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adventures / cycling / photo / Tuesday — Comments Off
9
May 17

Keeping up

Tonight I had the chance to enjoy my first group ride of the year. The group has been going out probably for a month or two now, but I’m hanging out with the students on Tuesdays and Thursdays while the cyclists are out riding around. But with the summer upon us, my Tuesday and Thursday evenings are free and I can ride. So there I was, sitting in the office considering with dread a route I’ve been on before, thinking of how poorly I’ve ridden it the last two times out and wondering how today could be any different.

We got to the parking lot of the giant church where the group meets and there are 17 or 18 people and we all set off on this little 25-mile course. I think I was the third wheel at the beginning, which basically just means I pushed off from the parking lot early. So there was Kyle, who is in IT at the university, and then The Yankee and then me and behind us a bunch of other interesting and talented people. And after a bit The Yankee passed Kyle and I went with her and some people latch on to my wheel and we just go. She’s crushing rollers in the 20s and I’m not even using any of my gears. I’d put my chain on one of the harder gears and it stayed there for the first eight miles, until we got to a real hill. My legs, which had felt tired all day, came alive and I’m sitting just off to The Yankee’s side and she’s leading the whole group. My heart rate is up a little and the breathing is up a tiny bit and I’m singing. I’m singing while I’m riding and just trying to hang on to the leader of the pack.

And she was so strong on her bike today that if you slowed up to take one picture — or to get a swig of water, or to glance at your gears — you’d spend the next two miles working hard just to catch her again. So this was the one photo I took:

There were never more than two or three people ahead of us, the real climbers of the bunch put us in our place on the hills, which we are still learning how to deal with. But we were bombing the downhill runs into the low 40s with ease, and then riding that momentum until we’d get to the next uphill.

It was my first “fast” ride of the year. The sort where you are a bit silly with the speed and delirious about how your legs are moving up and down. It was positively average, really, but I’m taking it.

adventures / cycling / friends / Monday / photo — Comments Off
8
May 17

From our long(ish) weekend ride

It was hard and slow, like all of my rides have been so far this year, but the weather was nice and the company was pleasant and the scenery was pretty. So you don’t complain. You do, but no one wants to hear about how slow you’re going. They just want you to keep up with them.

Anyway, it was a 45-mile ride and here are some of the pictures I took chasing The Yankee and our cycling club buddy Stephen around. Here’s one of the few flat spots, with wildflowers growing in the fields just off the roadways:

Two people riding better than me at the moment:

We went over a causeway on the lake. Still chilly, I’d bet, but awfully pretty:

Looking up through the trees as I went uphill one more time:

Where would you like to go next? They’re deciding, I’m catching my breath, probably:

Seriously, almost all day, just like this:

This picture doesn’t do it justice, but we topped off on a hill and the trees opened up and you could look down and out on what felt like just about everything. It is silly, no higher than we’d climbed, but it was a real top-of-the-world sensation:

And one more slight incline to enjoy.

They teach you, in a photography class, all about using lines in a composition to frame action and attract the eye. I often think about that when I’m shooting, of course. But not when I’m riding and huffing and puffing. It just worked out this time. That’s the great thing about a bike ride. It can be hard. You can be slow. It just works out.

adventures / Monday / photo — Comments Off
10
Apr 17

Conference over, it is back to campus, then

I got to chair one of the last sessions of the conference last weekend:

On Saturday, we had the opportunity to spend part of a beautiful spring day in a nice Greenville, South Carolina park:

Spring, it seems, has appeared everywhere. Or the places which matter, which is to say the place I am at the moment:

We hung out at a waterfall:

We temporarily also solved a running problem:

And that means a delicious sandwich, the likes of which you just can’t do in Bloomington:

A friend of ours in Bloomington is from Georgia. He’s a big Publix guy, he knows our pain and he has assured us there is no reasonable substitute. That didn’t matter this weekend, though, because we got to have a picnic.

Back to it today, though. I rode my bike to work, because weather and my schedule conspired to work together for a change. (Usually I have to stay past dark or it is raining or too cold or whatever. But, finally, a 5 p.m. Monday and nice weather mean I could spend my commute turning small circles with my feet. And I saw this:

They were pouring concrete. They were still on that site when I went back by later this evening. I imagine they got a lot done today. You better when you have a big concrete boom like that out there, I suppose.

It is surprising you can’t really hear them. But, according to the legend I’m making up as I type, under a quiet, full moon you can hear the muffled screams in the concrete beams.

adventures / IU / photo / Thursday — Comments Off
6
Apr 17

Finally, Greenville, South Carolina

So you’re going to drive about eight hours, as we intended to do yesterday. A good thing to do is to have an almost-violent flat tire in the first hour of your trip, things change.

So there I was, side of the highway, tiny little shoulder, inches from trucks whirring by as I pulled off an empty case of vulcanized rubber and put on a smaller tube of air. Sometimes the trucks move over. Sometimes they can’t, because there’s someone in the left lane. Sometimes you could look down the road and see they were going to be so close I’d simply stand up and move away. I’m used to cars and trucks not leaving me any room on the road, but on the highway it seemed a bit much.

Anyway, to another rental car office, where they could not give us a new sedan. Finally, after the three staffers tried for a long time to reconcile our route and their other stores along the way, they gave us a Dodge Ram pickup:

And you’ll forgive me, but I didn’t take a photo of the first rental car. Why would you? Anyway, it was an Altima, a few years newer than mine, but there is virtue in renting a car with which you are familiar. This was one of the reasons I wasn’t interested in a pickup. I don’t normally drive a truck and I’m not interested in parking one all weekend and gas mileage and so on.

Also, the big, bad Dodge Ram doesn’t have a gear shift. It has a knob:

Odds are pretty decent, you’d like to think, that Sam Elliott didn’t know about that when he signed on to do the voiceover work in their TV spots. He might have. He probably didn’t care, but it fits the idea in your mind, doesn’t it?

So we drove the Dodge for about an hour yesterday, which was the plan, to another rental car shop, where the crew would have either a sedan or a small SUV waiting for us. So we got this:

I moved the luggage in the first part of the rain while The Yankee handled the paperwork. We got into the Liberty and realized it didn’t have a USB port. She wanted a USB port. So we changed to this Mitsubishi:

If you’re keeping track, that’s four rentals in a few hours. And through part of Kentucky and all of Tennessee we drove in the big storms and learned that the Mitsubishi is not an especially fun thing to drive. Crosswinds were pushing us all over the lane. I would have looked like a DUI if there were any police on the road, but they were probably off stopping floods or something. The storm was intense, but hey, the Mitsubishi did well with standing water and hydroplaning.

We may try to swap this one out this weekend. How can we get to rental car number six and seven if we don’t get number five, first?

Crossing over the Ohio River to Louisville, just before the traffic and the storms turned this eight hour journey into a 12-hour odyssey.

Which made this morning’s panel no less fun.

Hey, we’re here now — and the subject matter improves, too. There were storms and almost everyone had a tough time getting in, but we’re all here, from Texas and Mississippi and Indiana and the fun and friends and scholarly talk can begin.

adventures / cycling / Monday / photo — Comments Off
27
Mar 17

My favorite are the ‘Double Grip Bison Brand’

We went for a bike ride on Saturday. We set out with a bike club friend, who offered us a route south of town or another one that he hadn’t yet written down. And then there were the choices of which hills and which direction you wanted to go. So we chose the southern route, because who has time to write down turn-by-turn directions? And we picked the counter-clockwise route, because there were rolling hills this way or one big hill that way. So we chose what we chose and then our bike club friend realized, oh, yes, there’s this hill, too.

That’s the thing about hills. You never realize them in their intensity or in count when you aren’t actually on them.

So on the last big hill our friend, Stephen, was just in front of me and he said “Oh, yes, this hill, too. This is the worst hill on this route.”

And I said that, at the top of the climb, he would get to explain that to The Yankee, who was just a bit behind me. And after four-and-a-half miles uphill from there … he said just that. Our bikes pointed uphill for about six or seven miles today, according to the map.

Still looked fresh on our way home, though:

Last night I spent the evening hanging out with The Black Cat:

It rained a lot yesterday. I read a lot. It was a good day.

Found this today. In 1897 there was a huge cycling convention in Chicago. The Indianapolis News included this art with their January 23rd story.

There were seven bicycle factories in Indianapolis at the time the story was written, a time when the reporter felt it important to list how many “electric lights” were going to be burning — 25,000. The story ranges all over, talking of upcoming six-day races, a national meeting in St. Louis and objections by the good people of Baltimore to an ordinance outlawing coasting. It also discusses the possibility of a continuous road between New York and Chicago within 10 years. So 1907. That didn’t happen, obviously. Back in Chicago, the biggest turnout of the week was to see the women’s race, a two-hour derby where the racers covered 41 miles on a track. And it mentions the quarter-mile world record. This was a standing start event and, at the time, it was held by a John S. Johnson, who set the record in Iowa in 1893 at 28 seconds.

No one really does this distance anymore. But, the Internet tells me that Francois Pervis set the most recent world record for the 1000-meter distance from a standing start.

Someone calculated his splits and estimated that his 400-meter time would be approximately 25.754 seconds. You figure if he’d set out to do 400 meters that’d change his race and he could perhaps go a bit faster, so maybe he gets down close to 25 flat, let’s say. But, to me, that makes Johnson’s time all the more impressive. He was 120 years behind on the technology — no true aero position or a skin suit or wind tunnel training — and his time is not far off. Shame there’s no video of that on YouTube.