A look back at the Defcon BikeRide #1: Hack the Heat 2011 edition by @alien8

Ed: Thanks to @alien8, for writing this post for us! Great idea of what the ride may be like on June 26th, 2012 for Defcon 20!

Hack the Heat 2011.

Take Las Vegas, Defcon and a bunch of security geeks who like bikes and what do you get?

A new project to get a new sub community of the security world, that gets people on bikes. We like.

Planning by Gdead and Punkrokk started https://forum.defcon.org/showthread.php?t=12155 with a post on the Defcon Forums

“So, we’re organizing a bike ride around Las Vegas before DefCon. It will probably be early morning on Thursday. Like 6am. It’s early, but it’s also cool enough you’ll live through it.

We’re working with a local bike shop to get a group rate on nice rental bikes (not crap rec stuff.. real bikes). We’ll be leaving around 6a and finishing by 8a or so. It will be guided by someone from the bike shop. Right now the estimated cost is around $40-$50/person, but we’ll know more as we get closer to the event including specifics on the gear. [ note I originally had $80/person on here but punkrokk corrected me and told me I was smoking crack. It’s more like $40]

This should be an actual “ride”, not a victorian outing on fancy big wheeled bicycles and parasols. If you’re interested in doing this, you’ll probably want to be in reasonably good shape and maybe have done some pack riding in the past.

Also, we’re designing custom jerseys. More on that later 🙂”

How could I resist? Totally mad. 🙂

A bike shop that hires decent bikes, a 5.30am start and a 4,700ft climb 10 hours after getting off a transatlantic flight! what *fun*

I thought this was be too good to not cover on bikehugger.com so Byron got pinged and we got involved.I do post stuff from .eu – but I do ‘security stuff’ so this was a true blending of my worlds.

I also contacted http://mybikefood.com who agreed to send a few goodies with me! They sponsor me but I really really rate their products. Vegan and Vegetarian friendly.

At that time I was mostly riding Moultons so the opportunity to try any large wheeled road bike was going to be interesting.

Choices of which bike were complicated due to me not having any idea beyond ‘it might be 52, 54 or 56 depending on geometry’… so I sent my fit figures and a picture of the of the Moulton AM20 Prototype to McGhies.

A mail reply asking height/inner leg measurements was sent and.. the night before flying out. Randy the manager of McGhies found a bike to suit. a Cannondale ’56 cm’ was prescribed.

There had been many more people signing up to what was now going to be quite a group ride!

Packing : Saddle (Specialised Toupe expert, Speedplay Zero pedals, Sidi Five road shoes with Speedplay Zero cleats as adjusted by Michael Crebbins)

BA provided the transatlantic connection. Club World was simply superb. Many thanks to them.

Arriving in Vegas and dashing to hotel – prepare the bike bag for a 5am wake up. 5.30am at the front of the Rio dressed and ready.. oh my.

ShuttVR race team bib shorts were accompanied by a new item – a ShuttVR Summer jersey. Made of ‘Merino perform’ it was claimed to be suitable for ‘30C+ 90F’ riding conditions. Let’s see 🙂

And after some of us grabbed coffee, we were off!

Arriving at the store it was a surreal experience..

The store was simply huge. This being America I probably shouldn’t have been *that* suprised.

Inside, it was like a candy store for bike fetishists – absolutely stacks of bike related stuff 🙂

A line quickly formed and moved at an impressive rate considering the time of the morning.

Bikes were setup to suit each rider (if they had their measurements with them!)

This is where it got very fun. I ended up with a 54cm Pinerello FP6. This boded well as I had a particular liking of them and Dan my Vattenfall riding partner had hired one as well.

not shabby at all.

Campag Chorus, very nice – I’d ridden it on my Moulton TSR30. Refined.

I had a few of my own bits. I use my own saddle and pedals on other bikes..

and a few other essential things for hot weather riding :

We finally got outside.. 🙂

And off we went:

The scenery was simply stunning.

after a few miles I decided I wanted my seat post a little higher – so I went ahead, stopped and got adjusting it. 3 other people decided this was a good idea and did similar things.

A nice gap to the group had developed, so it was time for some organisation to bridge it.

Although new to the concept of chain gang group riding the riders with me picked it up quickly and the turns went quite well over the next few miles. Sadly this is where fitness levels came out. 18/19mph up a 2-3% gradient was too much for some and during one of my turns I looked back to discover a couple of people had gone *pop*. ooops. sorry :-/

I bridged the gap with some tempo riding and then had a few minutes on the back of the group.

I was told we were coming to the final section and I decided it was time to test my legs and the bike.

25mph + up a 4% ish incline – acceleration very smooth and it felt ‘right’. Very pleasant.

a short break at the top allowed the group to gather..

Sadly there wasn’t a cafe or similar and the morning was getting warm. So we didn’t hang around.

On the way back – I needed some fast intervals as with the Vattenfall Cyclassic in a couple of weeks I needed to make this a valuable ride with some threshold work. This led me to really feel stability and and felt  total confidence in the front end of the bike.

Rotational weight was a factor – much much slower turning in than my Moultons – but once out of the turn it felt very quick accelerating.

Arriving back at the store, we parked up and awaited the return of the staff who had gone on their own ride 🙂

The Cannondale hire bike looked like this:

The McGhies staff were a pleasure to deal with

Thanks to McGhies, quality kit – setup to spec – and a pleasure to deal with. Highly recommended if you need to rent a bike in Vegas! (or need bike parts whilst there.)

Thanks to Bikefood for the drink and you can read an interesting article about sports drinks here

Thanks to Byron at Bikehugger.com for the bag of goodies we distributed after the ride.

Thanks to ShuttVR for letting me test their new material. It was great and I’ll be wearing again in high heat!

and thanks to all the other riders that made it such fun and special thanks to @Gdead and @Punkrokk that organised the whole thing. Same again next year!

Addendum.

I really liked that FP6. Really really liked…  so much so… I ended up getting something slightly better..

And that’s what I’m racing this year.

I’ll be doing the 2012 ride – with my training bike that I”ll be bringing from the UK. I need to train whilst in the US and I’m looking forward to multiple 5am starts!

—

alien8 co-organises 44CON held in London, UK. We’re planning a bike ride along part of the Olympic road race route the weekend after this years event.