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cycling

cycling / Monday / movies / Samford / video — Comments Off
2
Apr 12

“You have short legs”

Pulled the wheel off my bike and put it in my car. The rest of the bike went in there too. If I turn the fork so it looks like the front is trying to bite a flea and it will just fit inside.

It was time for a trip to the bike shop, one close to campus. The one close to home, which is generally very good, wasn’t interested in helping me replace the shifter cover that I lost last August. After the exposed screw sliced open my finger last month it was time. Felt, the manufacturer, told me to visit a store. The store said talk to Felt. And after we shared that joke, we got down to fixing it.

The part cost $10, which is the cheapest thing on a bike, apparently. It would also make my hands, as this is close to where your hands rest 99 percent of the time. So I left the bike with them, asked for a bit of maintenance and we’d scheduled time so I wouldn’t miss a ride.

I walked it and the lady behind the desk was sizing me up the way an expert tailor can tell your size without a tape measure. She sized me up and, I’m sure, found me lacking. It was like I’d told the tailor I wear one size and he glanced at me and said “No.”

With her glance she wondered about my bike set up. My seat is high. My legs are short. But, she concluded, what works for you works for you. She asked if I liked Felt. I was half-ready for her to tell me it was too much bike for me.

Later I was returning calls and found myself talking with a lady who was perfectly happy to be on the phone.
Happy to chat, happy to help. But she was making me late. There was a field trip to take with my class and timing is everything.

This is the introductory class, where we try to show off as many different parts of the business as possible. Today’s trip was to al.com where I worked from 2004 through 2008. Many of the same faces are still there. I saw three sales people, a designer and a producer I knew. The CEO and the office manager were there too. It was nice to catch up for a bit. Good people there.

We sat in the conference room and the guy that runs the content side of the place talked about what they do, the future, the past, internships and first jobs. The students asked good questions. Cards were distributed. The importance of networking was discussed. They crammed a lot of material in 90 minutes.

Some time back Bill Strickland introduced me to Graeme Obree. Tonight I stumbled onto The Flying Scotsman, a movie about the man, on Netflix.

Here’s the gist: He’s a Scottish cyclist who, in the 90s, set out to break the one-hour distance record. He built a bike from scratch, using parts of his washing machine, basically redesigning cycling all by himself. Only he just missed the record.
So the next day, after waking up all night to stretch his legs, he tried again. And he broke the record. It fell the next week to another racer. He took the mark back again soon after. Along the way he battled the sport’s governing body and his own deeply troubling demons.

Despite this trailer, the story (and the movie) make a compelling tale.

Obree, who did some of the cycling for the film, seemed to like it:

Once you get beyond this being, in part, about going in a circle, it is a good sports movie with a great supporting cast.

And then there’s the record itself:

This guy has held the record since 2005. In 2008 a doping suspension forced him into retirement.

Obree, who insists he’s never doped, is apparently preparing for a human powered land speed record. He wants to break 100 miles per hour. I’ve never even driven my car that fast.

cycling / iPhone / overwriting / photo / Thursday — Comments Off
29
Mar 12

Ride right

The road was quiet. Everyone had gotten to where they needed to be.

It was empty enough that when the occasional car came by it seemed to do so apologetically. They knew they were intruding on the empty asphalt and how lonely it should be.

When the hum of the road is your own noise, and yours alone, that’s worth chasing. That’s the moment you ride for.

cycling / iPhone / journalism / links / memories / Samford / things to read / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
28
Mar 12

Oh snap!

We are so very fortunate those words did not define our generation. You’ll see why at the bottom of the post.

Riding through the neighborhood the other evening I found I’d picked the neighborhood time for bicycles. Usually I see the ladies walking, or a mixture of people taking their dogs for a stroll. I often find kids out in their yards, but never anyone riding a bike.

But on this particular weekend evening I found four of them. I caught up with two at the stop sign that leads to the creek. At least one of them was even greener than I am. He was struggling with something at the intersection and his friend had turned and was waiting for him up ahead, his thigh across his crossbar.

The second pair I met soon after. The first I passed easily enough, he was just out for a ride. His partner wanted a race. And so surged up the hill after the creek. He was pedaling furiously, constantly looking over his shoulder. I pedaled furiously, clicking down through the gears and tapping out a rhythm I’ve never tried on that little hill. At the top he turned right and I turned left, but I had him. I was no good for the next few miles after that, but I would have had him.

It would be better if I didn’t get competitive about this sort of thing, as I am a bad cyclist.

But today, when I sat in my office doing office things, I thought about that hill. I thought about that little attempt at rushing up it. I thought about how my legs weren’t burning. That was a nice thought, for sitting in the office.

In class one group of students did a presentation and part of that was asking the question “Is print dead?” What followed was the best conversation of the entire semester. There were many different stances. Some said yes, some no. Others took the middle ground and wondered why we don’t simply say that print is changing. There were strong opinions. It was so great we’re turning it into an assignment.

Maybe I should have started the semester asking that question.

Things to read from my journalism blog: The interactive infographic uses a fancy ProPublica design as an example.

The increasingly useful Internet radio where I realize how many streaming apps I have on my phone, and we are teased with next month’s announcement of even more surprising smartphone penetration.

Two prisms, two news brands pulls together two stories, one on Al Jazeera English and the other on the growing Patch network. Both good reads of successfully growing (in different directions) projects.

From my evening drive:

Auburn / baseball / cycling / iPhone / photo / video / weekend — 1 Comment
24
Mar 12

Gorgeous day

It was the kind of day that should last forever and not change at all. Only you’d get bored of it. Sunny, breezy and 79? Again?

Maybe you’d get bored of it. Not me.

And if you don’t believe me, here:

Look at that sky, check out those clouds, ignore the guy pretending he knows how to ride a bike.

Rode 30 miles today, my first time on the bike since Tuesday. I was just beginning to convince myself that I was figuring something out about my bike or my legs or … something … earlier in the week because everything felt great. And then I got sick, and then it rained and now here we are. I’m on some precipice where three days off feels like a long time for whatever I have that passes for conditioning. I thought that today might be feel like I’d taking a slide backward.

But it felt a lot better than I thought it might. My legs were fairly strong. On the particular route I took today, one third was familiar and the rest was new. It didn’t include the most daunting hills around, but I was moving up rollers and slight hills with ease. I’d look down and realize I hadn’t even changed from my smallest gear.

Not sure what to make of that.

Baseball: Auburn beat LSU 3-2 in another game where the outcome was in doubt until the last pitch.

Here are the highlights:

That’s eighth ranked LSU. Auburn has won five in a row and is tied for the division lead in the young season. And this is a young team, picked to finished closed to last, still learning to put it all together, still stranding almost 10 runners on base per game.

The future looks bright. Maybe all of the days will be as pleasant as this one.

cycling / hobby / Monday / photo — Comments Off
19
Mar 12

“We must be caught up.”

This guy was outside this morning:

In the afternoon I rode my little bicycle, turning the wheels around and around for what little I’m worth. I did an out-and-back, just down the long, hilly road from my neighborhood, out of town, past a handful of deputy sheriffs, through the neighboring town and than through two unincorporated communities. When I got to the point that was the farthest I’ve been on this particular road I felt great and pressed on.

And if the pros romanticize riding the cobblestones of Europe I invite them to enjoy the neglected country roads of this part of the world.

I road on a stretch that was little more than beaten shale until it turned into a still-smelling-of-tar new blacktop. It wasn’t much better, despite being brand new. Finally I had to turn around, riding over new asphalt covered in the red clay that means I’d traveled through at least three different soil regions.

On the way home I landed a sponsor, of sorts. I stopped at one of the crossroads gas stations to enjoy the shade and the last little bit of water. The guy working the till was sitting on a bench outside and invited me in to top off from the sink. So, Alice Faye’s Grocery, you guys are the best. And for the water refill and two handfuls of ice, I’ll mention you a lot. Also, I’ll stop back by, when I’m not in lycra, and buy a few things.

By the time I got home I’d managed 50 miles. And only the last few were uncomfortable. For the first 44 or so I felt as good as I ever have on the bike. I even set a personal best average speed over the course of the ride. It is still slow. I am not a very good cyclist.

At home the cable was out. A technician was due between 5-7 p.m. While we waited a contractor for the cable company showed up to bury the line the tech left in our yard on Saturday. He was scheduled for April but, as he said, “We must be caught up.”

This was a man of dirt and grass and heavy machinery. He has a dispatcher who tells him where to go, and that is enough. You have to admire the man’s work. Instead of a bright orange cable sprawled across the property there is now only a narrow cut line where he had to get under the grass. If you didn’t look hard you might not even see it.

As he worked the other guy showed up. And he was mystified.

These problems have persisted since we moved in. We go through a few months of mild problems, and then a long series of very persistent outages. When that happens we have experiences like this, three guys out in three days.

Oh they mean well, and they try hard. There are a few constants in the many visits. Most of them have something unflattering to say about the cable company they work for. They can never figure out the problem. They mostly just undo what the last guy did.

The guy that came out Saturday was little different. He told us the spectrum of numbers our streaming data should be at, and then told us the negative number we were at, which brought about the new cable stretched across the lawn. That worked until today.

The guy today yanked out an amplifier module one of his colleagues installed last year. It isn’t needed anymore, he said, because of the new, and newly buried, cable.

Why this wasn’t a problem for two days he couldn’t say. He couldn’t say a lot, really. He spent much of his time confused about the problem, which can’t be great for his morale. Here’s the customer, here’s the problem, here are your springtime allergens and your cat allergies.

“What is the deal with this?”

It doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence, granted. But he got everything working in time. The cable got buried, everything is working as it should again. I had turkey for dinner. Life is good.

Also, we had this visitor today: