Palo Alto and Los Altos have fantastic cycling spots, Old La Honda being one of them. Also lots of great trail running like Rancho San Antonio Mountain View is close enough to where it would only add a few more miles to your route. It's probably the cheapest of the three cities. There aren't really open water swims nearby unless you head to the ocean (you don't want to swim in the Peninsula), but Stanford's Master's team is fantastic. The cycling and triathlon communities are strong here, but probably not as much as in Boulder. While it is expensive, it's a great area and I love living here.

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https://www.strava.com/athletes/10327392

You'll be fine on $95k/yr. MV is a bit cheaper than than MP/PA/LA. $2K-$2500/mo will get you a nice 1br apt.


For Menlo Park/Los Altos/Palo Alto, most folks ride out to Woodside. You can do Canada road (rolling), or climb up to Skyline via. Old La Honda, Kings Mtn., etc.

Burgess Pool in MP has masters, and open dropins. Lots of fitness clubs: 24hr Fitness, JCC, etc.

For running, Rancho is the best place.

The best part is the weather supports year-long outdoor training. The worst part is the hours you'll be working.

Tons of cyclists and triathletes, and some really great bike shops. For tri clubs there are GGTC, Sheeper, SVTC, and Kain.

Feel free to PM me with specific questions.

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ECMGN Therapy Silicon Valley:
Depression, Neurocognitive problems, Dementias (Testing and Evaluation), Trauma and PTSD, Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI)

You've got great info from previous posts (and the stuff above). Also Eagle pool in Mt. View is nice. In addition there are trails galore in the mountains. Huddart Park, Wonderlich park, etc, etc. My favorite rides are Kings Mt. and Page Mill. (both for climbing). Stanford masters would humble anybody slower than Phelps.

Cost of living is serious, and, keep in mind that taxes take a bigger bite out of the higher income you'd earn there as apposed to some place where the pay is lower, but the cost of living is lower. That said; the area is really something out of this world when it comes to quantity of smart/type "A" hard workers - can get easy to get sucked into lots of work hours - which is great, unless, you're a triathlete -_-

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I saw this on a white board in a window box at my daughters middle school...
List of what life owes you:
1. __________
2. __________
3. __________

Hi -

Its an incredible place to train, particularly if you are from the East Coast. I moved here 25 years ago from Pennsylfania and could not believe how good the conditions are for training. Long climbs, flats, hot conditions + zero rain in summer, winter never gets too cold and you can ride, run, swim all year.

Plus if you are in tech, the career options can't be matched. And you will find plenty of training partners at most companies. Many have noon rides, or early AM rides, or runs on the weekend, etc. Lots of races in the Bay Area too.

Good luck!

One of the best areas in the world for cycling and running. I know less about swimming other than training will be nearly all pool swimming, outdoor pools year round. It's a big advantage being able to comfortably train outside year round. The drought has made for some fantastic winter riding/running the last few years.

Where do people go in Mountain View? I have stayed there several times for work and i thought it sucked. No nice places to run, and traffic lights everywhere making it impossible to run continuously. Ran through some park there as well that was just a swamp. When people say MV is great do they mean some place outside of MV?

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_____________________
Don't forget to attack!

In MV I used to run at Shoreline (Shoreline blvd deadends into a park/golf course ~1/2mi. past Google).

If you are going to drive, just go to Rancho.

For cycling, head West and get to Foothill Expressway and head N to Page Mill, Arastradero, or Sand Hill to get to Portola Valley and Woodside where the great biking is (or just drive to Woodside and launch from there).

MV certainly isn't as convenient as PA/LA, but it's not bad at all.

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ECMGN Therapy Silicon Valley:
Depression, Neurocognitive problems, Dementias (Testing and Evaluation), Trauma and PTSD, Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI)

Grew up in palo alto, went to college here, medical school and residency in sf, and back to palo alto for my career. You're 27 and out of a relationship. I honestly would commute to Mt. View, Palo Alto, and live up in SF. The suburbs won't be great for your dating life and the night life is just not what the city would provide. Training is great up in SF and it's just a 30 minute drive down to the peninsula with all the rides you described although most city folk just bike over the bridge and do stuff in marin which has just as awesome rides. Al the companies (if you are in tech) shuttle their employees down (if need be since a bunch have sf offices as well). Be ready for sticker shock though. 95K is nothing to sneeze at..but this is the bay area so it is a different "norm" of income. Best of luck...

Yes, you need to drive..... and good luck with that!
Can you say car-mania and gridlock?

Good riding (a quick 90 min on weekdays)?
Forget it....good rides are at least 30-45 to get to....better drive...(Coast/Canada/Livermore)....
Those who think that Foothill Blvd, Portola, Old La Honda, Canada, etc. are fantastic riding have not seen much of the world or usually ride consuming large quantities of medical brownies.

Good trail running in the valley:
Drive....
Shoreline? You mean the Sunnyvale/MV sewage ponds?
No Thank You.

Open water swimming?
Drive...
over to the coast or up to Golden Gate where the water of the Bay actually gets "recycled".
But the Great Whites really like the whole area too....especially juveniles are adventurous and learn by test-biting things....exciting!

Suburbia at it's worst and those who think this is a great place to live (and have a social life) must not have traveled....
But Money is good, and so are cost of living. If you are a Techie, have no real social life, no interest in Arts and Culture, pull down 100K (which you'll spend mostly just to live there), you may like it.

I am stuck here for now....but I'd rather be elsewhere.

wow. I lived there for 10 years ('87 - '97) and visit all the time. Not heaven to me either 'cause I don't like lotsa people and DO love snow. But, just 2 weeks ago rode up Page Mill after work. Got passed by no more than a dozen cars. Saw deer, turkeys and went past Skyline to see the coast. Not bad for a major metro area.

I'm not into Arts and Culture (too busy w/family/training) - but SF kinda, sorta has some of that (tongue in cheek).

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I saw this on a white board in a window box at my daughters middle school...
List of what life owes you:
1. __________
2. __________
3. __________

If you are 27 then do it. I got offered to move there in 2009 at 44 but it made no sense financially given that I was well ahead of the finance game in Canada and it would be going backwards financially by 20 years or so given the cost of living. At 27, you are just starting off. If you are in tech, Silicon Valley is the place to be. Training venues are beyond awesome in all sport plus you have Tahoe nearby if you are craving snow sports.

Tech scene in Boulder is also good, and housing is way cheaper. But you're not in silicon valley. If you are on the technical/development side, it really does not make a diff where you do development work. But if you are on the business side (unlikely at 27 in high tech), then there is silicon valley and there is every other place on earth. So I have to spend a lot of time in airplane and hotels to be in silicon valley (and every other place in the world).

I say you just pull the plug from the DC area and head over NOW!!!!

I've got a pretty cynical view of SV. The nice places to recreate are too far away from where you can afford to live (which is also pretty far away from your job, and if not your first job, then your next one, which is part of the reason you live in SV, so that you can be working again on Monday after you lost your prior job on Friday), so then your choices are to suffer in soul-swallowing traffic or to instead wallow in mediocrity on the filth-ridden "trails" that are nearby the shitty overpriced 1bd apartment you can barely afford. That's starting to get ranty so I'll shut up.

I know that there are places I could live happily there, but 95k/yr wouldn't even come close to making that happen. Or, I could find a sweet place to live that's relatively more affordable and be faced with a 2hr commute.

Works fine for many many people, but it's death by a thousand cuts for me. I'd go Michael Douglas in "Falling Down" within a year there.

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Eliot
blog thing - strava thing

My 2 cents

I have lived in Menlo Park for 15 years. Being single you might find SF better (although MV might be OK), as PA and MP can be kind of lame for younger singles - from what I have heard (although if you are into older women I have heard the cougar scene is alive and well up at Rosewood on Sand Hill :) ).

I believe the biking is better down here than Marin (too much traffic on roads with no shoulders, plus you need to cross the GG bridge - which sounds cooler than it really is -crazy amounts of tourists). The coast rides on the peninsula are nice with limited traffic on most roads - can pick 2-3 ways to go over and come back. Once out to the coast you can do some loops on Highway 1 on the coast and some inner small roads.

The running trails here are awesome - way better than Marin (which other than some famous ones -Dipsea - have a lot of exposed fire roads). I have been dropped off in Rancho San Antonio park and run up to the ridge, along the ridge, and back down to MP for 30-35 mile runs w/ only 3 miles of pavement. Once you get a bit out on the trails you are by yourself - amazingly a lot of people don't seem to utilize these trails - at Huddart I can do 20 mile runs and maybe come across a few people.

Bad side - traffic to Tahoe blows!!! Cost of living (mostly due to rental price) is crazy from what I have been reading.

Good side - every other bike you see in Woodside is $10-15k, you can pick up nice used stuff cheap :)

Ugh. I lived in SF for 5 years and commuted down to Palo Alto for work. Found a decent place on the peninsula and now I'm commuting to SF to work. Cummuting sucks and I actually had easier access to running/riding when I lived in the city!!

Golden handcuffs. Lots of great employment opportunities that for some reason don't exist elsewhere despite the fact that we are selling "work is a thing you do, not a place you go". Now I'm getting ranty.

At 33 married w/ kid we don't even look at houses for sale in the Bay area. Just trying to enjoy being here and save a bit until we can relocate North. Traffic is getting LA-like and trying to go to Tahoe/Napa/Carmel, or any of the other amazing places nearby is not worth it on Fridays or Sundays.

I love it here and being able to hop on my bike and be at the Base of Old La Honda in 20 minutes is awesome. BUT all that comes with a price. And I miss trail running. Would love to move to Marin, but it doesn't really solve my commute/affordability issues.

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/kj

http://kjmcawesome.tumblr.com/

I live in CO, denver area. The company I work at has a large presence in sunnyvale.

There is a waiting list of people who want to transfer from sunnyvale to CO, few want to go the other way. The reason is simple, traffic and housing. People are fed up with million dollar single family homes and gridlock.

Mind you, Boulder is one of the more expensive places in CO and the whole Denver area is starting to get pretty trafficky. That's any growing city in America right now, but the bay area takes the cake.

If I had a job offer at google or some company that treats you like a king then I'd go to the valley in a heartbeat, but if it's just 'some job' then I'd steer clear. Not to say CO is where you should be, but having just moved from CA a few months ago silicone valley is not at all worth the cost IMHO.

Wow I think a bunch of you guys just don't get out much. kj: on trail running, have you ever run in Wunderlich or Huddart? They're both great (not flat, but great -- and they connect at the top). Rancho San Antonio has already been mentioned. Arastradero/Foothill is good too (they connect for runners). And that doesn't even count all the stuff on the other side of Skyline. I can run from my house almost all the way to the ocean on trails. You can do the same thing from the back of Stanford, with only like a mile of pavement. BTW also for those in MV, Los Altos has a system of trails you can run on in the hills.

And the road riding is also amazing! Yeah Foothill isn't the best (mainly because of the stoplights) but not even sure why that was brought up because everything west of Foothill is awesome, from Los Gatos all the way up to 92, too many roads to even list! OLH is great, but there are at least 5 roads I like even better. And if you want TT practice, Canada is hard to beat, but the loop (clockwise) is good too. I even like doing Canada/92/1/84 on my TT bike.

So yeah not sure what any of you are talking about.

The road riding is absolutely unbeatable. And I LOVE running at Huddart and Wunderlich. BUT after commuting home, I have to drive to get to the trails. I live in Menlo Park right off 101 and best case it takes me 30 minutes to get there. And I'm really bummed that none of the great trails in the area allow dogs.

So if I could live West of 280 (or even Alemeda de Las Pulgas) then my life would be much better. Just need to save my pennies so I can move to Woodside/Portola Valley/Los Altos Hills.

I absolutely love living here, it's just bumming me out lately that all the great trail are just a bit too far to get to.

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/kj

http://kjmcawesome.tumblr.com/

You'll do fine living like a college student with roommates but don't expect middle class living arrangements at that pay level. Six years out of school as a software engineer you should be able to do better as long as you stay away from startups yet to acquire venture funding, maybe $150K. While that won't buy you more than a one-bedroom condo in a decent location it's enough to live comfortably as a single person. I have no idea what the situation is like for other vocations.

From the BLS spreadsheet the May, 2013 median, 75%, and 95% pay for software engineers is $130,790, $151,570, and $179,440 for systems software people; and $127,190, $154,960, and $184,060 for applications developers. For completeness the 10% and 25% numbers are $92,570 and $108,610 for systems; $80,040 and $101,370 for applications.

New graduates at the big companies with good internship experience are landing $110K in base pay with $170-$190K total 4-year packages. You're competing with these people for rent with an order-of-magnitude constructed less each year than new office space.

For example Sunnyvale added just 2038 housing units between 2000 and 2010 and I haven't seen any developments with more than 4 residential floors. There's 2.4 million square feet of office space going in where I work, with room for 8000 employees at a generous 300 per. LinkedIn claims their new campus will hold up to 2900.

Buying you're competing against people who cashed out millions in stock or are executive level with $400K+ compensation packages. Even safe but not so nice neighborhoods are pushing $1M for a 1500 square foot 3/2 ranch built in the late 1950s, and nice areas start at twice that.

Where the alternative is commuting hours a day, engineers are willing to pay _a lot_ for housing.

With 40% of national venture capital spending, 70% of the unicorns, and all the big companies startups grew into there's no better place for a tech career although that comes with compromises.

I bought a double-wide mobile home in Silicon Valley on which I pay ~$1150 a month rent plus $540 for the chattel loan on the building and $450 annually in property taxes.

Traffic is very bad too, but living around Sunnyvale everything from San Jose to Menlo Park is a comfortable bicycle commute that will give you up to 125 base miles a week some of it faster than parked cars on the adjacent highway 101.

Road riding here is year-round even in the mountains. As long as you don't go south of the bay, rarely over 80 or under 50 during daylight hours.

Terrain varies - starting at my home or office in Sunnyvale on a weekday there are a few flat places to ride about an hour without interruptions from stop signs and traffic lights. There are lots of nice hills for 3+ hour rides starting at my door step.


$3000-$3500 if you want two bedrooms.


I spent the first fifteen years of my adult life in Boulder, CO and it was awesome. I left because it's a third-tier tech city and I care more about what I'm doing during my 50-60 working hours each week than the home I live in. That hasn't paid off yet financially, although I've done interesting things over the last 8 years I wouldn't have any place else and gotten closer to winning.

Second-tier cities are Boston, New York, LA, and maybe Washington DC. Boston gets less than 1/4 of the investment of the Bay Area, and all them together don't match it.

Third-tier cities are Austin, Boulder, San Diego, Portland, and Seattle with about 1/20th of the activity.

Boulder, CO does have great road riding - 15 minutes on my bike from home or office got me Flagstaff mountain, canyons, or plains rides - although the mountains are seasonal due to sand and gravel and there are days at lower elevations with snow that quickly melts or sublimates at .

It makes an _enormous_ difference after a few years in industry and you can't come close to the opportunities in the San Francisco Bay Area any place else in the world.

As a new graduate you can do well in any tech city, learning new things through work at the limit of your capabilities.

At the principal engineer level appropriate opportunities at series-A venture funded startups are essentially non-existent in third tier cities like Boulder becoming more so when you filter out companies with truck-sized holes in their business plans.

Big company positions at that level are also exceedingly rare.

The financial side is that Silicon Valley is your only viable option if you want to cash-out and stop working for a pay-check. As a non-founder at a startup you need a ten-figure market cap to do that, which doesn't happen between the coasts where exit values are 90% lower. As an executive level individual contributor at a big company $225K in base salary and 7-figure 4-year equity package will get you farther along than what you can land elsewhere.

You will freaking love it up here.

NorCal bay area is hands down the best place in the USA for year-round riding. No snow, tons of sun, and some of the most bike-friendly mountain roads you can get in the immediate vicinity of your neighborhood without being in the boonies at all.

You'll be fine on 95k/yr as a single. Won't be luxurious, but you'll be fine. Now if you were looking to buy a home and start a family, things get a lot dicier, as real estate here has always been nutso, and it's $$$$.

The only conceivable tri-related drawback is lack of open-water swimming sites (there are only a few) but that really doesn't limit anyone. Tons of races in SBR, tons of cyclist every weekend out on the roads making it safer for everyone, amazingly beautiful locale, etc. It's the real deal.

Everyone I know who left for higher paying jobs wishes they could come back. I know there are exceptions, but amongst the people I know, not a single person has left and not regretted it -4 of my friends left for much higher paying jobs in the Midwest and east coast saying they'd be fine, and they came hustling back within 2 years, one of them even breaking an contract which he got sued over (he didn't mind as long as he could come back!)

The main drawback for you - you won't want to leave once you settle in here! (And Palo Alto/Mountain View locale is exactly what I'm talking about.)

I just moved from Boulder, not the same place it used to be 25 yrs ago. It's way over rated, prices are crazy and the restaurants think they are Michelin value. What a joke. Went back and spent 1yr, had enough, just moved to the SF North Bay area love it.
You will have a great time out here.
Mt Diablo is a great training area if you stay down in that area.
Good luck move west !

I live in the South Bay - Almaden, close to Morgan Hill. I can run into a county park, from my front door - and go for miles. I've got 30-90 miles loops on my bike - with very few lights or stop signs. Pedaling past vineyards, farms and open space. Hubby works in Santa Clara - commute is 30 - 45 minutes ~ not fun, but worth it. I can be on a beach in 40 minutes, a lake in 10, skiing in 4 hours. SF in an hour. We hit 100 degrees 5 or 6 times a year, our usual highs are about 85. We drop below freezing a few times a year, usual lows are 45-55. It feels pretty dang awesome.

Now, if we only had water......... ;-)

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Linda
~Still recovering from IMLT

QED.

Not my kind of "outing" I would enjoy.
Getting out would mean starting a trail run or good ride at my house, and not worry about getting killed on my way to good riding.

No Go in SV unless you reside in the Hills.

Initially I had written off taking the shuttle down from SF, but if I'm honest with myself I probably spend over an hour each day in my car right now so it's just a matter of staying disciplined at starting workouts before 6am. It's an n=2 anecdote, but both my friends who initially moved to san fran eventually came down to the valley and now have a 10min bike ride instead of an hour+ on the google shuttle / caltrain. I like most parts of this adventure, I might just have to try it and find out. Dating anywhere around the Bay Area makes me a bit nervous with the guy:girl ratio being what it is...