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cycling / errands / Monday / photo / video — Comments Off
28
Sep 20

How I roll

Wake up with a morning show. They’re always so cheery and bright. Our students produce one of those. Here’s today’s episode.

I did a morning show for two years in college, and then I worked morning drive for pretty much my entire news career.

I’m a night owl and I think I’m still recovering.

I’ll spend some time from this year recovering, psychologically, from flat tires.

I had yet another one on Saturday. I think that’s six, maybe seven, this year. It’s always the back. And it’s probably entirely a mixture of bad luck and user error. Probably more the latter than I’d like to admit.

But there I sat, a brand new tube in the tire and it punctured about 15 miles in to its life, I was getting ready for a short, hard Strava segment when the tube gave way. The Yankee was right behind me and she stopped with me. I carry a hand pump and a spare tube, so I sent her on ahead. And I worked on this dumb thing a while, first in the sunshine, and then I crossed the street to sit in the shade.

A guy rode along on his bike and he offered to stop. We talked bikes and routes and I borrowed his better pump. And for a moment it seemed normal, and I think we both remembered at about the same time we should be standing a bit farther apart. About that time I had the new tube in place and inflated and so I soft pedaled my way home.

See, the thing is I ride at about 110 psi on a regular day, and a good hand pump will get you up to about 70 psi. And that’s just spongy enough to go a bit slower and smell the roses.

We went to get gas this morning. Made good use of those grocery store loyalty points, too.

We go and fill both cars up together to get the most of our savings. I said, As far as I can recall, this is the first time I’ve filled up since May 30th.

The Yankee thinks we got gas in July. Maybe. It’s hard to say. The point being, we’re driving so little that a tank of gas goes a long way. A normal week, right now, is four trips to campus and maybe a journey out to get takeout for Saturday lunch. That comes out to about 35 or 40 miles for me. I’ll take that.

And if I start riding my bike back to work … if I can avoid the flats …

cycling / Monday / video — Comments Off
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
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!”

On Topic with IU · On Topic with IU — Talking about the return of sports with Dr. Lauren Smith

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
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
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.