavia Dr	3.35 mi	793 ft	0.21mi	21.9 %
Woodcrest	1.91 mi	478 ft	0.18mi	21.4 %
Oakdale via Stoneleigh Dr	1.78 mi	548 ft	0.15mi	27.2 %
Montclair (Trinity)	0.38 mi	212 ft	0.13mi	21.8 %
Hugh Daniel Greystone Crest	1.36 mi	371 ft	0.11mi	24.4 %

And here is the topocreator map of the ride I did today with the elevation profile. Note that I did three variations of the Oakdale climb with the Stoneleigh version being the first one. Also, I really enjoyed the Shook Hill climb again today from Rocky Ridge and then climbed it towards the end of the ride for the first time from the Cahaba River in what I called on Strava a “mega stair-stepper” climb.

Topocreator map of today’s ride, which includes the Stoneleigh Dr – Oakdale monster

And here is the annotated elevation profile:
Elevation profile for today’s ride – annotated