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cycling

I blame the fire fighters

Beautiful, sunny, crisp, windy day. It was in the 50s and a I pedaled out in sleeves. Wheeling the bikes into the street, we did a few turns in the back of the neighborhood, going up and down the smallest hill we can find around us, dodging gravel on the right side down by the cul-de-sac.

I’m still trying to relax my feet in the new shoes and pedals. Today is just my third ride with them, and I’m having a hard time convincing myself I can make it to the prescribed six rides before assessing the problem, especially when the problem starts creeping in at mile four. The idea of foot pain for the next several dozen miles thereafter is no fun.

I did the first two of four laps into the cul-de-sac, generally mashing the pedals and trying to warm up. The Yankee breezed up and down the road, from a distance a picture of relaxed composure. She really just wants to go ride and this is just her tolerating my cold legs. After two turns she cranked her head to the side and heads out through the shorter exit from the neighborhood.

My last two laps into the bottom of that road gives me my first three miles or so, after which I cruise through the slightly more fun exit out of the neighborhood, stretching things out into a whirling, assuredly ugly and almost respectably speedy form before the creek bed, and the slow incline that follows it. From there it is up one of the more popular stretches of cycling road in town, the red light and the second half of the five mile climb. Oh, sure, that sounds impressive, but I won’t tell you the elevation, because it isn’t.

I’m maybe seven miles in and getting more out of the stroke, just like the expert said I would, but my feet hurt. I have this deal with myself though: I will not stop riding for any reason that can be in any way tolerated or ignored if the odometer is under 15 miles. The feet, though, and the simultaneous crunching and pulling apart that seems to be happening in my arches, is making a powerful argument otherwise.

I started tinkering with my stroke, more lifting than pressing. This helped a bit. Too self-aware of my foot pain I began to notice other things. My entire bike feels out of fit, somehow. I am too big for it all of a sudden. The geometry, not that it is ever good, is noticeably awkward. I noticed every little thing. The arms aren’t right, I’m too far back. I need a custom-built bike. Everything.

I stopped at almost the midpoint of today’s mini-route to take off my jacket, have a banana and rest my feet. I hadn’t seen The Yankee yet. She must be having a good ride, and if so there’s no crossing that gap. There’s even a switchback on this route and I didn’t see her going down the second overpass as I went up the first one.

Settling back in I notice my feet stopped hurting. I’ve adjusted! Or damaged the nerves! Something has changed, and maybe not just my stroke. Having zoned out for the past few moments I glanced down and realized I’m cruising over slow rolling hills, gaining speed as I go. This is unlike me. It must be the banana. (I will carry one tomorrow to test this theory.)

I made the hard right for home at 20 miles. There’s a car dealership there, and an out of the way transmitter across the street. We’ll soon pass the fishing pond. And then three stop signs, one little hill I hate and another I’m trying to convince myself I don’t mind too much …

Oh, there are fireman at one of those stop signs. They have the boot out. Great: a fund raiser and me with no bills.
Only this is a rural, volunteer fire department in the kind of place where everyone knows everyone. This crew might have answered a call for someone in that SUV, and that chitchat may be what is making their conversation going on so long. I can’t trackstand for-

That’s about how long I can trackstand, about as long as it takes to think that paragraph. Suddenly I’m over. Crash, scrape, pow.

They say earning your first fall in clips is something like a badge of honor, a rite of ascension. You aren’t stepping off of pedals or pulling your shoe out of a vinyl toe cage. You have to pivot the ball of your foot and turn your ankle. It comes out quickly, if you’re ready to do it. If you feel your bike turn and instinct takes over — well, my ancestors didn’t have clips, so that instinct isn’t there.

Somehow I stayed up, but my bike fell. And there was a terrible scratching noise on the asphalt, though I can’t find anything damaged. I stood there stretching for a bit, muttering for a bit, trying to convince myself I hadn’t strained anything. This all went on a little too long, apparently. The firemen started walking over to offer help. Self-conscious, I thanked them, told a joke and tried to clip back in to pedal on. Because I was self-conscious I almost fell off the bike and into the laps of the two people holding the fund raising boot.

I stood up in the pedals and sprinted off as quickly as I could, hoping the swaying of the bike frame from right to left at least suggested some competence.

A few minutes later I saw The Yankee a half mile ahead. I slowly reeled her in, ducked inside to pass her and gave a glance. And in a way you get maybe just from knowing someone a good long while I could tell in that peripheral half second that something was wrong. We stopped. She shared. Turns out she’d actually crashed right by that car dealership and transmitter. A truck got to close, she thinks the wind sucked her in, and it turns out her ancestors didn’t have clips either.

She was on the ground and bounced once. Someone coming the other direction stopped to help.

She said “Could you help me get out of my bike?”

Her feet stayed clipped through the fall. She’s an artist.

Because we are in a part of the world where everyone knows almost everyone and you can get a ride anywhere, the guy offered to take her home. She declined, “My husband should be just a few miles behind me.”

“Next time tell him to keep up!” he said.

It takes all I have, stranger.

So we both sort of limped home. She had the slight owie. I’d hurt my pride.

I attacked the longest, largest hill in town at the end of my ride for the first time ever. It isn’t especially long or high, but it’s more than enough for the likes of me. It ascends in two stages and in that first part I was a fury. In the second I looked as if I was pedaling in soup.

This was the longest ride I’ve had in some time and it wasn’t even long, just 30 miles. I have to build back up once again.

The birds are back. We’ve improved the anti-squirrel theft technology — taller pole, and yes squirrels can climb, but they can’t leap high enough over this conical baffle thing — and now only the feathered set are getting the goodies.

I hadn’t realized cardinals were especially territorial, until we met this guy. He’s also very aware of you from a distance:

And then some of the smaller snackers:

I’m sure we will see more birds tomorrow.

cycling / links / site / Thursday — Comments Off
23
Feb 12

Who’s counting?

I realized today that I need a new gimmick for the site. Thursday is usually a day with extra content here, and now I’m out of material. Last Thursday we wrapped up the section on my grandfather’s textbooks.

Not to worry. I have an idea. Now we’ll just have to make it work. Maybe by next week it will be ready to roll out.

Read a little. Wrote a little. Remembered how many people I still need to call this week. Somehow the day got away from me a bit.

A great essay by Jason Farman on using disruptive technologies to a classroom advantage:

I was excited by the potential of the iPad and other mobile technologies as a means to practice different forms of engagement. I am now a strong believer that these tools, when used correctly, truly foster a deep sense of interpersonal engagement between the students and with the spaces they move through.

I’ll finish up by getting on my soapbox and preaching to the choir (among other clichés): Soon, if it hasn’t happened already, every teacher in higher education will have to develop a strategy for mobile phone use in the classroom (whether that be to integrate the technology or to ban it). Currently, mobile phones are the most pervasive computing technology in existence. There are currently over 5.3 billion mobile phone subscribers worldwide. In a planet of around 7 billion people, that’s around 76% of the world that has access to — and uses — a mobile phone. Almost all of our students have them. The mobile device is something that they have on them throughout the day and has become embedded into the fabric of their everyday lives.

While it will be some time before the same can be said of tablet computers like the iPad, it is still worth noting at this stage that simply responding to these pervasive technologies by banning them from the classroom does little to address the importance of these media in our students’ everyday lives. From my perspective, as an educator, I must respond those practices that have become pervasive in the lives of my students, demonstrate that there are many ways to use these tools, and, ultimately, show them how to analyze and critique their own everyday practices. I am taking small steps toward figuring out the best techniques to achieve those goals.

Did manage to sneak in a few miles on the bike. I’m still adjusting to my new shoes and clips, so riding behind the neighborhood seemed like a good idea. While getting acquainted with the new gear my feet have been taking a beating. About four miles in my arches start complaining. After about 10 miles I had to take a break, just to rest my barking dogs.

I never think of my feet as dogs until they hurt. And on those rare occasions they snarl. That’s a good description for today.

So after a bit of standing around I hoped back on the bike and raced the daylight home.

The local bike shop says all of this should be better in three or six rides. Two down, some pain still to go.

cycling / errands / iPhone / photo / Thursday — Comments Off
16
Feb 12

These stories have thin morals

Eggs. Eggs. Must get eggs. I’d been tasked with this important task because it wouldn’t be a weekend without breakfast.

To the meat lab. This is all in the timing. If you went early the eggs would not be there yet. If you show up late they’ll be gone. (They are a good deal, and popular with the in-crowd. They have a sign with the bad news that they’re out of eggs. They do not have a sign for when they run out of pork chops.)

I walk in. There is one flat of eggs left. Thirty delicious eggs at a terrific price and these are the last ones for the evening. I ask the lady working there if they are spoken for. She says yes. Crestfallen, I glance around at other things and, having failed at the original mission, decide to purchase nothing. I turn to leave.

“You’re not going to buy the eggs?”

Didn’t you say they were someone else’s?

“No. I meant that’s the last of them.”

Well. They are spoken for, then.

Moral: Don’t count your eggs before they are in your refrigerator. (If you count them in someone else’s refrigerator, you should get permission first.)

Visited the big blue box store, because I had to see what the hubbub was about. The place was packed like Christmas was coming or snow had arrived. It was all very orderly though, with people stopping and staring at exciting things like brushes and notebook paper for the longest amount of time.

I checked out behind a handsome elderly couple. They just managed to sneak in under the draconian Express Lane rules that most people do not bother to acknowledge. The lady staffing the register checked them out in silence. And then she struck up a conversation with me, offering me a credit card application and asking about my day and wishing me well. She did none of these things for the couple. Maybe she just talks to every other customer.

Moral: A leopard can’t change his spots, but you can pick yours.

Also hit the local bike shop, where I needed their help making two small adjustments to my bike. They have a tool I don’t — they have a lot of tools I don’t — which is required to make this particular pedal-to-crankset change. I learned this important, and costly, lesson last spring.

Picked up some new shoes, talked about chain lubrication and the upcoming chain replacement that I’ll be due. Chain work, he said, can sometimes open a Pandora’s Box. Because, really, my repair-and-upkeep luck needs the help.

“It might be more than the chain,” he said. “There could also be problem with the cassette.”

Or the derailleur. We could find out I’ve been riding around on the wrong tires. There could be a problem with the satellite in a neighbor’s home, and this responsibility to fall to me.

“But it could be just a chain,” he said.

Moral: It is never just the chain.

cycling / errands / Friday / links / movies / video — Comments Off
10
Feb 12

Emailed items are Undefeated

Email on the wane according to a new ComScore report, as relayed by Alan Mutter:

The use of email has plunged by more than 30% in the last year among consumers under the age of 24, owing to the increased use of texting and Facebook to stay in touch.

[…]

A primary activity among wired individuals since the arrival of the Internet, email use in the last 12 months fell by more than 30% for those under the age of 24 and stayed absolutely flat among those aged 24-44, according to the audience measuring service. As illustrated below, only those aged 45-54 are pecking out more emails today than they were a year ago.

Twenty-two percent of the remainder is in my inbox. Six percent spam, eight percent meant for someone else.

I’m presently inundated with emails from seemingly every agency east of the Rockies that ships cars. Someone is intent on shipping their Volkswagen Jetta from Philadelphia to Chattanooga. The going rate, I can confidently say, ranges between $400 and $550. And the car transport people? They are big on correspondence.

Shipped off the headlight lamp that was supposed to fit my car, but did not fit my car. I clicked the buttons on Amazon, printed the return file, put everything back in the original boxes and carried it to the UPS store. That’s where you can buy UPSes.

The door just about pinched my finger off going in. The two guys working there feigned a mild concern. They were helping a young lady on crutches. She had all of their sympathy. Even the pre-existing injury on my finger didn’t win the day. I didn’t mind. The thing I printed meant I didn’t have to pay for shipping.

Amazon gives you several reasons to return your purchase. Some of them are very nuanced reasons, but some of them mean the difference between you paying a restocking fee, a shipping fee or nothing at all. Fortunately my reason to return the thing meant the seller was footing the bill. And that’s the first thing in the car drama that has worked in my favor.

Snuck in a few quick miles on the bike this evening. It is February, but it is finally turning cold. I could tell on my ride. Still nice and mild when I left home, but about two-thirds of the way through the ride I found myself in the shivers.

Tomorrow we’ll have big winds and maybe the 40s. I’ll just have to wait that out and pile it on Sunday afternoon.

Watched The Undefeated:

If they edited trailers like they do today Rock Hudson would have been a total scene stealer, John Wayne would have punched someone and the love interest would have been slipped in at the end. And then Rock Hudson would say something like “Finding ourselves outnumbered is a fact of life we’ve gotten used to!”

That’s just before the conversation between Hudson’s fleeing rebels and the soon-to-be assaulting Mexican bandits. Their detente doesn’t go well. The bad guys attack. They are turned back by the confederates and then ambushed twice, first by Wayne’s calvary and then by Wayne’s adopted son’s friends.

Later a Juarista general double-crosses Hudson. After a speech, an execution, dilemma and then a running gunfight that takes place in a barely controlled horse stampede we reach the conclusion. And there it is hard to picture a colonel and family man, in the next-to-last scene, having a toast with the man who’d previously held them all hostage.

There had to be at least 100 people shot and killed in the movie, which held a G rating.

Which is better than three percent of the email currently sitting in my spam folder.

books / cycling / journalism / links / video / weekend — Comments Off
4
Feb 12

Mass, viscous, swooping, all appear in this post

Halifax Media Holdings, which recently purchased The Tuscaloosa News and The Gadsden Times and a handful of other properties from the New York Times. Poynter reports:

About 30 employees of the former New York Times Regional Media Group were notified Friday that their new employer, Halifax Media Group, has decided to lay them off and offer severance packages. The other 20 were offered positions, but only if they relocated to Daytona Beach, Fla., where Halifax is headquartered.

A letter accompanying documents distributed Friday said Halifax “has reviewed the company’s Tampa operations to see where additional efficiencies can be achieved by eliminating or consolidating certain job functions and operations.”

Employees “who were offered a package were told that they wouldn’t be given severance if they speak to the media or publicly discuss the situation,” said one source. A second source confirmed the confidentiality clause …

There are more cuts on the way:

Those local news organizations also have their own journalism and sales staffs, who can expect to hear more lay off news over the next month or so.

By the terms of the sale, Halifax could only lay off a maximum 10 percent of the 2,000-person staff, but that requirement applied only to layoffs that occurred at the time of closing.

Selling those properties to Halifax only did so much good for the New York Times. While their paywall has been somewhat successful GigaOM says it doesn’t come close to closing the gap. “Print ad revenue fell by almost 8 percent, which helped push the NYT’s fourth-quarter profit down by more than 12 percent, and for the full year the company reported a loss of $40 million.”

Yelp? Hurting for dough.

Income-Age gap? Growing.

And now that I’ve found three stories to slow down your Saturday, here’s this reason I love the Internet: Jedi Betty White.

I watch Golden Girls from time to time, I’ll admit it. I can’t stand the theme song, but if I can jump into an episode after that I’ll be hooked for the duration. White’s character is really the only one I never especially liked, but watching the actress is a different thing. Estelle Getty’s character has always been my favorite. Rue McClanahan was always on the periphery to me, Betty White played the comic relief. Bea Arthur held it all together, and sometimes tore up the room. Here’s the end of a great speech at the end of the fifth season premiere. She’d been blown off by her doctor and then saw him out at a fancy restaurant where she confronted him:

It is the sort of thing you think about when someone you care about talks about their doctor and whether they like him or her. The camera pulls and Dorothy goes back to her table and there’s Dorothy setting up the comic relief, and Sophia stealing the show, as she often did.

I’m certain that clip has made its way around to restaurant managers, however. You might need to find your own solution when you get stuck in that spot.

Visited the local bike shop today, which I do believe is about two steps down from going to a coffee house. A few less chairs, a few more expensive products, but everything else is the same.

The Yankee is two-thirds of the way through a bike fitting — centimeters matter, particularly when you’re talking about long rides and various stresses and strains on the body. This is a multi-step gets the process, a by-feel mixture of what the bike expert thinks looks right, and then several rides where you go back and tell him what this infernal device is doing to your back or your shoulders or what have you. Once you get things well fit you can feel like a rocket. Until then you’re just tinkering and trying to find something that doesn’t make you miserable.

I did mine myself last summer. She said my knees were spread out all over the place so I moved the seat post about eight microns over the course of a weekend until I found just the right height. When I found a place that didn’t strain my knees or over-burden my upper body I wanted to launch fireworks and mark that spot in a paint that the world’s worst CSI agent couldn’t miss: Place Seat Here. Mine probably isn’t perfect — my bike is a little small for my build, after all — but nothing especially hurts.

And, as I told the owner of the bike shop today, lately it feels like I’m not riding my bike so much as going along for the ride. I’m holding on more than propelling the thing. It is a nice feeling, silly as the explanation sounds. Bill Strickland calls it the flow:

a discussion of the merits of such a route will ensue, incorporating concepts such as traffic, slope, wind, sun, gravel and the ever-ethereal and thus impregnable defense of “flow.”

I’m the “flow” guy, by the way.

This is inane behavior, I know. But it is important in the way that things that are absolutely without importance are important.

I think Strickland and I are on the same page, at least. If you find Strickland’s flow — which sounds like a submariner’s geographic map notation — maybe you can get to what Jean Bobet called la volupte:

The divine surprise comes when you discover that beyond enjoyment lies the thrill of la volupte. The voluptuous pleasure you get from cycling is something else. It does exist, because I have experienced it. Its magic lies in its unexpectedness, its value in its rarity. It is more than a sensation because one’s emotions are involved as well as one’s actions. At the risk of raising eyebrows, I would maintain that the delight of cycling is not to be found in the arena of competition. In racing the threat of failure or the excitement of success generates euphoria at best, which seems vulgar in comparison with la volupte.

The voluptuous pleasure that cycling can give you is delicate, intimate and ephemeral. It arrives, it takes hold of you, sweeps you up and then leaves you again. It is for you alone. It is a combination of speed and ease, force and grace. It is pure happiness.

I wonder if the guys in the local bike shop have read all the great French philosophy on cycling and — oh, he’s going to answer my question now.

I had two, actually. One about chain maintenance, to which he whipped out a tool from the sky above and told me how to build a clock that runs on bike chains. You can’t help but like this guy. He’s just so passionate and giving with everything he knows, and he knows plenty. My other question was also about the chain and how mine seems to have a “Shift, Dummy” signal. He pulls that tool out again, a silver boomerang shaped thing that is not unlike a dipstick and shows me another function. He tells me what I’m describing could be one of three things, or just me being in the wrong gear.

I’m not a very good cyclist, I keep telling you this.

The Yankee, meanwhile, has her bike attached to a trainer. The back wheel is slightly elevated so that she can pedal and work the gears and the front wheel is in a giant plastic contraption designed to keep her in one place rather than crashing through a handsome wall of ultimately vital, expensive brand name accessories.

They adjust, tinker, reset, and we’re all just chatting away about geometry and ergonomics and you’d not believe how many different terms they bring into cycling just to mystify the casual listener, or how many ways I will analogize the things he is saying just to make sure I have it all right in my head.

We talk about warm ups and routes and races. He races. He has more than one pair of cycling shoes. I do too, they are called the tennis shoes I ride in and the the tennis shoes I learned very early hurt my feet when I try to ride in them. (Those are now simply my gym shoes.) The Yankee builds a good pace and pronounces the fit worth trying. She picks up a few accessories. Her bike is now once again fancier than mine.

Back at home, as the day is beginning the long slow sigh into evening, we decide to go for a short ride. We have about an hour of daylight and she wants to try her new clipless pedals. We do a few laps on the empty street in our neighborhood. We pass the little boy who lives next to us, intently focused under his Incredible Hulk helmet and pounding away on his training wheels. I cruise by him quickly, hoping he likes speed, and chuckling that it might concern his mother.

The Yankee and I decide we will ride our bikes through the neighborhood and back up one of the more popular routes in town to the local grocery store. We need charcoal. If we both go one person can stay outside and watch the bikes. I pull out one of those ridiculous drawstring backpacks that we picked up as a promotional gift at a swim meet figuring it might hold the charcoal on the way home. One day those backpacks might hold extra water if I find myself making a really long ride in the summer. A quick visit to the store will be a good test.

We head through the neighborhood, down the hill, through the stop sign and out through the entire subdivision, two people on bicycles laughing like crazed people on bicycles. We can’t do this ride leisurely, because The Yankee has new equipment and wants to test it. Also, we are competitive.

Around the part where all of the old ladies live, the ones you can unfortunately startle if you pass by their house when they’re out to get the mail, we’re streaking along at what is, for us, a good pace. Sprints are relative, dear reader. She has an extra gear in her bike, and perhaps an extra something else when it comes to short distances. I do well to stay on her wheel. But when the hills come — we have moderately sloping hills, nothing massive at all — I can create some distance between us.

I settle in at a nice pace and beat her to the grocery store, but I know I won’t for long. Her new equipment, the bike shop guy said, is going to give her another mile per hour on her average. The gear is a great equalizer. (I, suddenly, need new gear.)

She stays with the bikes. I go inside and find a seven-pound bag of charcoal. I think the 12-pounder might fight this drawstring backpack, but let’s work up to that. I pay. I’m in my full cycling kit and no one at the store even blinks.

“Can I bag this for you?” one of the employees asks.

“Can you put it in this one?” I pull off the blaze orange backpack and he doesn’t hesitate. What do you have to do to give these people pause?

We head back home. In this direction that popular road is more like a drag strip, which is why it is so popular in that part of town. I put my mass forward, which is now even greater with seven pounds of briquettes strapped on my shoulders and cruise down the road. This is a straight path, the first feature being the turn back into the intersection, a 90-degree right-hander that is never a problem.

Unless you’ve changed your weight distribution. What I can normally do from my bike lane into the right-hand car lane now takes up every inch of asphalt. There was no diving into that corner. It was more like watching a big glop of something sliding down the back of a spoon. Not especially viscous, not in any way pretty. Then more sprinting, the last of it really, for soon the remaining route turns into an uphill push back home, which sits up higher than everything else in the ZIP code, apparently. At least it feels that way on my bike.

Just before the bottom of that last sprint is a roundabout, which offers the most technical aspect of this particular ride. You have to swing to the right to get into it, even from the bike lane, but then swing back to the left to avoid someone’s well manicured lawn. But you can’t do that too early, because there are potholes and bent bike wheels waiting for you if you do. Also, I have charcoal on my back. It doesn’t interfere with my riding — I didn’t even notice it on inclines — but it is certainly impacting my swooping.

And I like swooping.

I make it home with no more difficulties and feeling confident I can carry a small amount of dead weight on my back while riding. The Yankee rides up soon after. I note the times on our computers, just in case it is the last time I get back before she does. I’ll want to remember this moment, because it was a great day.

How great? I didn’t even mention the morning yard work, which could not diminish it, with all of its attendant scratches and scrapes and cuts from the flower bed. That’s how great.