Specialized Diverge Elite E5 Gravel Bike

Health & Fitness

A couple years ago, Hugo received a Specialized Diverge Elite E5 gravel bike for his birthday.

If you’re wondering what a gravel bike is, they are essentially a drop handlebar road bike with large tire clearance and a slightly more relaxed geometry for comfort. I went down this option because they are in essence ‘all road’, can be ridden on the road or gnarly gravel which opens up more ride experiences and have larger gearing options to make climbing easier.

The Diverge comes in many versions, but I felt the Elite E5 was a balance point of solid features vs price for a really capable, entry level gravel bike. It has an aluminium frame, carbon fork, standard through axels to attach the wheels, flat mount disc brakes and is the first version with Shimano GRX.

There is a lot of words in that previous paragraph that might not make sense to the uninitiated:

  • Aluminium Frame – Bike frames are generally made of steel, aluminium, titanium or carbon fibre and increase in price in that order. An aluminium frame is substantially lighter than steel, not that much heavier than titanium/carbon fibre but considerably cheaper.
  • Carbon Fork – Typically the frame and fork are made of the same material, but having a carbon fibre fork is a nice upgrade for comfort as it absorb a lot of vibration/road buzz.
  • Through Axels – it uses standard sizes 100x12mm and 142x12mm that all mainstream high quality bikes use. This would enable the wheels to be swapped easily, maybe a lighter carbon wheel could be added.
  • Flat-mount Disc Brakes – like the through axels, flat mount disc brakes are a standard. It would mean you could change the brake calipers if needed to a better quality or lighter set and any modern disc brake wheel would fit.
  • Shimano GRX – GRX is Shimano’s gravel groupset & it is where the quality really starts to kick in like 105, Ultegra or Dura-Ace for road bikes. Entry level GRX has 2×10 gearing with 46-30 chainrings paired with 11-36 cassette which is good for climbing. Additionally, the disc brakes are fully hydraulic where as cheaper options might be cable actuated with hydraulic calipers or fully cable actuated.

Gravel has become a huge scene in the last 5-7 years. It appealed to me because you can explore more places, opens up additional event opportunities and while I don’t mind riding on the road with cars – gravel has none which is novel.

I asked Hugo if I could borrow his bike and he said yes, gravel here we come!

SEO Basics

Search

Like most websites and certainly most blogs, this website is powered by the open source WordPress CMS. WordPress comes out of the box with a lot of great functionality and has a plugin infrastructure to allow the core functionality to be conveniently extended.

While WordPress default settings are generally okay to get a site to show up in Google, most websites use a 3rd party plugin to help optimize the configuration. These optimizations could include configuring meta data on each web page, generating specially formatted files to tell Google what URLs exist on a site, restricting certain URLs from being crawled or which can be indexed and a raft of other features.

The image below is from Google Search Console for HTTP www.lattimore.id.au and shows how many URLs Google is aware of and how many are actually indexed/discoverable within search. WordPress is generating about 900 URLs in total and in the first half of the chart approximately 150 are indexed. The decline midway through is caused by switching from HTTP to HTTPS recently.

The next image is for HTTPS www.lattimore.id.au (after switching to HTTPS) and importantly after reviewing the configuration within the All In One SEO plugin.

The following changes have been made to help Google crawl/index the site more efficiently:

  • Applied noindex to date based archives (/<year>/<month>/<day>/)
  • Applied noindex to tag based archives (/tag/<tag-name>/)
  • Applied noindex to author based archives (/author/<author-name/)
  • Applied noindex to search based URLs (/?s=<query>)
  • Removed noindex from paginated category based archives (/category/<cat-name>/)

The broad based noindex changes above have cut the number of generated URLs in half, most of which were thin, low quality or broadly duplicative of other URLs in the site.

The second major change was indexing the paginated category archives, such as /category/search/2/. Before the change the top level category URLs, such as /category/search/ were indexed but pages two and onwards were noindex.

Interestingly, Google had a crawl path to the posts via the Archives link in the main menu and also each of the date based archives that were noindexed. I’m now curious if the 300+ URLs which are currently indexed remain that way in the mid/long term or if it is just short lived fame due to them being ‘new’ URLs from switching to HTTPS and it had nothing to do with deindexing the various archive type URLs above.

Only time will tell ;-)

Endless Ride Mountain Bike Race

Health & Fitness
Screenshot

I recently competed in my first cross country (XC) mountain bike race & it was a blast!

The event was named The Endless Ride, named after the seemingly endless days associated to the summer solstice. The event started at 7pm, which seems crazy, however in Seattle at this time of year the sun doesn’t set until after 9:00pm.

Lemon Peel, who are the event organisers have a highly inclusive approach to their events. They support classes for different ages alongside supporting mountain bikes, gravel bikes and runners! I guessed and entered myself into Cat 2 Open as I was certain the Cat 1 Open was going to be outrageously fast.

The course used the Grand Ridge trail system, which connects Sammamish to Issaquah. Total distance was 12.5km, with 350m of climbing. While it mightn’t sound too tough, when you combine sections with 15-20% gradients, roots, rocks & ruts – even with the massive gearing on a mountain bike it is definitely challenging!

My race plan was simple, go out really hard in the first 3km to try and get a gap on the pack as that section only had 50m of elevation. Between 3km and 8km, I knew I was going to lose time as there were competitors who were 15-25kg lighter than me. The weight difference doesn’t hurt you on the flat or downhill, but is a huge penalty on gradients over 4%.

Overall this worked out pretty well, by the time I got to 3km mark – I couldn’t hear or see my competitors behind me. As expected, some of the other racers got past me by the 6-7km marker. Fortunately, I was past the steepest sections by that point and the downhill started at 8km mark. I crossed the finish line in 53 minutes and was shocked to hear my name called for 2nd place at the ceremony.

From an effort stand point, it was definitely an all out – Garmin said it was “highly impacting V02 max”. That doesn’t surprise me whatsoever, my max HR is 183bpm (which I hit) and I averaged 170bpm even after accounting for the downhill where it ‘recovered’ to 160bpm.

It was a heap of fun being on a course with other people racing!

Moving To HTTPS

Websites

HTTPS is the secure version of HTTP, it makes sure that information sent between your browser to the website you’re viewing is encrypted and can’t be decrypted by any machine or person in between.

Traditionally HTTPS was only used on important sites such as banks or checkout pages in ecommerce websites where your privacy was considered paramount. HTTPS wasn’t broadly used in the early days of the internet as SSL certificates were only available to purchase from a relatively small number of companies, they were expensive and it came with a performance penalty due to the additional work needed for establishing the secure connection and the ongoing encrypt/decrypt process.

In 2010, low single digit percentages of internet traffic were encrypted. By 2015, encrypted traffic was at about 25%. In the following 10 years, the barriers that were holding back adoption have been removed. Thanks to Lets Encrypt, you can get free SSL certificates. Web hosts integrate with Lets Encrypt, automatically issue/re-issue and install the SSL certificates. The original performance penalty has been removed. With HTTP/2 (the second version of the HTTP protocol) which requires HTTPS, websites load dramatically faster. Couple that with a big push from companies like Google, suggesting it is a ranking factor with their algorithm and by 2025 over 90% of all internet traffic is encrypted.

I’m late to the party, but I’m doing my part in switching to HTTPS :P

Dirty Bloom 50mi Mountain Bike

Health & Fitness, Photos

Since I bought my Scott Spark RC mountain bike last year, I’ve been eager to attend my first mountain bike event. Last week while on Instagram, serendipitously I was served an ad for Dirty Bloom 50mi. The ad said it was their inaugural event, as such it had very limited spots and there were only a handful left. There is no time like the present, so on a whim I signed up four days before the event.

Dirty Bloom is held in Wenatchee in Eastern Washington, it is about a two and a half hour drive from Sammamish across I-90. It’s just close enough that I could drive there in the morning versus needing to go the day before and stay in a hotel – so the alarm clock was set for 4am. I arrived into Wentatchee at about 7:15, went to the nearest McDonald’s to grab a coffee, bacon & egg muffin and change into my cycling gear.

The course for Dirty Bloom is 50mi/80km in length with 8000’/2666m of elevation. For those that aren’t familiar, any ride (regardless of distance) with over 2000m of elevation is going to be a tough day. I was lucky enough to get a ticket for RAMROD (Ride Around Mt Rainier in A Day) last year, it was 160mi/255km with 10000’/3333m of elevation and it was a huge effort.

As it turns out, the climbing was front loaded on the course and was absolutely savage. At the 5km mark the climbing started with gradients regularly going into 12-15%. In sections, they were so steep, I couldn’t ride them even in the lowest gear and had to push my bike.

Without question, this uphill section was the hardest effort I’ve ever done on a bike and lasted three (3) hours and 15 minutes. For some perspective, my max heart rate is 183bpm. When I do a one hour max effort and bury myself, I can sustain a heart rate of 168-172bpm and produce 300w. I averaged 162bpm over this section, absolutely brutal!

When I made it to the second aid station, the elite riders had completed an additional loop and were passing back through that aid station a second time before making their way back toward the finish line. A whole bunch of them commented how tough the course was.

I’d been riding for about 4 hours at this stage, guessed I had at least two hours of riding to the finish line, followed by a 2.5hr drive home. While I knew I could have completed the extra loop of about 20mi, I decided to drop it and begin the ride to the finish line.

I’ve heard people speak of ‘single track’ a thousand times, but having never ridden a mountain bike event or a trail network as massive as this before – I didn’t fully understand the wonder and magic of it. With the exception of another 2.5km climb, the next 23km were downhill – blasting through meadows covered in wildflowers, fast, flowy, up, down, left, right – it was like a rollercoaster!

I crossed the finish line in 6 hours, an average HR of 155bpm & just under 50km under my belt.

Can’t wait to do my next mountain bike event!