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cycling

We’ve got this heat wave on

The tense line of truth in the race of truth. This is the line that is the starting point for the local cycling club runs their Tuesday evening time trials:

We walked over and watched them race a few weeks ago. I tried the route soon after. After a second attempt I realized my first try was going to be the early standard. I dropped more than a minute the second time. Did it again today, a little anxious at the beginning and then working hard on the first half. I turned and struggled on the back portion of the out-and-back. With heavy legs and empty lungs and squinted eyes I made it back across that line again, happy to be able to breathe again after six miles of complete effort.

The local club posts the officially recorded trial times on their website. My time is slower than everyone they’ve ever listed.

To make this sound a little more impressive for myself than I should: the heat index was something like 103 degrees when I did it this evening. Have you heard it has been hot?

I did 20 miles this evening, would have aimed for a few more, but the sun outran me.

We had our weekly breakfast at Barbecue House this morning. There was an offensive lineman and a cornerback from the university team there. The one looked like he was 320 pounds, but the other did not look like he was 6-foot-2, as he is listed in the official roster. Nice to know, though, that we’re eating with top-flight athletes. We’ve had breakfast there over the years with lots of football players, including more than a few national champions, swimmers, World Series champion baseball players and so on.

The secret is Mr. Price’s biscuits. I’m sure of it.

That was the only other thing that was worth enduring the heat wave, honestly. We’re sweating inside the house with the air on. We live in the South, perhaps you’ve heard of it:

I contend that purple on a weather map is never a good thing.

So there was reading and writing today. Here are some things you might find interesting, as I did:

The Chicago Tribune has a new web design. It is an interesting design philosophy, though they could do without the autoplay.

And now an essay on the evolving news industry, titled Leaving Alabama Behind:

On Nov. 11, 1918, as my dad used to tell me, a reporter named George Flournoy, who went by Gummy, stood in the window of the local daily paper, The Mobile Register, shouting the news of the armistice that ended World War I.

In 1929, after The Register announced it would accelerate updates on the World Series between the Chicago Cubs and Philadelphia Athletics to ensure that “followers of the national game in this city shall not be many seconds behind each bit of action recorded,” Gummy relayed each play “by megaphone as rapidly as it is received over direct wires of The Associated Press.”

Gummy, I am sure, would have been impressed by the ease, access and greater reach he’d have today. And he’d be able to go home with his voice intact after the story.

These are the concerns of a man who admits farther down in the column that he likes to compose in pen. He’s pretty cynical about the changes coming to journalism in Alabama but that is also part of the reason he’s one of those scribes who have, unfortunately, been downsized. We agree, wholeheartedly, on this:

Of this I’m sure, though: Whether it’s through a commitment to public Wi-Fi service in every town, or giving tax deductions for family computers and online services, or offering free classes on how to operate what for many are still newfangled gadgets, attention must be paid.

Thirty months ago 62 percent of Alabamians had Internet access. That number is low, but growing. If this is the right Census report, “respondents were not asked any questions about computer access or ownership” since 2007. So the number could be higher. And I don’t see whether libraries were included in connectivity. Either way, the point being, a significant portion of the state’s population, 2.9 million of us, according to the 2010 data, are online. The number is growing.

The Birmingham News, The Huntsville Times and the Press-Register, the three Alabama papers being radically reshaped this fall, have a combined daily circulation of 320,521 papers. (The top dozen papers in the state, combined, have just under 500,000 in daily circulation.)

At the beginning of the year comScore reported that al.com — those papers’ collective website (Disclosure: where I worked for four-plus years) — averaged more 3.4 million unique monthly visitors. In 2008, they were collecting more than 55 million page views a month. (Not sure why that number is so dated on their media kit.)

The future is right there. There’s a lot of work to be done, but you have to point in the right direction first. The dead tree newspaper edition will play a big role in their future, but that’s no longer their first step, nor should it be.

Quick links:

News has been changed forever by the iPhone:

Through incidents like the plane landing in the Hudson, the earthquakes in Haiti and Japan, the “Arab Spring” revolutions in Egypt and others, it has gradually become obvious that the iPhone hasn’t just changed the way a lot of people consume the news — it has also fundamentally altered the way that the news and journalism itself is created, now that everyone has the tools to create and publish text, photos and video wherever they are.

I’ve been talking about that in my journalism classes that for … four years now?

Meanwhile, I love this piece: 5 ways journalism educators can teach students to use multimedia in breaking news coverage:

Journalism schools across the country are embroiled in important but lengthy discussions about reforming curricula, updating courses and funding technology. Meanwhile, new forms of journalism roll on, and our students can get left behind.

While I stay involved in the larger structural debates, I look for small and immediate ways to incorporate digital reporting tools and publishing into my classes. Breaking news events like the Colorado wildfires provide an ideal moment to stick with notebook reporting and text stories and also round out coverage with multimedia.

So, naturally, we need analytics for mobile. Oh wait, that’s here now.

And, finally, from Mashable: Why ‘Twittercycle’ Trumps the Traditional News Cycle:

Still, social media’s permanence is up for debate among media professionals — IJNet‘s readers included–despite the growing population of news consumers who rely on Twitter’s aggregating capabilities for information.

[…]

It needs to be used with caution, (Rem Rieder, editor and senior vice president of American Journalism Review) said, given that it comes with new challenges in accuracy and verification. But when it’s used properly, it’s “truly potent.” And the same can be said for Facebook, which is used less for breaking news but is still a valuable tool for journalists. “Growth rates may well slow down, but both seem to be embedding themselves deeply into the culture.”

Greg Linch, special projects and news application producer at the Washington Post, said social networking sites will continue to serve as dominant news sources as long as they remain part of the public’s daily routine. “As they become more ingrained in how we lead our lives, the distinction between social and other media will growingly fade,” he said.

There’s a lot to think about in there for a weekend, no?

Have a great weekend thinking about it!

adventures / Auburn / cycling / iPhone / memories / photo / Tumblr / Twitter / Wednesday — Comments Off
27
Jun 12

Picture filler

Just working on work things today, writing a bit. Forgive me if there isn’t much here.

Here are some leftover pictures from the Art Walk held downtown a few weeks ago. You’ll remember, if you follow that link, that one full block of Magnolia turned into a road of kids young and old writing in the street.

There’s a crosswalk in the middle, and a couple of young adults claimed that area as their own. They were insistent that you see their art in the right order. This was very important, in the way that art must be explained. So I am sharing the crosswalk art in the proper order.

Nice sentiment, as far as it goes:

Rode 30 miles this evening, up and out through the neighborhood and over the side of one of the big hills, marveling at my dead legs. Then down the hill, reveling in gravity, and turned around to go back up the hill, looking for my legs.

I circled part of the bypass, and then up one of the false flats, past the airport, over the interstate and back into our part of town.

The local cycling club has a time trial course nearby, a road we ride frequently. But now I’m trying to ride the entire thing with time in mind. Today was the second attempt at that, which was not as good as the first. Mostly I’m slow, but also I found myself concentrating so much on breathing I messed up the math involved in timing myself. So I gave in a bit early, feeling defeated when my previous time clicked by just before I made it to the finish of the time trial. I’m just riding against myself here, so there’s no real shame in exhaustion and bad math.

Mostly, though, this ride was not as good as my first attempt because I’m slow.

RIding at a tongue wagging, eye bulging, rib ragged way has a lot upside, the best being that you seem to breathe so much better afterward. After, that is, you can breathe again. And so I doubled up on the course, back down half the time trial course, over that same hill from earlier and sped through a subdivision, chasing an SUV in a sprint I wish I had in that time trial — sometimes the great challenge is putting it all together at the right time, that’s why I keep coming back to this I guess. Finally into some nice downhills. That’s a great end to the route, helping satisfy my last goal of any ride: make it back into the house without sounding like I’m hypoxic.

Such a simple thing, two wheels and respiration. Everything in between needs improvement, though.

But there’s always that next ride. Always the chance to have a great kick up a hill. Always that voice in the back of the helmet: smile when it hurts. Especially when you’re in the middle of the road.

Thanks for stopping by. Come back tomorrow for … something. In the meantime, check out the Tumblr page, where a new picture landed today. And the Twitter account, which had a lot of good reading today. And none of it was filler.

adventures / Auburn / cycling / history / photo / weekend — Comments Off
24
Jun 12

Catching up

Where homeless pictures land, happy to find some place to finally belong after too much floating on my phone or my camera or on the desktop or in Photoshop.

My pictures have a very transient life, it seems.

This edition has about two weeks worth of material. It is like going back in time, of a sort.

You are here. We saw this somewhere in Tennessee. The trailer wasn’t much more specific than that. But visitors could rest comfortably in the knowledge that, as soon as an errant ash from the owner’s dangling cigarette caught the breeze they might very literally be somewhere else:

Crabford, the pool crab, says hello. He rides around in the car a lot, too:

This folk art can be found at one of the booths at Moe’s Original Bar-B-Q, where the biggest mistake they’ve ever made is encouraging people to scribble on their walls. If you’re having trouble picking out the detail, the crudely drawn character on the left is a terrified “Guy from Alabama.” The heroic and vibrant illustration on the right they’ve labeled as “Aubie Tiger.”

Perhaps I’m a traditionalist, but I liked it better when this was still painted on barns.

Clark Byers, an Alabama native, painted this on barns in 19 states, ranging from 1937 until 1969. He had about 900 barns under his built, offering to give the buildings a new coat of paint if the farmer would let him put the famous slogan on the roof. He died in 2004 at the age of 89. I remember writing that year “We can never look at barns the same.”

Well, I have a terrific life and asking for much more would just sound greedy. So, fortune accomplished:

The Yankee on the Ocoee River, near Benton, Tenn.:

The ones where she pretends to fall in the river we’ll just keep in the family collection:

We have an old grill brush tucked under the roof of the back porch, conveniently located next to the grill. Last year the squirrels stole it twice. (They couldn’t figure out how to get it over the privacy fence, apparently.) This year they’ve just decided to skip the takeout menu:

After a while I managed to get Allie to notice:

A few days later she took a nap with some of her toys. This is one spoiled kitteh:

We went to the local bike club’s time trials last week, just to watch. This guy hammered it home:

They post the participants’ times on the website later. I did the course the next day. I’m slower than everyone that showed up that evening:

adventures / cycling / photo / weekend — Comments Off
23
Jun 12

Bikes and cycling for gawking

More bikes to check out from this morning’s race. If you’d like to contribute to my Cervelo fund (now standing at $0!) I would think you the most awesome reader ever. Please make donations in amounts divisible by $100.

(I kid about all of this, of course. These are very nice bikes, though.)

I spend a few minutes every so often looking for a great deal on a bike like those. Still looking.

My bike is nice too, mind you, but decidedly more … entry level.

Some of the racers, finishing strong today:

You’ll notice that both of these guys are already out of their shoes. They’ll hit the the ground running barefoot about 75 feet from here, ready to transition into the running portion of their sprint triathlon:

He’s not waving, but changing hand positions to leap from his saddle and turn into a runner:

Finishing strong:

adventures / cycling / iPhone / photo / video / weekend — 1 Comment
23
Jun 12

The big aquabike race

For three years at least — since we started riding spin bikes one summer, or maybe even longer — The Yankee has toyed with the idea of competing in an aquabike event. This is a swim and bike, or a triathlon without the run, though purists would, I’m sure disagree with that as a oversimplification.

This summer has been the first time she’s been able to put it in her schedule. She’s on the master’s swim team at Auburn. Between doing laps and doing work she’s been riding her bike as well. And today there was a sprint triathlon — one in a series of six — in Georgia. They offered an aquabike component. And so we finally got to see it happen.

The race was at Indian Springs State Park which, like so much of Georgia, is in the middle of a rolling, rural countryside that features pine trees, pastureland and not much else. So we stayed last night in lovely Macon, and woke up and were on the road before sunrise. The race started at 8 a.m., which was great because everything wrapped up at 11 a.m., when the sun remembered it was June and turned ridiculous.

But we were, watching everyone get read as the golden rays filtered through the pines:

We’d registered yesterday, so that left only putting things in the transition area just so and getting numbers painted on your limbs and donning those fetching swim caps. They started the race, triathlete or no, on the basis of which cap color you had. Every group meant a different thing. The yellows were younger men. The green color caps, worn by older gentlemen, swam away three minutes later. Then came the purples, pinks and red for everyone else. The Yankee wore a red cap in the novice group, which pushed off 12 minutes after the yellows started the race. Perhaps this was the wrong category.

Getting her game face on. Or wondering how you’re supposed to be able to see in lake water.

Here’s the group’s start. They are swimming clockwise in a giant half-circle around five orange buoys. Those 600 meters look a lot different in open water than in the pool, I’d bet.

She got off to a good start in the swim, which is her stronger of the two events. She said she got off course at one point — which is precisely why I don’t swim in these things, my kick is so awful I’d go around in a circle — and had to correct. And then she started catching people in the groups in front of her, who swam away three minutes before she did.

On the other end of the manmade beach I settled in right where the competitors were coming out of the water. They swam the last 200 hundred meters into the rising sun, so very few people knew they’d arrived at the end.

I have a series of pictures of her coming out of the water, her red cap in contrast to the bulk of the pink-cap wearing group behind her. She’d put more than three minutes into a few dozen people in just the swim. (And later was displeased with how long she was in the water.)

In this race you stride out of the water and run maybe 30 yards across a narrow beach. And then you jog uphill:

This is on a sidewalk to the park’s lakehouse, where you turn right, run parallel another 50 or 60 feet to the beach, turn left and then have another incline to get into the area where your bike is waiting for you. It is a long run after a smart swim.

You put on your helmet and walk your bike out of the corral and to the “mount here” line. You climb on and immediately hit two rollers, a stop sign (that I imagine everyone ignored) and then a nice little windy exit to the park. You turn left and then climb hills for two miles. After that you’ve got a dozen miles of ground to cover, mostly rolling, but also some really nice flat distance.

I rode this yesterday and figured the early hills would hurt, but that she’d have a great ride the rest of the way. I was topping out in the low 30s on some of the flat stuff, and The Yankee’s bike is geared to give her a little more power on the flats than mine.

So I tried to stake out a good place just before the finish line back in the park, where shadows and light were playing tricks on the swiftly moving cyclists. The first guy back, by the way, completed the swim and the bike in less than 50 minutes. I assume he went on to have a masterfully impressive run and total sprint triathlon time as well. He was wearing an aero helmet, which seemed a bit excessive for the Georgia quasi-recreational race, but whatever made his head happy, I guess.

And, naturally, I found my spot and was largely alone for half an hour enjoying the morning and then the early returning cyclists all by myself. When my wife comes back through, working hard and looking good, this entire family walked right in front of my shot. So I have some fuzzy ones, thanks random family of ill-timed people. Now she’ll just have to do another race.

Which, after she’d stored her bike, tore off her helmet and did the final few yards of running across the finish line, she said she would do again.

That was about the third thing she said actually. First she asked for permission of the race volunteers to die. Fearing the paperwork, they said no. She did except their offer for a water, though. And then, later, she said it was a great race. Except for that first transition. And, when they posted times, she thought her swim could be better. But her ride was great. She did it today faster than I did it yesterday. We’ll just credit adrenaline for that.

She ate bagels and oranges and drank water and we tried to stay out of the sun while the rest of the field came in. She got cleaned up, we moved the car closer to the crowd and loaded our gear back in and on it. Just before the awards came through one of the last finishers. And just after they started handing out plaques and medals the last female racer, an older woman who finished strong, crossed the line. Not too far behind her came the last man, who was racing in the 75-79 division.

What did you do on your Saturday morning? Because that septuagenarian completed a sprint-triathlon. He swam 600 meters, biked 14.3 (I saw him come back in, looking serene and at ease) and then ran a 5K over a hilly course. Late 70s. How was your Saturday? Mine involved standing in the shade.

At the end of everything, when the official scores were tabulated through the magical powers of race software and the vagaries of USAT rules The Yankee was counted not as a novice, but as a third-place finisher in the women’s aquabike.

She was just two minutes out of first place. Her swim was four minutes slower than her pool time and we know nothing about transitions. So, yeah, we’re going to be competitive about this sport now.

More to come later.