cycling « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

cycling

What is going on inside your monitor anyway?

“It doesn’t get any easier; you just go faster,” said Greg LeMond, who never had to drop me on a ride. (If only because I’ve never ridden with him.) I find it isn’t getting any easier and I’m not going any faster.

I’ve had three days of short, pitiful rides I could complain about. Sunday I stopped because my back was hurting. Yesterday I pedaled home because it was about to storm in a profound way. Today’s ride was incredibly forgettable. The legs are dead. Everything feels off and I feel slow.

At least the scenery is nice:

I’ve been telling myself over the last 40 miles, that it is getting harder because I am about to go faster. That seems to have been the case in the past. Somehow, though, I think this is wishful thinking in this case.

I wrote an interesting PowerPoint presentation on feature stories. Want to see it?

No?

OK then.

Things to read … because you can’t say no to that.

This makes me wish I knew everything about the subject matter, New York Times Rolls Out Archive of Vintage Print Ads, Asks for Help ID-ing Them:

Vintage ads that appeared in The New York Times are getting their own digital archive that will live on the Times’ website. Called Madison in reference to Madison Avenue, the archive initially includes every print ad from every edition of the Times in the 1960s.

“It invites people to view an important part of our cultural history,” said Alexis Lloyd, creative director at The New York Times Research and Development Lab, which created Madison.

But the Times is inviting readers to do more than just view the ads. It’s also asking readers to help shape the archive by sifting through the ads, identifying them and even transcribing their text.

A good list, What are the perfect tools for a mobile reporter?

Even if this horrible estimate is wrong this is still grim, New Ebola Cases May Soon Reach 10,000 a Week, Officials Predict:

The head of the new Ebola Emergency Response Mission, Anthony Banbury, told the Security Council that none of the three most heavily affected countries — Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea — is adequately prepared. Only 4,300 treatment beds will be available by Dec. 1, according to current projections, and even those would not have an adequate number of staff members. The acceleration of new cases, if not curbed, could easily overwhelm them.

Mr. Banbury painted a picture of substantial need. Only 50 safe-burial teams are on the ground, he said, but 500 are required. They need protective gear and about a thousand vehicles. So far, Mr. Banbury said, the mission has delivered 69 vehicles.

The top three ways Alabamians are getting scammed:

When the recession sucked away retirement funds of many of Alabama’s elderly, the senior population became a desperate and easy target for crooks, said Joseph Borg, director of the Alabama Securities Commission.

And several scams have popped up that are luring in small and midsized businesses, Borg said during a speech at the Birmingham Kiwanis Club at the Harbert Center Tuesday.

Let me guess … Here’s how Facebook, Google, and Apple are tracking you now … there are little men inside my screen, right?

cycling / Friday / friends / Samford — Comments Off
3
Oct 14

A tired Friday title

I taught a class, which is to say I returned papers and discussed some of the most pressing items contained there in. We talked about that story I mentioned earlier this week. We touched on story organization, construction and source blocking.

I made an acrostic. It was a terrible acrostic, but I repeat myself. I hated it. But it let me use a cool blocks illustration and gave me the chance to talk about the elements of a story you can move around.

I graded stuff. I left campus.

Made it home in time to visit a store and pick up some flowers. I thought we might brighten the living room with a big yellow clutch of stems and petals in a glass vase of water resting on furniture above eye level.

It works almost as well as the overhead light or the nearby torch lamp.

I took a brief ride, through the neighborhood, up one of the timed courses and then back down it. I rode one half of the time trial and then came up the double hill that ultimately brings everything me back around to the other side of the neighborhood. My times were slow. I haven’t been on my pedals in five days, I would expect nothing less. Or is it nothing more? I could expect nothing more than going slow. I could expect less. My legs could be sodden stacks of newspaper, uncooperative piles of leaves, giant petrified chunks of wood that can’t turn a gear, but bleed when I fell over after I lost balance speed.

I can’t expect anything from my front derailleur just now. I can’t shift from the big gear to the smaller, which would be helpful as I labor over a little climb. There is a trip to the bike shop in my near future.

In my immediate future, though, there is company. Friends from Indiana have come down for the weekend. The plan is to show off tailgating and football.

And also dinner. Late into the night we sat around and talked about places abroad we’d all visited and genealogy and regionalism. It was pleasant and nerdy late into the night. And I am very sleepy.

adventures / cycling / maps / photo / running / swimming / triathlon / weekend — Comments Off
28
Sep 14

Augusta Half Ironman 70.3

The calm before the chaos.

We were up before dawn. We were in downtown Augusta before dawn. We’d been on a school bus and got down here to the transition area before dawn. The Yankee was a mile up the street, waiting for parachutists to drop in and the national anthem and a canon to blast and all of the waves to start. As we are running a relay, the unwanted step-children of these races, she was in the last wave.

She still beat a whole lot of people out of the water.

We, Jenni (our runner) and her husband Gavin (our cheerleader) sat on a railroad berm and watched the first part of the morning come and go. We watched the sun rise, and that was not a bad seat for it:

At 9:20 The Yankee was finally able to get in the water. She swam 1.2 miles and then worked her way up the boat launch ramp and then ran a little more than 100 meters to the relay pen, in the very back of the transition area, because, remember, we are the step-children of the race. We’ve watched the pros and quite a few of the age-groupers come and go. A few of the relay teams had their swimmers come in and then came our water hero, having done all of the above in just 28 minutes. Not too shabby.

But these races don’t give you a lot of space. More cramped than a dive boat or darkrooms I’ve known.

Anyway, as I was standing there waiting, having done all of the preparing and water-drinking and snack eating and bathroom breaks I could muster, looking at the fancy bikes next to my bike I hear great stories.

One of the age-groupers was pronounced by friends of hers in the relay area as an idiot. Seems she’d completed a full Ironman last weekend and was doing a half today. That’s a 140.6 mile race followed by the 70.3. This makes no sense.

A guy was telling us about his nephew, who went to an Ironman race and was very excited. Ironman! But he was crushed when Tony Stark didn’t show up, just a bunch of people in spandex with bicycles.

That is a bummer.

The Yankee came in, I pulled the timing chip off her ankle — that’s our relay baton, if you will — and put it on mine. Grabbed the bike, ran out of transition and off we go:

Every other race picture the pros took of me is badly out of focus. Because I go so fast.

Here’s the course, a 56 mile joy ride through the countryside. I have made turned this into a ThingLink, which means it is an interactive image. This one is very basic. Mouseover and click on the black-and-white dots to see the notes. The race starts near the left margin and goes in a counterclockwise direction. The notes, as you might imagine, follow suit.

I finished my part, slower than it should have been, but I spent the back half of the race trying to measure my effort so I didn’t blow up the entire race. (We’ve not eaten well enough this weekend and proper fueling is key.) But I made it in, dismounted with great relief and found that the growing pain I had in both feet was something of a problem as I shuffled all the way through the transition area — because we were camped at the back.

I passed off the timing chip to Jenni she was off and running on her 13.1 mile run.

I, meanwhile, suddenly can’t walk. And I’m starting to cramp up. I got a cramp in my quad and made a facial expression and my face cramped. More water. Much more water. Get all of that under control, change clothes, get our things out of transition and back to the car and we got to watch Jenni go by on the run route. Then we had a snack at a nearby restaurant and watched her run by again. She was awesome.

And here she is at the finish:

Pay no attention to the time, as that clock counts from the beginning of the event, and does not account for the big delay in the wave starts. The important thing is that we finished. We had fun. We survived. And we got bling:

We also got massages. Actually we got stretched. The masseuses had closed up — with people still on the course, but whatever, who cares about those people, right? — so we got the active release guys. I put Jenni’s name on the list and then my name on the list. The Yankee didn’t want one initially, because she’d only done 28 minutes of work or something. But I decided she should get the active release stretch too. So I added her name to the list. The guy says he was closing up shop. He’d seen a ton of people. I explained I was trying to get my wife on the list and my name was his last customer. Before I could even think up the “Help me keep the domestic peace” jokes, he conceded.

“Put her on there,” he said, “And then write ‘No more customers!'”

So the four of us had dinner, deciding that the racers don’t like the relay teams not because we could use all of our energy in one event, but because we are athletes with social skills who know other athletes.

After dinner we got on the road. There was a long drive home — and it was a long drive home. We got in sometime just after 10 p.m., just in time to do laundry and put everything away.

Apparently we’re going to do the whole race as individuals next year. I’m exhausted from the requisite training already.

adventures / cycling / photo / swimming / weekend — Comments Off
27
Sep 14

A Saturday in Augusta

Woke up this morning and we went for a ride on the half Ironman’s bike course. It is a 56-mile counterclockwise loop that goes out of Georgia, into South Carolina and back. I rode the hilly part on the back half:

The Yankee was driving along, making sure I didn’t miss any of the turns. She took that picture at one of them, and had I known she was going to do that I would have really leaned into the turn.

I saw several people training today, they’ll all be riding harder tomorrow. I’m just hoping to get up and over the slow, gentle climbs tomorrow. It felt pretty good today, but I only did about a quarter of the route, which seemed pretty fast.

Afterward, we got cleaned up and did the formal check in down town. We then walked from the convention center to the transition area. Walking was a mistake.

You can’t help where the civic center is in relation to where the logical places on the water — in this case the Savannah River — are relative to one another. On the way walking back up I measured the distance. It was 1.7 miles.

In between was where the swim will actually start, so The Yankee had to double back on her walk. When she finished her practice swim, she pronounced it nice and fast, I drove down to get her. So we’ve done more walking than we wanted and not enough eating today. Great way to prepare for a race!

On my walk back up from dropping off my bike in transition I noticed this:

That’s the back of the Augusta Chronicle, which is a fine paper. There was a large man loading his old, beat up car with some sort of publication. It was about 2 p.m., (I know because I was frustrated that I still hadn’t had lunch) so it was too late for the Saturday paper and too early for the Sunday issue.

Back behind him, and seen in that picture, there were two guys sitting on the equipment in the paper’s loading bay. Those aren’t seats, but they’ve probably been used that way for generations, the job done, the rest won, the pressure off the feet. Behind them is that billboard for the Chronicle’s tablet app.

Make of all of that what you will.

We parked near this mural. This is a part of a four picture arrangement, a quadtych, if you will. It is old and in disrepair and it wouldn’t have looked any better if it was still brand new:

We had that late lunch, followed by an early dinner with lots of carbs. Tonight we’ll try to go to sleep early. Tomorrow, we wake up early.

Oh, I walked by this sign, too:

Indeed.

cycling / overwriting / photo / Wednesday — Comments Off
23
Sep 14

Just some pictures

I had these shots from my ride on Sunday and I’ve been staring at them. The colors are beautiful. The light is perfect. The road just sings to you. There’s a great whir, whir, whirring in my imagination from the rubber tire on the road. When you get close enough you can smell the clay:

On my bike I am always trying to ride hard and fast, because I am not fast. But in my daydreams I’m lazily drifting onto the center line, where the road noise is different, quieter. When I have the space to ride on a painted lane I always wonder if it moves faster. Maybe the paint makes less friction, somehow. It is quieter. There’s just your breathe there, just the whoosh of the wind in your ears. And then you can really see the things around you:

Not far from there at all, really, I looked up the road and saw the prettiest site I’ve seen on an otherwise normal, and freshly paved, ribbon of road:

And I started doing the only other kind of riding I know how to do, the slow back and forth tilts from the shoulder to centerline, making big swooping curves over the asphalt. Sine waves. Sign language.

In my mind I’m sitting on the saddle. In reality I’m sitting in my office chair, wondering why it is lately less comfortable.