cycling

cycling / Monday / video — Comments Off on We changed it up this weekend
21
Sep 20

We changed it up this weekend

We loaded our bikes up on the car and drove to Indy and rode the Monon Trail. This is one of those former-railroad-routes-turned-paved recreational path. It was a get-out-of-the-house move. It was also a ride-somewhere-else move. And a go-slow move. It was, perhaps most importantly, an enjoy-a-lovely-day-out move.

Here’s part of the trail, way on the north side of town:

And after we turned around at the far end and were riding back toward the car, I decided to shoot some slow-motion videos. You see it in sports all the time, let’s see if I could pull one off myself:

That’s not bad for 19 or 20 miles per hour. Let’s try one more, just to see how much of a fluke the first one was.

It was a nice change.

cycling / Monday / photo / podcast — Comments Off on Interviewing my wife
14
Sep 20

Interviewing my wife

We had a nice bike ride over the weekend. I took it easy, nursing an old guy’s bike. (I have come to appreciate the wisdom of listening to my some of my aches and a few of my pains.)

The Yankee did hill repeats:

I did sprint repeats. She might have still been faster, though.

If you go down this hill, all the way down it, you can make it to the lake. And then you’ll wonder if you should regret that decision because theres only the one way back up and you’re on a bicycle. The bottom of the ascent starts out at 12-14 degrees, but averages out for a nice 4-degree climb.

We saw some nice roadside flowers, too.

Also, I interviewed her Friday. When you have a distinguished and renowned sports media scholar who has a home office just around the corner from your own, you book the interview. The premise is “We had the usual amount of sports, and then no sports, and now we have every sport imaginable!”

For the record, it was no easier to get her booked, but it was more fun talk to her and easier to edit. Which balanced out the difficulty of trying to write questions about things she talks about all the time. This is an issue for all of these experts: Come, please, talk about your understanding of your life’s work in a basic way. The difference being I’ve heard her talk about it for years, and, with these other people, I send them a cold call email, interview them, thank them for their time and later send them an email link.

If I got one wrong here, or, worse, left one out …

Every now and then I try to encourage her to do any number of shows of her own. One day I’ll find the right idea. Then I’ll get to edit some more of that brilliance.

cycling / Monday / photo — Comments Off on Just a few words about a casual bike ride
7
Sep 20

Just a few words about a casual bike ride

There’s a moment in this video where the frame rate and the RPMs of the spoke shadows synched up perfectly. Check this out:

This was of course, on a sunny Saturday bike ride, one of the highlights of the weekend.

Weekends taking on a curious level of sameness. We sleep in, get curbside pickup of Chick-fil-A for lunch, eat, go for a bike ride, get cleaned up and settle in for an evening of chatting with a few friends. Sundays usually have a lot of reading, or preparing for the week, or dreading it, or whatever it is that people do.

Next week, we’re changing it up. We’re going to go ride bikes somewhere else!

On our usual weekend route:

She takes beautiful pictures. Pointing those toes a little bit though …

I wonder if I should tell her. Nah. She was already ahead of me. “You’re riding better than me wrong!” would be bitter grapes, indeed.

adventures / cycling / Monday / photo — Comments Off on First day of classes
24
Aug 20

First day of classes

First day back, and all is well. Empty, but well. There’s not a lot going on in our building, by design. Safety measures and all that. May it ever be so, and may it continue to go well because of it. With the quiet day there isn’t much to discuss. May it ever be so, and may that continue to go well, too.

The cats had a grand week, as ever. Phoebe is working on her selfie skills:

Poseidon is working on his save-you-from-falling-off-the-cliff pose. He’s really selling it with the facial expressions, if you ask me.

We went for a bike ride. It was one of the usual local routes. And the part I would like to mention here, briefly, took place just before this photograph:

There was a blip in one of the recording apps. (What? You don’t document your bike rides on three different tools?) On one segment I hit 11,309 miles per hour. Now, you might think that mach 15 is fast on a bicycle, but if you’ll note that the red line is the path of travel and the blue one is the recorded mile in question.

Fitting, I suppose, that I was roaring by Airline Road at the time.

I’ve been down that road. It’s neat, but it has nothing to do with planes or airports.

Last night, on the front porch, I got a haircut.

I was well overdue. But who wants to go sit in a barber shop just now? So I bought some trimmers online and we watched a video and read the instruction booklet and she went to work. She didn’t sign up for it, but she was game to try it. She was also terribly susceptible for the “NO! NOT THAT MUCH!” joke.

For a first haircut, she did a great job. (I fidget a little, so any problems with the styling are mine.) And after two more haircuts those trimmers will have paid for themselves. The photos are free, and who knows how wacky hair styles will be by then.

cycling / IU / podcast / Twitter / Wednesday — Comments Off on It goes much faster now
19
Aug 20

It goes much faster now

We’re counting down the days until classes begin again next week. That’s something to look forward to. No matter what you do, no matter how much you work ahead of time, whether in a normal semester or, as we’ve learned this year, a pandemic, there’s always a huge crush right at the starting line. There’s always more. Always the last minute thing, the unexpected, the sudden memo that subvert’s some previous week’s work.

So it was that at one point this morning I was in a Zoom, and on a webinar, and following a work-based Slack chat and having a text exchange all at once.

That, as I noted elsewhere, is Friday-level bandwidth.

On the bike, it was a rare day. It was almost fast for me — though admittedly average for others. It was one of those rare days where I could look down and proudly note I was pulling 20 mph up a hill and pushing through 38 on a slightly ramped down -1 percent decline … and still get dropped.

But on two segments I really worked on I set new PRs. On the first one I knocked off 19 seconds off my best time over that 1.2-mile stretch. That was a nine percent reduction. Who knows if I could do that again through there. (I know. I know how I felt at the end of it. I might find a second or two, but not much.)

And on the segment nearest the house at the end of a swift (for me) I took four seconds off my fastest time in a 1,000 meter sprint. If I can cut 16 more seconds off my time there I’d make the all-time top 10 on that Strava segment. It seems … improbable.

Kyle Anderson, is an economist at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business at IUPUI. I talked with him today to discuss the state’s economic condition as we make our way through August. He talks about the prospects for recovery, sectors hardest hit, evictions, personal advice and more.

He isn’t as optimistic as the last time we talked, but he does see some positives out there. I wonder if economists figure “At some point, no one is going to listen to the gloom. I need some silver linings in here.” One supposes an added benefit of having all the data at your disposal that an economist can call upon has to lead to something good, somewhere.

After we wrapped it up he said I asked good questions. So my minor in economics is paying for itself once again.

Some stuff from Twitter …

This was amazing, and I should have stopped watching the conventions right here. No way anyone comes out with anything much better than Rep. Gabby Giffords.

More on Twitter, check me out on Instagram and more On Topic with IU podcasts as well.

← Older Entries
Newer Entries →