Group Ride

What about a Saturday 9:00 am ride? You can’t possibly have to work then.

Well, as it turns out, Jörg was right. I didn’t have to work then. I did have to play for a wedding that afternoon, but that was another story, and I was sure I could squeeze in a ride in the morning. (My Lovely Lovely was less certain, mind you, since there were things around the house that needed to be done, but we worked that one out all right. She is, after all, lovely lovely.)

There was a nice group there: Jörg, Bobby, Dr. Bob and Bob, Karen, Lisa, Tom, Mike, Keith and Rick. (Bob, not to be confused with either Dr. Bob or Bobby) and Keith took off to do a mountain bike ride. They planned to swing by Wal-Mart to pick up some other riders (wow, they really do have everything you need at Wal-Mart) but the rest of us planned to hit the road. No one in living memory could recall the last time that Rick, Dr. Bob and I had all been on a ride together.

It was what we call a “social ride”. That is, the pace was easy so everybody could just enjoy the morning and chat. I had a great time. (I don’t know about anybody else. After all, I got to chat with them, but they were reduced to having to chat with me.) We took a route that I hadn’t been on for awhile (mind you, lately it feels like I haven’t been on any route for awhile) but which I remembered well. The temperature was in the mid sixties and the wind was certainly present but not brutal, and I got a chance to catch up with some people. (Socially speaking, that is. Even I didn’t have to catch up physically, since the pace was too gentle for anyone to get dropped.)

The weather prediction had been for no rain, and it was almost wrong. We could see the clouds ahead of us as we came in, and the sky spat a little bit, but nothing major.

As we were riding in over the last mile, I recalled a lesson I had once heard someone given on when it was inappropriate to sprint.

If someone tells you they aren’t going to spring, you shouldn’t necessarily believe it. That might merely be a tactic. But, if you’re attentive, you can tell when a (nonverbal) truce has been called and there won’t be a sprint. It is quite gauche to sprint at such times.

This day, of course, there was no question of a sprint. It simply wasn’t that kind of a ride. So, I waited until we were all of three feet from the finish line and, just as pure silliness, nipped ahead. Mind you, I had to get up to nearly 16 miles an hour to do that. Whew. (This was a really social ride. We came in with an average pace of about 14.3 mph.)

The whole ride was great. I wish you could have been there.

See you on the road.

I'm Back

You see, the thing about new year’s resolutions...bear with me here, I know it’s not new year’s…unless of course you’re reading this long after I wrote it…which you might be, I suppose…let me start again.

You see, the thing about resolutions is that 83.12% of them don’t get kept.¹ (I can hear someone now: What? Footnotes in a blog? Really? I don’t do footnotes.²) So that will be last foot note in this blog.³

This is precisely what happened to my recent resolution to ride more. It didn’t get kept. Well, not until today. I got up bright and early…well, early anyway. It was a little chilly out, so I put on my snazzy new Seyboro Cyclist vest.

It’s not new.

I put on my snazzy-

It’s not-

What?

It’s not new. You’ve have that vest since the summer.

Okay, so technically it’s not new, but this is the first time I’ve worn it on a ride, so it’s kind of like new. I hadn’t been on the road more than a minute when I decided that the vest had been a good idea.

It was a little windy. The windy season here is from January to December, so of course it was a little windy.

There were a lot of dogs out this morning, but since they were all behind fences, I was not trouble. That said some things to me as I passed that sounded rather rude, but I’ll let that go.

I also encountered some road kill. First was a raccoon. Then I spotted a container of McDonald’s french fries. While the raccoon (not that I subjected it to a close inspection you understand) appeared to be intact, the french fries had clearly met with a car. I also spotted a grapefruit. The grapefruit actually didn’t look so much like road kill as it did someone waiting for a bus. It was just sitting at the side of the road minding it’s own business. I had an image of a truck full of grapefruit pulling by and this one hopping on board.

It was a strange morning.

I passed a small cemetery which was being mowed. There was a gray truck sitting there with an empty trailer behind it. A man on a riding mower was circling the graves.

Now, I know that somebody has to mow graveyard’s but it still struck me as a little creepy. I wondered if odd things ever happened to him. Ten seconds after I passed the graveyard, what appeared to be the same truck with riding mower now on the back of the trailer, sped past me.

Not that it’s possible, of course. I’m just telling you what I saw.

I passed a group of people setting up a yard sale. Well, it was more of a portable flea market in a parking lot. One woman was leaning up against her SUV watching everyone else work. The she saw me. Her head slowly turned to follow me as I rode past, as if she had never seen anything like me before and was trying to figure out what I was. I have seen exactly the same look on the face of a curious cow.

This is not intended as an insult to the woman who may, for all I know, be quite personable. She just had that same look on her face.

Everyone was still asleep when I left, and everyone was still asleep when I got back home. I think it’s going to be a quiet morning.

See you on the road.

Notes :

1. The accuracy of this statistic may be somewhat doubtful in view of the fact that I simply made it up.
2. Neither do I.
3. Except for this one.
4. This is the Will Cuppy Memorial Footnote. If you’ve never read Will Cuppy’s work, then you don’t know what you’ve been missing. Of course, if you don’t know what you’ve been missing, it probably doesn’t trouble you much. Oh, what the heck, look him up anyway. You’ll thank me later.

Random Encounters

My Lovely Lovely and our daughter and I were out shopping for back to school supplies (I can still hear my daughter screaming at the thought that school is once again immanent) when, in the parking lot, I noticed a car with a “share the road” bumper sticker. It also said, “Same road. Same rules. Same rights.” I liked it. To top it off, the car had a bike rack on the roof. (I should probably apologize for that one, but I won't.) “Ah…” I thought, “A fellow cyclist.”

Well, no. Actually what I thought was, “That’s a cool bumper sticker. I want it.”

At that moment the car’s owner, an older gentleman, walked up. “I like your bumper sticker,” I told him. I’m not normally one to strike up conversations with strangers, but I really liked that bumper sticker. I’ve seen several versions of it here and there, but none qute as snazzy as that one.

Yes, I did just use the word snazzy.

Alas. I have bumper sticker envy.

He nodded at me. “Are you a cyclist?”

“Yes.” (Hey, even though I haven’t been on the bike in a while, I finally managed to go for a ride the other day, so I’m a cyclist. I can still say that.)

“I just moved here. Is there a club in town?”

“Why, yes there is.”

I got his e-mail address and then e-mailed him a link to the club’s website and sent an e-mail to President Dave to get him put on the club’s e-mail list. We pride ourselves on snappy service.

Later that evening, I was talking to the guy who lives across the street from me, and, apropos of nothing, he said, “You’re a brave man.”

I blinked at him. I couldn’t really think of anything to say in response to that. I mean, what do you say to that, especially when you have absolutely no idea what the other person is talking about?

“Because,” he explained, “You ride on that road out there. I’ve driven past you and thought, uh-uh. I wouldn’t do that.”

Well, it’s either ride that road or don’t ride, since that’s the only way out of the subdivision I live in, and I’m not going to toss my bike into the belly of the two thousand pound beast and drive somewhere in order to ride. Also, contrary to the opinion of my neighbor (and my Lovely Lovely and my mother and several random friends…hmm…I’m a bit outnumbered here, but that doesn’t make me wrong) the road isn’t that bad. Well, most of the time. Just stay away from it during the morning drive to work and the evening drive home (unless of course you’re bike commuting, in which case you just have to be visible and predictable and careful, right?).

He then proceeded to tell me some random stories of crazy drivers, apparently in order to show me just how brave I am. I did not enjoy this. I don’t really want to hear stories of crazy drivers on the road. I know they’re out there. I just don’t want to dwell on it.

The fact is, Sir Isaac Newton has explained to us in detail how bad things can happen to us out on the roads. (That wasn’t precisely his focus while he was formulating the laws of motion, but it works out to be the same thing.) Physics is not your friend when you are on a bicycle and have an encounter with someone in a car. We all know that, but how many of us really think about it?

I don’t.

I don’t intend to stop riding, so I think about the risks enough to wear my helmet and my RoadID and carry a cell phone and be conscious of what’s going on around me, but I don't obsess about it.

My Lovely Lovely, who doesn’t ride (yet) gives it a bit more thought where I am concerned, and we sometimes have to discuss it. She comes up with all kinds of reasons about why I’m not to commute on any given day – it’s too hot, it’s too cold, it’s too dark, it might rain, it’s too windy…but the last one is always it’s too dangerous. If I deflect all of the other objections, that's the one she brings up in the end.

The fact it, I’m a better, healthier, happier and probably nicer person when I get a chance to ride. Riding is my anti-depressant, and all the side effects are good.

All the non-car related ones, anyway.

So I still ride.

See you on the road.

The Family Y Triathlon

Let me correct your first possible misapprehension.

I did not participate in the triathlon. That is not to say that I have anything against triathlons in general. I just hate running unless I’m being chased by a bear. My job was directing traffic.

I was originally going to call this event The Y Tri, but then I realized that sounded a bit negative. After all, why not try, right?

My usual post is at an intersection where the riders have to make a left turn. A short distance down the road is the turn-around point, then they come back through the intersection again.

I got there a bit early, parked and pulled out a book to read. (In case you’re wondering, it was Pride and Prejudice and Zombies – the Jane Austen classic updated to include zombies and martial arts mayhem. I recommend it, if you like that sort of thing.)

Suddenly, an unmarked police car driven by a highway patrol officer pulls up. Okay. Then, suddenly, three highway patrol cars rush in and pull up, all of them pointing at me. It was like a scene from a movie, except that it wasn’t followed by the officers leaping out, pointing their weapons at me and arresting me. It was still a little unnerving, though.

It turns out that, unlike previous years, we were to have a fairly heavy police presence on the bike route of the triathlon. I was, of course, wondering why. Had something unusual and violent happened the previous year? Well, no. When asked directly, one of the officers explained: “They asked for help and it was a slow day.”

My partner at the intersection was Jörg, and he is ideal company for an event like this. His running commentary ranged from the ribald to the profane but was uniformly entertaining. There was a case of mistaken identity that was nearly hysterical but probably not suitable for this particular page.

The riders ranged from the intensely competitive (aerobars, disk rear wheel, aero helmet)
to those who were just hoping to survive to the end (mountain bike, no shirt, tattoos, beer belly). They were young and old, focused and not so focused at all. There were several Seyboros in the bunch, too. Jorg seemed to know most of the competitors. He called out to one rider that she should be able to catch the guy ahead of her because he was so slow, and she came out of the saddle and had a go. She didn’t catch him.

We saw a truck from the volunteer fire department, lights going, edging down the street toward us, following that last rider. Now, I don’t know about you, but an emergency vehicle with lights flashing and riding my rear wheel wouldn’t make me particularly comfortable. We watched them make the turn and waited for them to come back, ready to pack up and leave. Then a highway patrol officer pulled up and told us that there was, in fact, another rider still out on the course. When the volunteer fire fighters came back, he told them, too.

We all waited, and there she came, pushing gamely along. She made the turn and came back, and everyone followed her out. First her, then the fire fighters, then a string of cars from each location on the course where someone had been directing traffic, then the highway patrol. It was quite a parade, really.

Jörg had ridden in, and I watched him make his way through the caravan of cars. As he rode past, I asked him if he wanted to take my traffic cone and vest for me, but, surprisingly, he didn’t. He rode up to the last rider and stayed beside her, keeping her company and giving her encouragement. Eventually, they turned off. I dropped off my gear and headed home with my pay beside me – a snazzy new T-shirt.

I have never competed in a triathlon, and, to be honest, I never expect to – it involves running, after all – but congratulations to all the competitors.

See you on the road.

Epic Ride

With the Seyboro Cyclist annual double century ride looming (and Cyclin' Missy's first century coming up) I've decided to post some tips on how to finish an epic ride. These tips were actually collected by Jorg. (The double century takes place in four loops of decreasing length. Knowing that fact might make some of the comments easier to comprehend.) Here they are, complete with Jorg's intro:

C-bros,
As you know, we have quite a few riders in the club who have finished the Double Century ride. I thought this might be a good time to ask them to reveal the one thing that made the biggest difference to them. As you will see, some things are deeply psychological, while others are just a little weird.

The proof, as always, is in the pudding: All of these tips have worked for the tipper...

Neil starts us off with a not-so-subliminal-after-all message:
Plan your "BUTT CREME" hydration and nutrition by approaching each loop "BUTT CREME" as four individual rides with "BUTT CREME" recovery fuel after each in the form of solid food you are used to "BUTT CREME" consuming.

I do remember that, after I completed the double century for the first and (so far) only time, I wasn't interested in sitting down again for three days afterwards. Over 11 hours in the saddle...sheesh...

President Dave, ever the pragmatist, continues with 4 ideas:
-Drink at least one bottle every hour, even if you don't feel thirsty.
-Keep some high-energy snacks in your car for the breaks at the school.
-Change into clean, dry clothes after the second loop.
-Maintain 18 mph!!! While it may seem easy on the first loop, it will feel very difficult on looop 3.

President Dave has completed the double more than once. As far as maintaining 18 mph seeming easy, that works as long as everyone else is maintaining 18 mph too instead of 20+!

Scott's tips to finishing the double century twice:
-Most important Hydration: Start Hydrating by Wednesday three days prior to the ride. Take the water bottle to bed if you have to. Your body needs to be saturated long before the ride.

If you aren't getting up several times during the night, you aren't hydrating enough!

-This is a big one: Come to the ride with your mind set that you will finish the Double Century. It's not an easy feat so any doubt may cause you to quit.

One of the most useful things about riding that anyone ever said to me came from Scott: "You have to start by knowing that you can do it." This helped me a lot near the end of the double century when I still felt like I could complete the ride, just as long as no one expected me to go over 12 mph. That's a story for a post in itself.

-I bring 4 Sandwiches, 2 with Turkey, Cheese and Tomato and 2 Peanut Butter and Jelly. I eat a sandwich after each loop and have one for recovery when the ride is over. With those sandwiches I will wash them down with a Yoo-Hoo or a Gatorade. I do take Tums to settle my stomach as well.

Bobby first introduced me to the idea of a Yoo-hoo after a ride. It didn't sound like a good idea at the time, but he was right. That's about the best stuff to drink after a hard ride that I've ever run into.

Dave Peacefoot takes a more philosophical approach:
Pain is temporary. It will subside and it will return.

Well, there you go. I can't argue with that one. I'm not entirely certain what to do with it, but I certainly can't argue with it.

Bobby has a practical angle:
Use your gears wisely, spin on the hills and use your big chain ring on the flats. Spinning will give your legs a rest and mashing will rest your lungs and heart.

I wish I had something either clever of witty to say here. Mind you, I haven't said anything either clever or witty yet, so why should this be any different.

Mike meanders back to a ride famously shrouded in Seyboro lore:
The "Double Century" is an endurance event so you need to make preparations of what to wear; eat; drink; sunscreen; resting on breaks and that sort of thing. It's an all day event and over the years many good riders have been left in the parking lot. So..prepare, prepare and prepare and if all else fails, call Velvie for the secret weapon...Justin.

Chuck managed to complete the double one year because his son Justin cussed him and got him back on his bike again after he had decided he had enough. That's what family is for, right?

I'll go with something a little more personal, but effective for me:
-Take a shower after every loop. The breaks are long enough and changing into a fresh kit will make the whole event seem much shorter than it is.
-In between the loops, eat something real. Forget the sweet stuff - I had ham and cheese bagels from Five Star.

After I finished the double, I also didn't want anything even remotely sweet for at least a week. I was so sick of candy bars and gels and everything of the sort that I didn't even want to look at anything sweet. I definitely made some bad food choices there. Well, I'll go ahead and add my own tip. Here's what did it for me:

If it's really hot, drink and drink and drink and don't be afraid to drop ice down your jersey to cool yourself off.

Yes, that's probably the most peculiar tip of them all, but it helped me out. Of course, I'd much rather ride in the cold than in the heat. Here's my other tip:

Ride in the middle of the group.

If you take too many pulls at the front, or if your pulls are too long, you'll wear yourself out.

If you hang out at the back of the group, you'll get the yo-yo effect. When you hit a corner, the people in front won't slow down too much, but the people in the back will end up having to slow down and lot and will then burn energy trying to catch back on. I know. I've been there. Don't be that person.

Well, if you've got an epic ride coming up, good luck.

See you on the road.

Group Ride!

Has it been awhile since I’ve been on a group ride with my fellow Seyboros?

This is a rhetorical question, which in this case means "a question I already know the answer to."

Well, I guess it has been awhile, because when I let it be known that I was going to go on the Memorial Day ride, I was counseled by Jörg to wear a name tag and was greeted with shouts of “Hey! New guy!” after I arrived.

I pulled my bike out of the back of the 2000 pound beast, only to notice that my computer sensor had fallen to the ground and my chain had come off. How appropriate.

It was nice to be greeted by people, even if they couldn’t believe their eyes.

Once we got moving, we had a great time, if a bit peculiar in spots. For example, I’m used to hearing shouts of “Dog left!” or “Car up!” but “Cow right?”

That’s a new one on me, and I thought it was a joke, but, no. There was a small cow trotting along beside the road. It was following the fenceline and sticking its nose into every crack in the fence, apparently trying to get back in where it hadn’t gotten out from and unable to figure out how to do so. (When we rode back by at the end of the ride, it had apparently found the way.)

I could hear snatches of conversation all around me. Triatheletes were trading battle stories. Roadies were talking of dogs of the past. Work stories, cycling stories, family stories, laughter, they were floating all around me, and I thought back to my first ride with the club. Somehow, I hadn’t known that cycling would be so social. I had this idea in my mind of everyone riding along, together, but each in his or her own world, and the nonstop conversation surprised me.

How do you tell if a hill is hard or if the pace is difficult? The conversation stops. But let the road level out or the pace slacken a bit and it’s back again.

We have a good time together out on the road. I eventually found myself riding next to Lisa. While we were on terrain unknown to me, we were practically in Lisa’s backyard, and she had more than a passing familiarity with every dog on the route.

“Okay,” she’d say, “There are four dogs who live just on the other side of that bend, and they will run at you.” She was right, too. Dogs must like Lisa a lot. They chase after her everywhere she goes.

There was one dog that got encouragement. It was a very small puppy, but it exploded into barks as we went by, and people began calling out, “Come on, dog!” This may, in future days when this dog is no longer so small, prove to have been a tactical error.

We passed a field full of cows, stately matrons all, who watched us go by, heads swiveling slowly to keep us on view. (I later passed these same cows in the 2000 pound beast, and they ignored me completely. Apparently they are only interested in cyclists.)

I was treated to the sight of a rider I didn’t know playing with her helmet as she rode. This seemed odd to me, and then a wasp flew out from underneath it! Apparently it had flown in through one of the air vents and she had been trying to get it out again. I'm sure both the wasp and the rider were happy that it succeeded.

We rode twenty miles out to the Bentonville Battlefield, which turned out to be closed on Memorial Day, go figure, hung out there for a bit and then pedaled twenty miles back home. The talk ranged from theology to cloning to turkey nutrition to dogs I have known to what it’s like to work in a prison to cows to home life to…well…pretty much everything really.

I can’t guarantee that everyone had a great time, but I think they did. Even the rider with the (fortunately painless) wasp in the helmet, allergy rash, bug bites and, to top it all off, a bloody knee from a classic clip related slow motion fall in a parking lot. Hey, most of us have done it, and you guys who haven’t, there’s still time. Just wait.

It was great to do a group ride again. I was urged to do another one before next memorial day, and I think that’s good advice.

At the end of the ride, Jörg asked, “How are the legs?” The legs are fine. I’m ready to go again.

See you on the road.

Cars and Things

As far as I can tell, most drivers are not actively trying to kill bicyclists. They just don't care whether we live or die. If a driver wants to turn right 6 inches in front of me without signaling, that is, apparently, my problem,
-Del Dickson

In 15 years of riding and racing, there were so many times when trucks and cars passed by just a bit too close. Sometimes they’d be so close I could feel the vacuum-like force that is typical of a large vehicle passing at high speed. It’s amazing how easy it was to brush off all those close calls and keep riding, never really conscious of the minute difference that separated all those moments from the one that landed me in a hospital.
-Diana Panchyk

Virtually every cyclist, and certainly every roadie, has had more than one close call with a motorist who made too close a pass ─ sometimes unintentionally, but sometimes intentionally.
-Bob Mionske

You know, every time I read or hear about a cyclist getting hit by a car, it makes me feel a little twitchy on my next ride. When I hear a car approaching from behind, my back kind of prickles. After Dave had his encounter with a car, I thought a lot about it on my next ride, but I realized that Dave would hate to be the reason anybody stopped riding.

I read all of the statements above in the same day and then went out for a ride. It was a short one – twenty miles – but it was over a route that involved a fair amount of climbing, helped (if that is the word I want) by a screaming (and chilly) headwind. I was faced with the same conundrum that hits me every year when it starts to get cold. How do I dress?

In the beginning, I usually get it wrong. This time I was underdressed, and, despite all the work I was doing and the heat it generated, I was cold.

And twitchy. Let’s not forget the twitchy part.

But I have to admit that the vast majority of the cars who passed me did so not only safely, but courteously. Of course, all it takes is one person who’s inattentive or actively hostile to a guy on a bike to ruin your day or month or year or even decade.

So why ride?

That’s the very question my mother (who still worries about me) asks from time to time. She sees the health benefits (cardio, pulmonary, etc.) and she also sees the health risks (SPLAT!!!!!!!!!!!), and the latter agitates her more than the former comforts her.

I’ve certainly had enough people tell me that riding a bike on the road is dangerous.

I’ve also had someone say to me, “I don’t mind if people want to ride their bikes, just so long as they don’t do it on the road.”

“Where should they do it?” I naively asked.

“I don’t know.”

Not very helpful, really.

So I still ride on the road, but what do I do to protect myself out on the road?

Well, to be honest, there isn’t all that much you can do to protect yourself from a rampaging 2000 lb beast even if said beast is only going thirty-five miles an hour and is being driven by someone who is paying attention and values the lives of others.

I do have a Road ID that I wear containing some vital contact information. Granted, that won’t do much to protect me from getting hit in the first place, but it might help me out afterwards.

Other than that, be visible, be predictable, use common sense and then don’t fret about it too much because you’ll only torture yourself internally and end up as an unhappy person who used to ride and now sits in a corner staring at the microwave thinking it’s the TV set and wondering if all shows are this boring and wishing you were in the saddle instead, and nobody wants that, right?

You know what? I’m going for a ride.

See you on the road.

One Fine Day

Yesterday I expected to go home in the same way that I went to work: in a motorized vehicle. For reasons that shall remain obscure, I had to walk instead. Now, If you are an avid follower of this blog and have diligently committed every random fact to memory, then you know that’s a distance of a little over six miles. The weather was fine, and it was a very nice walk, but you learn some things when you finally walk a ride that you have so many times ridden. (I realize that sentence may perhaps be described as grammatically awkward, but I prefer to think of it as being intriguingly constructed.

1. Steve says: “Any walk over a quarter mile sucks. That’s why I always carry an extra
tube.”

Well, at the beginning of the walk, I did find myself wishing that I had my bicycle. Also, at the end of the ride, by which time my feet were beginning to complain a bit, I did wish I had my bicycle. In the middle of the ride, however…well, I wished I had my bicycle then, too.
The walk really was quite pleasant, but I do have to admit that I would nearly always rather be riding.

2. Many drivers care just as little about pedestrians as they do about cyclists.

I have often wondered if those drivers who honk as they are coming up behind me would honk if they were coming up behind a pedestrian. The answer, in at least one case, is definitely yes. This is particularly odd since I was walking on the correct side of the road, so the car was coming up behind me but was in the other lane. I don’t really know what message that particular honk was intended to convey, so I’ve decided it was something like, “Hey, how come you aren’t riding your bike?”

Drivers who don’t pull over to give any clearance to a cyclist hugging the shoulder, certainly don’t pull over to give any clearance to a pedestrian who is actually walking on the shoulder. I’ll admit that I tend to swing out to give such people a little extra room, but a lot of people don’t.

3. Dogs are different when you are on foot.

I’m not sure how to explain this one.

Two dogs who typically ignore me when I am on the bike came trotting out to meet me as I walked past. Well, I don’t know that they wanted to meet me precisely. One of them, fortunately the extremely small member of the pair, was giving every indication of wanting to see the color of my insides. Neither of them actually left their yard to pursue me, however. In the case of these particular dogs, I think they ignore me when I’m on the bike because they don’t want to chase me. Even the one who sounded like he was cussing me out in dog language was merely sauntering after me. If you can’t catch a guy who’s walking, then you aren’t really trying.

\There is a self storage place along this route with two chows guarding the fenceline. When I ride past, they bark at me and run along the fence and generally look fearsome and dangerous. (When I say two chows by the way, I actually mean six chows but four of them are recent additions and are slightly smaller than throw pillows. They are puppies, in fact.)
As I walked past, the puppies looked at the adults to figure out what to do about the interloper. One of the adults ignored me and the other one ran to the fence and wagged it’s body and gave a doggie grin and seemed to do everything in its power to communicate the fact that it was a good doggie and wanted to be friends.

I didn’t actually try the experiment to find out.

4. I see a lot more when I am walking.

Well, that one makes sense. I’m closer to the ground and going slower. Not everything that I saw was worth the seeing, mind you. I never realized how much manure gets spread on some of the fields that line this route. I never realized how much garbage lines the road, especially beer bottles and, oddly enough, cds. (No, I didn’t look at them to see what they were. They probably had manure on them.) I didn’t see that dead fox the last time I rode by.

I’m sure there was some natural beauty out there. It always seems like it when I’m on the bike, but I didn’t notice it this time.

I think the next time, I’ll ride instead.

See you on the road.

Heigh Ho

For the past week the temperatures have been in the seventies. The days have been beautiful for riding. So, of course, I haven’t had much time to ride. Today my desires and my circumstances coincided – it would be helpful to others if I rode my bike to work and I had the time to do so. The temperature: 37 degrees. With the infamous wind chill factor the temperature was equivalent to 31 degrees. If you’re standing still, that is. I don’t know what the heck it was if you were riding into the wind, but it was cold. If Murphy didn’t write a bicycling specific law, he should have.

I headed out not quite prepared for the temperatures. I was wearing my work clothes – slacks and a shirt, a coat with a broken zipper (not the most effective outwear, I’ll admit), a winter walz cap with ear flaps (if you don’t have one, get one now) and full fingered gloves. And a helmet, of course. It didn’t take me long to regret the absence of a balaclava, but I wasn’t going to turn around and go get one. Why? I have no idea.

When I went to put the helmet on, I saw that it had been adjusted for a head smaller than my own, which should have been an important clue to me but, somehow, wasn’t. It meant, of course, that the last person to ride the hybrid was my lovely lovely. This is rather an important fact, because she four or five inches shorter than I am. Does anybody see where I’m going with this yet?

I hit the road and something felt strange, but it took me a moment to realize that my saddle was too low. It only took a couple of seconds longer to realize that I didn’t have any allen wrenches with me. The smart thing, of course, would have been to turn around, get the wrench, adjust the saddle, all of which would have taken five minutes or less. So, of course, I didn’t do it. Why not? I have no idea. AI have to put this all down to some effect of having a Y chromosome.
Did you know it’s harder to ride uphill when your saddle is too low?

Well, it’s really pretty simply biomechanics and quite obvious to anyone who’s actually thinking, which, as I believe I have already demonstrated, I wasn’t doing this morning.

I spotted a German Shepherd early on in the ride, but then I realized it was in a fence. Then I saw, tacked to a stop sign, a very tiny placard for a missing dog. It appeared to be a terrier of some kind named Toby, but the sign was waaaaaaay too small to read. I then passed the self storage place that used to have two chows in their yard. They now have about six or seven chows in their yard – two adults and several puppies. They were all huddled up together, and seeing them should probably have made me wish I was snugly tucked under the covers at home, but that thought didn’t occur to me at the time. At least I was getting a ride in.

I would like to say thank you to the driver of the SUV from Georgia that slowed down behind me and then waited until it was safe and passed me slowly and with clearance. I would also like to say quite the opposite to the tractor trailer driver who whooshed past me with less than a foot of clearance.

It occurred to me this morning that, if a student rides his or her bike to work, he or she is looked upon as either being

a) normal

or

b) an object of pity for being so poor as to have to resort to the bicycle

but if a teacher rides his or her bike to work, he or she is looked upon as being utterly strange and a bit amusing. Oh, well.

I got a rather pleasant little ride in this morning – my commute is just over six miles – and that puts me six miles to the good, and I have a six mile ride home in front of me. Mind you, I think I’m going to try to borrow an allen wrench before I make that trip home.

The world is good when you can ride your bike to work.

See you on the road.

Daisy Chain

In the following story the names have been changed to protect the innocent and because I I can’t remember the real name of the person involved, so I have decided to call her Daisy.

The Story of Daisy

When you go on your first club ride, you will often be given helpful advice. (Here I am speaking of actual helpful advice rather than advice given primarily for its amusement value to the giver.)

Daisy was a teacher of spin classes who was taking to the road for the first time in preparation for a triathlon. There can be friendly rivalry between roadies and trigeeks or between triathletes and people who couldn’t run a mile if a bear were chasing them, depending on which side of the fence you sit on, but beginners, no matter why they are riding, always get good advice distilled from years and miles of wisdom. Now, just because you’ve only been doing something for fifteen minutes and someone else has been doing it for twenty years doesn’t actually guarantee that they know more about it than you do, but it’s got to be considered a pretty good indicator, don't you think?

Daisy didn't think so.

She was discovering a few differences between riding a spin bike and riding on the road. One difference is that you don’t control the environment. The temperature, the wind, the steepness of the hills, all of these things are beyond your ability to do anything about them. Another difference is that your bike doesn’t stay upright unless you make it stay upright. You have to pay attention to that. There is also the fact that your bike can wobble quite a bit, swaying from side to side in some sort of bizarre dance that makes everyone around you nervous.

Daisy was also discovering that people were offering her advice. The advice which she was given included such things as:

“You should drink water. I notice you don’t have a water bottle. Take one of mine.”

Daisy’s response was: “I think water bottles are just for show. People don’t actually drink while they’re on rides or in races.”

I have to admit that I found this a curious sentiment for someone who teaches a spin class. Do they not drink during spin classes? I honestly don’t know. I’ve ridden a spin bike and found it to be a less boring indoor ride alternative than some other things I’ve tried, but I’ve never taken a class. Don’t they drink?

I also discovered, on Daisy’s second ride when, for the second time, she nearly bonked, that she was on a low carb diet.

Now, for those of you who don’t know, on a lot of rides, your muscles are primarily powered by carbs. Bonking is what happens to you when your body uses up its share of the carbs and your brain decides that whatever blood sugar remains in your system needs to be saved for the proprietary use of the brain, all of which is a longwinded way of saying that your brain wants you to stop exercising, preferably RIGHT NOW!

A nasty headaches is an early symptom, soon to be followed by nausea, dizziness, and falling down. This is a battle that the brain is going to win. Fortunately, the bonk is easy to combat. Take in some carbs. Drink a soda, eat a candy bar, how about a gel? Your options are numerous.

Daisy, however, didn’t like this idea because, let us not forget, she was on a low carb diet. This is rather like taking your car on a long drive while it is on a low gasoline diet – not the best of all ideas.

Daisy didn’t ride with us many times. For one thing, she got tired of people offering her water. What I would have called an act of kindness seemed to tick her off. Maybe it’s because nearly every rider in the group offered her water, and she didn’t want it. (On her last ride with the club, she had a water bottle. She never drank out of it, and she later admitted that it was merely there so no one would offer her water. Curse you nice people!)

These rides were conducted in the summertime, and everyone ended up soaked in sweat at the end. Some of us, however, were still hydrated. Others, not so much.

Well, in the end, if you don’t want the advice which is offered to you, don’t follow it, but it is just possible that someone else may know better than you do from time to time.

Daisy disagrees, but that’s her prerogative.

See you on the road.

Riding the Hamster Wheel

I do not like to ride indoors. I am not alone in this, I know. I have never tried to imagine myself in the place of a hamster or Ian Anderson's One Brown Mouse, yet that is the inevitable comparison whenever I resort to pedaling indoors: I can imagine the little guy going round and round in his wheel and getting absolutely nowhere. If course, it’s probably better than nothing. Right? Right? Tell me it is. I need the motivation to keep going.

I have done the stationary trainer.

I hate the stationary trainer.

I begin to hate the sight of the wall in front of me. I’m wearing my cycling shoes, I’m on my bike, the pedals are spinning, and that wall is just sitting there in front of me. Oh, I can do it for awhile. My resolution is good for at least two or three minutes of pedaling to nowhere. Then I begin to get bored.

I tried music. I tried books on tape. Nothing worked. So I decided to try rollers.

I had been told that riding on rollers was a lot more like riding for real. In fact, this is true. It is so much like riding for real that I was able to crash for real. We’ll ignore the little incidents - such as the time my front wheel slid off and I came down hard on the bar - and we’ll skip right to the big one.

I did find the rollers more interesting than the stationary trainer, but that’s a lot like saying that I found the beige wall more interesting than the plain white one. It still wasn’t fun. So I tried watching cycling videos while riding the rollers. This helped quite a bit, actually, and, if I had been smart, I simply would have stuck with it. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, right? Well, it wasn’t broke, but I decided to fix it anyway.

One year during the Tour de France, a well known cycling coach put out, for free, a series of workouts inspired by the TdF stages. They were downloadable files that you could put on your mp3 player and ride along with. There was music and helpful suggestions and I figured, what’s the worst that can happen? I can try it and, if I don't like it, no harm done, right?

Um…no.

In fact, the worst that could happen was this: The coach was in my ears telling me to sprint, so I was sprinting hard. The bike slid sideways just a bit and then off the rollers. Now, I was in a little hallway, so I clung to the walls rather like Spiderman and the bike went out from under me and turned a complete flip in my kitchen. I climbed down from my perch and found that the chain was actually wrapped around the crank arm. It took me a bit to disentangle it, at which point I found that the rollers were still rolling. I had been spinning the pedals at quite a nice pace, apparently.

I put my bike back on the rollers and climbed on, only to find out that the rear derailleur was now useful only as an objet d’art.

Riding on rollers is very realistic.

I even went to the gym and climbed on a spin bike. I did not take a spinning class. I remembered what had happened on the rollers when I tried to let someone else tell me how to ride, so I figured I’d just do what I wanted on the spin bike.

This was as strange experience. There were little red dots on a monitor on the bike, one of which apparently represented me and one of which apparently represented my competition. (I decided arbitrarily to race against a variety of pros. I beat them all. It turns out it isn’t that hard to beat a little red dot. I'm sure it's quite a bit harder (which is my way of saying impossible for me personally) to beat the actual pros.

Watching a little red dot chase another little red dot around an imaginary track in an imaginary velodrome was not the most fun I have ever had. I suppose the dot chase did do something to liven up the ride. The giant fan blowing on my sweaty form simulated the wind. I have had less fun, such as riding the stationary trainer, but somehow the idea of pedaling and just not getting anywhere still doesn’t appeal to me.

Maybe I could hook the bike up to some kind of generator. I’m sure I could generate at least enough watts to power a radio. Not a big radio, mind you, just one of those little transistor things, and not long enough to listen to an entire program. Maybe long enough to listen to an entire song.

Actually, I’m not sure I could generate enough watts to power a radio. I have a feeling I’d get bored first.

Today, however, I have a chance to ride outdoors instead of indoors. I think I’ll do that.

See you on the road.

An Early Ride

Last night I went to bed early, and my brain said, “Maybe if I wake up early, I’ll go for a little ride before I go to work. My body laughed quietly to itself, snuggled under the covers and said, “Sure.”

Unfortunately…I mean, fortunately, I did wake up early. Quite a bit early than I would have liked, in fact. I eventually got out of bed and checked the weather. The temperature was on the midforties, not bad after two weeks of snow and ice and subfreezing temps. The wind was supposedly light. “That doesn’t sound bad at all,” my brain said. “No, not at all,” my body agreed. “Let’s go back to bed. I bet we can fall asleep again if we try.”

But I got kitted out – adding tights, booties and my lovely walzcap with the earflaps and headed out.

The first thing I noticed was the cold and the hill outside the front door… the two things I noticed were the cold, the hill outside my front door and the child screaming in the distance…the three things I noticed were the cold, the hill, the child screaming and the geese…the four...no…amongst the things…amongst the things I noticed were diverse items as the cold, the hill outside my front door, the child screaming and the geese.

As I went up the hill, my legs, apparently still under the impression that I had been going to go back to bed, began to protest. “We didn’t know you were serious about this!” I was, though, and the pain in my thighs helped me to know it. I heard a child give a loud and piercing scream followed by a second loud scream. I suspected this might be due to the unexpected sight of me in lycra. The scream was followed by laughter and then more laughter, at which point I was certain it was due to the unexpected sight of me in lycra, but I may have been wrong.

The sun had barely cleared the horizon and some kids were already out and waiting for the bus.

As I was starting to catch my breath after the hill, I saw a small flight of geese take off honking. It wasn’t melodious, but it still looked pretty.

I made the turn onto the road and took off. My body was still telling me that it had thought I was kidding, but it seemed apparent that I wasn’t going to turn back now, so we just went with it. I was passed by a couple of school buses and various cars and trucks, and I began to wonder how many of those people passing me thought I was crazy. I was fully expecting to get the freakshow look, but I wasn’t actually looking at any of the driver or passengers, so I don’t know if I did or not.

Suddenly, off to my left, an animal burst out of a screen of bushes and took off after me. It was what Basil Fawlty once referred to as “el perro microscopic” and, despite the fusillade of furious barks that it hurled after me, it didn’t have either the legs of the wind for that particular chase and began to fall behind immediately.

Well, at least I have better legs and lungs than an extremely small dog. Good for me. That’s clearly a step in the right direction.

Ahead I saw a woman carrying a plastic tub in one arm with a cat walking beside her for all the world like a dog at heel. They were only three feet away from the edge of the road, but they ignored a school bus, some cars, an SUV and a motorcycle. Then they saw me. Both the woman and the cat froze, eyes wide, staring at me. As I passed them, the woman gave a little uncertain laugh, the kind you give to prove that you aren’t terrified out of your mind. The cat wasn’t even pretending. It was clearly terrified of the guy on the bicycle. I got the freakshow look and then some.

I passed a house with two very large dogs who danced about their yard and made little feints in my direction, but neither of them came after me. A few minutes later I turned onto what must be the worst maintained road in the county. Everything on the bike was rattling, including my teeth. Then I reached my turnaround point and headed back.

The two large dogs were now three, and the third dog clearly had something important to say to me which it persisted in saying in a very loud voice even after I had gone by, but none of them set paw in the road, though one of them ran along the full length of its yard as I rode past.

The woman and her cat had apparently run off in terror for fear that the horrible apparition might come back, as indeed it had, and I eventually made it back home safe and sound.
Recipe for how not to ride well: be ill the night before, get up extra early on a winter morning, don’t eat any breakfast, don’t drink anything, head out on the road. It’s only common sense that you won’t be on top of your game.

Recipe for how to have a fun ride: be ill the night before, get up extra early on a winter morning, don’t eat any breakfast, don’t drink anything, head out on the road. That must be true, since my ride was a lot of fun. The enforced layoff has taken its toll and my sit bones have to get used to saddle again, but that’s okay. It’s still fun. A lot of fun, in fact.
See you on the road.

If you’re up early enough.

The Hot Dry Day

The Fable of Frank and the Greatest Water You’ve Ever Tasted

It was a hot day, but not to worry, according to Frank, because there was a springwell coming up which produced “the best water you ever tasted.” (I have to admit that I don’t actually know what a springwell is, but that’s okay. Live and learn.) The water was so good, Frank said, that everyone should go ahead and dump out whatever water remained in their bottles so they could fill them up at the springwell. Everyone took his advice. Everyone that is, except Frank himself, although this fact went unnoticed for the moment.

The group rounded the curve, and Frank pointed out the springwell. It was a pipe sticking out the ground, out of which came a stream of thick green water. Yummy. Well, what do you do when you’ve dumped out your water bottle and it’s a very hot day and you’ve been riding for awhile and are still miles from home? You drink what’s available, and the sound of slurping filled the air, rapidly followed by the sound of people spitting and gagging and then looking for some way to get the taste out of their mouths.

“There was so much iron in that water,” Dave says, “that it tasted like what you taste when you’ve got a bloody nose.”

“I just filled my bottles up from there yesterday,” Frank said, “and it tasted great!” The grin with which he said this, followed by the realization that Frank hadn’t dumped his own bottles out, probably contributed to the general air of disbelief with which this statement was greeted. This was followed by Frank politely but firmly declining to share his water with anyone else. Well, really, not all that politely.

Not too surprisingly, Frank eventually found himself leading the group. Being the only guy with water does a lot to help you outride everyone else. The even tenor of Frank’s ride, however, was interrupted by a sudden piercing scream. He turned around to find out what had happened.

What had happened was that the panting peloton, like the deer that longs for running streams, was on the lookout for water. They spotted a woman watering her garden and descended upon her en masse. They would have been friendly, even polite, but, when she was a group of lycra clad spandex wearing guys on bicycles pulling over at the edge of her yard, she shrieked, dropped her hose, with water still streaming from it, and ran for her front door as fast as her legs could carry her.

Upon being asked, “Did you drink from the hose?” Dave replied with an emphatic “Yeah,” and added. “We filled out bottles up, too.”

Now, what there may have been in the sight of a group of cyclists to send the poor woman shrieking and running for safety, I don’t know. I never did find that one out.
Still, live and learn.

Especially learn not to trust Frank when he makes a suggestion.

(Just to show that Frank is a good guy, one day I ran out of water on a ride. I was passing Frank’s hosue and saw him working in the garage. He gave me a drink and filled my bottles up with cold clear water that didn’t come from his favorite springwell.)

See you on the road.

On the Road Again

WOOOHOOOO I’m riding again! I can’t tell you what a joy it is to be back on two wheels after my enforced layoff!!

It was a lovely day, nearly seventy degrees out. Of course, the wind was blowing 15 to 20 mph, but you can’t have everything. We were slated to have an easy ride, with President Dave, Jorg, Mark and Lisa, Jerry and Frank, clearly a small but select group, by which I mean, people whose bare legs haven’t seen the sun in who knows how long because most of them haven’t been out riding for one reason or another.

Our goal was 20 miles at a lazy 15 mph, and that was pretty much what we did. That’s the kind of pace a fellow just on his first real ride after surgery needs.

As usually happens, most of us were riding around the parking lot as we waited for the ride to start. Frank did three laps, and we headed out. Before we got to the street, Frank’s wife honked at him. Apparently three laps of the parking lot and his kitchen pass was revoked.

Mark was, of course, riding his recumbent, which was even more fully tricked out than the last time I rode with him. I found this out when he honked back at Frank’s wife, and the horn on his bike was louder than the horn from her car. He later sounded his klaxon from behind us when we were on the road, and his wife Lisa issued a threat that involved both the horn and a part of his anatomy and no further details of which will be revealed here. It was a very loud horn.

At one point early on, the cry of “Dogs left!” was heard. Lisa had one or two rude words to say, since she is, for some reason, a dog magnet and since she was on the left side of the double paceline at that point. We heard a furious fusillade of barks followed by the appearance of two microscopic animals that might, if one stretched the definition nearly to its breaking point, have been called dogs. Whatever they were, they were both ferocious and game. They darted into the street at us, barely restrained by our yells of “No!” As we passed, they skidded to a stop in a manner worthy of a Bugs Bunny cartoon and then darted all the way across the road and took off after us again. In fact, they were actually gaining on us. Then Mark sounded his horn. Both dogs leaped nearly a foot into the air and, when they hit the ground, froze. That horn must have sounded like the trump of doom to them, and they were awaiting their fate in a paralysis of horror. We all thought it was pretty funny.

Later in the ride, the cry of “Rider off,” was heard. It was Mark. Jörg asked, “What? Did his satellite dish fall off?” This joke led Dave and Jörg to give a joint telling of:

The Story of Alan

Alan was to come over to Jörg’s house for a ride. Jörg gave him his address and started to rattle off directions, but Alan said, “I don’t need that. I have GPS.” Indeed, he did. What he had, in fact, was a computer with some sort of wireless satellite connection. Riding down the road, he could often be seen using a stylus to tap at a screen in the middle of his handle bars. He was sending emails from his bike. Now, I’ve heard of multitasking, but that just sounds like a way to ruin a good ride to me.

Alan had ridden a long way to get to the ride and had a long way to ride to get back home again afterward. He wanted to be back home by 4:05, so he set his GPS to track to the time for him and tell him when to turn around and head back. His GPS dutifully did so. “Turn around now to be back home by 4:05.” Of course, the GPS has calculated his distance traveled and the time it took him to travel that distance. It had not included in its calculations the fact that that he was on a bicycle and had a 20 mph headwind on his ride out and would have a 20 mph headwind on his ride back. He got home arournd 8:00. Take that, GPS.


Jörg was on his latest ride, which was also tricked out, but in a totally different way than Mark’s. He had gotten hold of an old Pinarello steel frame. His bike now had a hidden downtube cable, tube shifters, and tubular sew-up tires. He says they’re great as long as they don’t roll off the wheel while you’re riding. 175 psi makes for a different ride, right? Of course, the idea of the tire rolling off the wheel would make me think twice before trying it.

It was great being back on a ride after the surgery. All the equipment seems to be A-okay. Well, I don’t guess I should go that far. All the equipment seems no worse than it was before the appendectomy, anyway. After all, it’s still my equipment.

I saw some friends, traded some stories and spun the pedals. This is what life is all about.

Speaking of stories, at a later time, we will hear the story of Frank the water bottles that shouldn’t have been emptied but were. Stayed tuned.

I’m back in the saddle again. Bike Route 40, here I come.

See you on the road.

The Gullibility Factor

Note: I did have my first ride back after my appecdectomy, and it was a blast. Unfortunately, my computer ate the post I had written. I'll rewrite it and put it up tomorrow. And now for today's entertainment:

When you join a bike club as a new rider, you will be offered a great deal of advice and given a lot of new information. Some of it is even true. The trick is to learn to tell the difference.

On one of the routes we ride, there is very steep hill that leads up to the parking lot of a church. There are also stairs that lead up to the church. Standing at the bottom of that hill and looking up is a daunting experience, so you don’t do that. However, if a ride goes past the church, several people will opt to depart from the afternoon’s scheduled activities long enough to ride up that hill. When we finally get to the top, everybody circles around the church parking lot for a little while until they can breathe again. Did I mention that it was a very steep hill? Then, after you’ve recovered, you get the pleasure of riding down the hill.

Well, perhaps pleasure isn’t exactly the right word, as this hill debouches onto a very busy road with pretty much no line of sight, so you can’t blast down it. Well, you can, but, as you run a serious risk of encountering a car or truck moving at sixty miles an hour, it isn’t an especially good idea. Instead, you have to ride your brakes - hard - all the way down.

On a now not so recent ride, a fairly new rider talked about liking that hill, as many of us do. (Yes, many of us are crazy. Most cyclists are crazy. Haven't you learned that yet?) He was immediately told that, while the hill was fun, the real fun was in riding up and down the stairs instead. Now, there are perhaps fifty steps in the stairway, and it looks a bit more like a ladder than a staircase, so the very idea of riding either up or down it is pretty much ludicrous in the extreme unless it is your great desire to break something. Or possibly several somethings, since a fall down those stairs into the busy road would be quite spectacular from start to finish and might actually involve an involuntary lesson in flight with no accompanying instructions on landing.

The person in question asked, “Really?”

“Yeah.”

“That would be pretty hard!”

“Nah, you just have to get a rhythm going. Bump Bump Bump. It’s not that bad.”

“Wow.”

Now, for those of you who are keeping track, that was false information, as was eventually explained to the listener in question for fear that he might actually try it one day and end up on MTV waving at the camera from the ambulance.

In fact, the peloton (the official name for a roving pack of cyclists) is full of chatter, much of it involving pulling someone’s leg.

“Dump out your water bottles here, because there’s a great spring around that curve where you can fill them up again with fresh water.”

Sure. (This is part of Frank's story, which will be posted in its entirety in a couple of days. I can tell you are breathless with anticipation.)

“No, there are no hills on this route at all.”

Of course not. There never are. Of course, this statement is almost certain to be followed by, "Oh, except that one. I forgot about that one." Then, later, by, "Well, you can't count this one. This isn't really a hill." And so on.

“If you move your water bottles from your bike to your jersey pockets, it’ll make your bike lighter and you’ll be able to climb faster.”

Oh, yes. You should try it. This is one of my favorites, actually. It's amazing how many people will believe this one.

Then there was the time I was buying a new bike. I had ordered a Litespeed Classic only ti find out after a few weeks that the model had been discontinued. Okay, so I went with a Tuscany. Then I waited. A week or so later on a ride, I heard Chuck behind me in the paceline talking to someone else. It seems his son had ordered a Tuscany and they were on backorder. It was going to be six months before his bike arrived. I was aghast, as you can imagine. (In this context, aghast is a euphemism for really ticked off.) Of course, it turned out that Chuck's son had not ordered a Tuscany and this conversation was specifically for my benefit. Even I thought it was a good joke.

You actually do get good information sometimes, though. I swear you do. Come on out and find out for yourself.

See you on the road.

It’s COOOOOOOOLD outside.

I headed out for a walk, and that made me consider how cold it would be if I were riding. I would still rather have been riding, cold or no cold, but there is a certain pleasure in considering how cold you aren’t because you’re not riding.

I was recently asked if I ride when it is “really cold” out. I answered yes, and the questioner was amazed. Do you still wear those shorts? Well, no. That would be crazy. I may have ridden my bike up a mountain during Bridge to Bridge. I may have ridden my bike 200 miles in one day in the middle of a heat wave during the Summer Sizzling Mileage Marathon, I may have ridden my bike in 34 degree temperatures and in pouring rainstorms just for the fun of it, but I’m not crazy.

Of course, I have discovered that people who don’t ride have a different definition of crazy than the rest of us do.

As I write this, the temperature outside is a toasty 27 degrees Fahrenheit. Don’t ask me what it is if you include the wind chill because I don’t know, but I think the answer is “really really cold”, which, as everyone knows, is markedly colder than “really cold”. I’m not sure how many degrees each “really” represents, but I’m sure it’s quite a lot.

I will admit that the cold is making me think of the hottest ride I ever had.

The Seyboros were riding to the beach one summer. The beach ride is a blast – roughly eight miles of riding (not counting the miles covered on a ferry at one point) followed by a great dinner and then we drive home with the bikes in the back of various vans and trucks and SUVs. This particular bike ride, however, was one that I couldn’t go on because I didn’t have all day to spend, unfortunately.

There were half a dozen of us who couldn’t make the whole trip, so we rode perhaps thirty-five miles out with the rest of the club and then turned around to head back home. It was a scorchingly hot day, with the temperature well up into the nineties. It was so hot that I was expecting my tires to melt and bend like some sort of Salvador Dali inspired bike painting.
At the turnaround, I had emptied my bottles and got them refilled. Unfortunately, I allowed them to be refilled with a “sports drink” that shall remain nameless instead of good old pure H2O. I don’t know why I did this. Perhaps my brains had started to melt and leak out my ears.

Now, I don’t have anything in particular against sports drinks, but, for my tastes, many of them are too sweet. In this case, the drink was so sweet that, without realizing it, I stopped drinking. I nearly emptied two bottles on the way out but barely drank a fifth of a bottle on the way back, and it certainly hadn’t gotten any cooler in that time.

I was going slower and slower and starting to weave a bit, and then we finally got back onto what I would consider home roads. We were twelve miles from home, and I was convinced I could ride those roads under any conditions. I’d ridden that road on a solo breakaway. I’d ridden it hanging in with the pack at a high rate of speed. I’d ridden it alone and toasted after having been dropped and watched the group disappearing over the horizon. I could ride it now. I was certain of it.

Feeling that I was slowing everyone else down, I tried to get them to go on, but they refused. The truck that was with us stopped to dish out drinks, and I was sucking on ice and dropping it down my jersey. My face was red (probably from a mixture of temperature and pure embarrassment) but I hung in there.
I was motorpaced by the truck at about twelve miles an hour for the last three miles, but I made it.

Ah, those were the days. That’s what I’ll think of when I’m out riding this weekend, and I will be out riding this weekend. It will have been four weeks since the appendectomy, and my bike is calling my name plaintively asking where I’ve been for the last month.
Cold or no cold, I’ll be there.

Will you?

See you on the road.

The Perils of the Commute

I ride my bicycle to work each day
It's not so far
It's better for me than my car.
I wear a helmet that is made of rigid Styrofoam
Inspected by a French guy named Guillaume.
I downshift my Shimanno gears
I pedal hard and I'm out of here
Glad I am that the coast is clear
Glad I am to be my bicycle and me.
- “Bicycle” by Livingston Taylor

My commute to work is too long and too short, all at the same time.

That doesn’t have the same ring as the opening sentence of “A Tale of Two Cities” but Dickens got paid by the word for his writing, and I don’t get paid at all (which is why there’s no charge for that literary reference right there. It is one of the many free services that we here at the blog provide).

My commute is too short because, when I ride my bike to work, the trip is over too soon.

My commute is too long because, when I ride my bike to work, especially in the summer time, I get pretty darned sweaty, and there are no showers at work. Now, this isn’t much of a problem for me, but it may be a problem for those I work with. They haven’t actually said anything about it, but I’m waiting.

I do not live in a bike friendly town. There’s some good riding out in the county, but it’s not so good in and around the town itself. I have very little choice about the route I take to work, and the road I have to take is fairly well traveled and doesn’t have much of a shoulder. In fact, a lot of it has pretty much no shoulders at all. Kind of like me, really.

Now, there are all kinds of good reasons to commute – health, the price of gas, saving the planet and so on, but the best reason of all is, of course, that it’s more time on the bike, and you can’t beat that. In fact, I would have thought it was self evident that commuting is a good idea. It turns out, it isn’t self evident to everyone.

I know this because people often:

(A) Try to talk me out of doing it

The arguments for this are usually based on two points. The first is that I might get hit by a car. Well, yes, I suppose I might. As Livingston Taylor put it:

Pedal that bike, pedal that bike
Don't open that door 'til I go by.
Pedal that bike, pedal that bike
That little old lady in the Dodge Diplomat
I don't think she sees me
I hope she don't teach me how to fly

The second point is usually about how much effort is involved. I don’t really have much to say about that, except that it’s fun. I do it because I enjoy it. Really. I do. Honest.

(B) Give me the freakshow look when they see me on the road

If you’ve ever been out riding fully kitted out, someone has given you this look. A head turns as you go by, and you know that, if you could hear the person in question, they would be saying something like, “What the…?”

(C) Give an amused look when they see me arriving

These are the same people who, on very cold or very wet days like to ask, “Did you ride that bike today?” Sometimes I startle them by saying “Yes,” and they grin and shake their heads in a knowing way.

That’s all okay. I get a ride out of it, and that’s all I’m looking for. There must be some other commuters out there. Aren’t there? Let me know.

See you on the road.

Bike Shops

A bike shop is a special place.

I ran by my local bike shop recently to pick up a water bottle (which is what we call wishful thinking, since I can’t ride hard enough to need a water bottle right now) and I was reminded how much I like bike shops. I like the way they look, and I like the particular smell that you get, which is, I suppose, composed of equal parts new tires, new lycra, chain lube and sweaty cyclists. (If sweaty cyclists who were out for a ride and just happened to pass by the bike shop never stop in just to pick something up or get a drink or say hello or just hang out, this is a bad sign.)

Every bike shop needs a Steve. Steve is a wrench extraordinaire who has a simple philosophy: “There’s a right way to do things, and you should do things the right way.” This is a guy who I want to take care of my bike.

We considered trying to get a constitutional amendment past so that the Steve in every bike shop that has one would in fact be called Steve, but we decided in the end that it wouldn’t be worth the trouble. It would save cyclists who go to new towns a whole lot of grief, though. You could walk into a bike shop and ask, “Do you guys have a Steve? No? I’ll go somewhere else, then.”

Of course, then I suppose there would be unscrupulous bike shops which would hire a guy whose name happened to be Steve even though he was a Steve in the truest and best sense of the word. You’d have to watch out for places like that.

I have to admit that I have visited bike shops in other cities. I know this might seem to make me untrue to my local bike shop, but it’s okay just to look, right? That’s the excuse I offer, anyway.

I would like to make it clear that I am talking about bike shops here. I would hate to think that any of your who might have happened upon this blog by accident and who ended up reading it in spite of yourselves were making extrapolations about other areas of my life.

Bike shops.

My local bike shop has been known to let people come in and use the tools onsite and cyclists have been allowed to watch and ask questions while their bikes were being worked on so that they could learn how to perform some of the basic tasks on their own.

Yes, I know the old joke: The rates are ten dollars an hour, twenty dollars an hour if you watch, thirty dollars an hour if you help. Well, it isn’t like that. (Mind you, I have been known to provide great entertainment value. Just ask Steve about the time I took a can of degreaser and aimed it at my chain. I pressed the button and discovered that I was holding the can backwards. I degreased my face instead of the chain. It did wonders for my acne, brightened Steve’s entire week and probably created a story that will last a lifetime. It’s a bit embarrassing though, even for me, so don’t tell anyone, okay? Thank you.

If you happen to be a complete klutz, like I am (I have been known to injure myself just by watching someone else do something mechanical) it’s nice to have a trustworthy wrench you can take your bike to. If some people are mechanically inclined, I must be mechanically declined. Want proof?

The first time I ever got a flat on my bike, the bike was actually sitting in a stand at home. Now, I assume that I got a slow leak while out on the road somewhere and that it just took a while for all the air to drain out, but maybe that’s not the case. Maybe my bike has picked up my klutziness and actually did get a flat while standing still.

Whatever the case, I set myself to change the flat. I had been told how to do it, and I even (heaven only knows why) bought a book on bike maintenance, as if I were coordinated or something, so I felt what later proved to be a completely unjustified level of confidence in my own abilities to deal with the situation.

I pulled the rear wheel off of my bike and, sitting in my house, set a record for slowest tire change in the history of bicycle repair. I did, however, manage to get the tire changed and even inflated. I did not, however, manage to get the wheel back onto the bike. I was completely stumped.

At the time I was driving a small two door car. I got the back seat lowered and, by pushing the front seats as far forward as they would go, managed to get the bike into the car. I also managed to get my body into the car, albeit with my knees under my chin and my nose touching the steering. This was obviously completely unsafe, but I drove to the bike shop anyway, where they didn’t laugh at me once as I dragged bike and wheel in. Steve then showed me what I had been doing wrong, and took my now functional bike back home and went for a ride.

Since that time I have had to change a flat or two, and I have succeeded in doing it unaided, which is certainly a good thing, since they sometimes happen quite some distance from home. I’ve never been fond of that ride home with no spare tube, but that’s another story.

See you on the road.

A New Ride

It’s like a scene from a movie. Exciting music is playing in the background as our hero is climbing into his special clothes. We see a series of quick cuts as an arm slides into sleeve, as a helmet is adjusted on the head, as hands slip into gloves. He steps through a door and presses a button and then, as the music builds to a crescendo, the camera cuts to outside. We see a large door sliding slowing up. The sunlight streams in as our hero is slowly revealed I all his glory. Perhaps he is an astronaut in some kind of hangar bay. Perhaps he is a race car driver in the garage. Perhaps he is a certified public accountant.
Perhaps he is a cyclist who has been off the bike for awhile and is ready for that first test ride to see how his body has recovered from surgery. Perhaps he is just a guy who wants to go for a ride.

It’s a stirring scene, I know. In reality, I was doing a public service. If this seems farfetched, allow me to explain.

I get upset and hard to live with when I can’t ride.

I know I’m not the only one.

I can remember Dave telling me that, when he hasn’t ridden in a while, he knows he gets hard to live with because his wife will eventually say in an exasperated tone of voice, “Will you please just go ride you bike?!” Of course, this could just be a ploy to get him out of the house for awhile, but Dave’s a nice guy, so I don’t believe it.

This question is on my mind because I find myself to be sleepy, grumpy and dopey, and I don’t know how many of the rest of the seven dwarves. Granted, it could just be that I’m in a bad mood, but I think it’s because I haven’t been able to ride for awhile.

And this is why, three weeks after the appendectomy, I found myself strapping on a helmet today. It was a good feeling. I was going to be on the hybrid, so I didn’t get kitted out, but the helmet, aside from being a truly snazzy fashion statement, is a necessity for me whenever I ride.

I passed two kids on bikes today, and I was the only one of us wearing a helmet. I was troubled by this. Having had my skullular integrity saved by a helmet once, I hate to see anyone on two wheel without one, but I suppose not everyone falls down as often as I do.

The goal of today’s ride, aside from saving the sanity of everyone around me by putting me into a better mood, was to test out the state of my internal equipment. Current condition: acceptable, but not perfect.

I only rode a little over two miles – not even a warm up, but my body told me to start slow. It also said that, at least as far as today was concerned, I should finish slow and, while I was at it, take it easy during the middle part, but at least it was a ride, however ephemeral.

(And the category today is: Unexpected words to find in a bike blog.)

I can’t tell you how good it felt to be back on the bike.

That’s a rather odd statement to put in a blog, isn’t it? If I can’t tell you how it felt, then why am I taking the time to write about it?

An excellent question, and one which I have no answer for.

It isn’t exactly effortless, but it definitely lets you know you’re alive. Your blood is pumping, your muscles are working, your lungs are going and your spirit is free.

Now I want to go ride again.

See you on the road.

Happy Dreams and Frozen Toes

Work clothes are not proof against the cold. At least, mine aren’t.

It was a chilly morning, but I checked the temperature empirically, which is a fancy way of saying that I walked outdoors and said, “It doesn’t feel all that cold,” and I was empirically wrong. It was that cold. It was colder, in fact, but that didn’t stop me from deciding to ride to work, a distance of about six and a quarter miles.

I was riding the hybrid, and the hill right outside my door looked like a mountain, but I made it up to the top. My body wasn’t awake or adjusted to the temperature. I was wearing a balaclava and some cross country skier’s gloves, tennis shoes, slacks, jacket and, of course, a helmet. (You might conclude that my riding to work on such a cold morning dressed like that was evidence of a previous brain injury, but I still might as well protect my head.)

“Are you sure you want to do this?”

That was the voice of someone worried for my sanity or my safety or both.

“Not entirely,” I said, before pedaling off.

As I rounded the first corner and felt the full force of the wind for the first time “not entirely” became “no, I don’t want to do this,” but I merely pulled my balaclava up to cover my mouth and kept pedaling. Unfortunately, covering my mouth somehow made my glasses fog up, and riding blind didn’t seem like the best idea, so chose to pull it back down again and let my face freeze.

Actually, I’m kind of used to the cold face from previous winter rides, so I adjusted to that. My hands were fine, thanks to my trusty gloves, and my jacket kept my upper body warm.

An elementary knowledge of anatomy will show that I still have several body parts left to be troubled.

The wind cut through my slacks with ease, and my toes began to go numb. I felt that both of these developments were bad. (Actually, I had looked for my heavy winter socks, which go all the way up to my knees and are wonderfully warm, but I had only been able to find one of them.) I began to wish I was wearing tights and had some toasti toes handy. Well, it was only six miles, right?

You know, it’s amazing how long it can take to go six miles when the temperature is below freezing and you aren’t really dressed for it.

I know that particular ride well, so I had a number of landmarks picked out that I could use to fool myself. You know the sort of thing I mean. No, I’m not riding all the way to work, I’m only riding to that stoplight. Now that I’m at the stoplight, I’m not riding all the way to work, I’m only riding to that little store. Hey, what’s a little hypothermia between friends, right?

The above was, of course, written before the appendectomy which is currently keeping me in a chair and out of the saddle, but I thought of it because I had a conversation just today with someone who asked how I was doing. I gave the answer that I have already given at least a hundred times: “I’m getting better, but it’s killing me that I can’t ride yet.”

“Well,” I was told, “It’s cold out, so you probably don’t mind much.”

Cold?! It’s 50 degrees Fahrenheit out there right now! (How do you tell a native born science geek? He doesn’t give a number without including the unit of measurement.) 50 degrees isn’t cold. That’s good riding weather, that is.

My ride to work that day when there was ice on the ground – that was cold. Today would be a great day to be out spinning the pedals.

Sigh.

My day is coming soon, though.

See you on the road.

Eventually.