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cycling / Friday / photo — Comments Off
3
Apr 20

Ride and ride faster

After work today — and I did work today, there were meetings and emails and planning and executing some things, even if it was not at a pace one is accustomed to — it was time for a …

… time trial? We found a route just outside of town, parked at the local winery, which is closed and empty, and did four loops on a flat course where all the roads looked like this, for the entirety of the 27 miles. We were riding on frontage roads on either side of the highway, but I think I was passed by four cars. For the sake of comparison, one other cyclist passed me.

But it all looked like this, empty and quiet, which is why I was taking one-handed photos at about 25 miles per hour.

Which is where I was riding in that particular area of the course. It was the fastest mile on the course for me and, having noticed that the first three times through, I knew that’s where I was taking my picture, just so I could actually suggest I was fast, on this one part of the full course.

It’s a good course. I suspect we’ll be back a few times this year, just to chart our progress.

The gardens at the winery are quite lovely. And since no one was there, and we were outside and it was a joy to do it, we took about 10 minutes of indulgent photographs before loading the bikes back on the car.

I like to imagine these are ruins, and not just lawn decorations:

So … big weekend plans?

adventures / cycling / photo / Tuesday — Comments Off
31
Mar 20

Still a few leftover pictures

We’re going back to our roots!

When I took that photo I thought, Wow, that’s a lot of roots. But, somehow, it seems like less now. Maybe that’s a compression of the whole scene into a computer monitor rather than the several square feet of ground the tree’s lateral branches. Maybe I was just impressed by being outside.

This was a sad sight.

In the background you can see a field where, in happier times, soccer and football and whatever else is played by the little kids. It’s a nice park floating just above the nearby middle school, surrounded by a quiet walking path. But there can be no swinging, and no monkeying around on the monkey bars. The climbing parts have been fenced in. There were still a few kids playing in that field, however.

This was from our bike ride yesterday, which was a nice and easy ride.

I don’t know why some days are nice and easy, and others feel like the most inept demonstration of human ability possible. But in that little ride, I established four new PRs on various segments and felt about as strong as seems likely, so it was the former.

You would think the sport, at the professional levels at least, would have caught up to science on this, but no. We are left to acknowledge that, sometimes, we have good legs. And then, other times, we resign ourselves to realizing we don’t have good legs, we merely have meatsicles that just hang there and feet that pedal squares. Sometimes it is a demonstration of physical grace and power and ease. Other times that fish that doesn’t need a bicycle could do it better than you. And that’s always the day when you see people you know out on a ride of their own.

cycling / photo — Comments Off
27
Mar 20

It’s Friday, let’s go ride bikes

Left work about 15 minutes early to go on a bike ride. And by “left work early” I mean “announced in the four different platforms in which we are presently communicating (because the first three weren’t sufficient), that I was going for a bike ride.”

So we set out for a pleasant little 30-miler. Someone told me in the fourth communication platform, eschewing the other three mediated formats, to be careful. I take this advice to heart every time it is offered. Fortunately the traffic broke our way:

That’s the benefit of getting out just a few minutes early. You can beat the crowds that don’t exist. Down that road is the local lake and, even on a slightly chilly and predictably gray day you’d expect to see one or two boats being pulled down for the weekend float. But not today.

So we went through the three neighborhoods, long roads with houses and big yards really, that we normally cruise through on that route. We came back up the same direction, over the big hill which has the ice cream shop sitting tantalizingly at the bottom of the descent, the big hill which sometimes I can get over in one gear, and sometimes I need to the whole cassette, and on neither occasion have I ever wheeled my bike in there for a cone, but one day I will. There’s a big false flat sprint after that, a hard right hander into some rollers and then a left turn before two long stretches of road where you can really build your pace or completely lose your wits, and then we saw these guys:

And then on the last little bit we worked on the art of moving fast, but trying to look casual about it.

She’s doing somewhere between 22 and 25 miles per hour right there. That’s not a put your head down and grit your teeth pace, or anything, but it’s a fair clip, for me at least, with one hand and in a small gear ramping up to the last descent at the end of the ride.

Covid-19 / cycling / photo / Wednesday — Comments Off
25
Mar 20

I am still able to keep count — for now

This is Day 14, I think. It all depends on how you choose to count and where you are, I suppose. Two weeks ago yesterday the university announced they were seriously curtailing campus activities, and that has continued to evolve the more they dive into it, and will likely continue to do so. Two weeks ago from today our dean told us to go home and work from there and not come onto campus unless it was vital that you be there. So I worked in the office that Wednesday and then went in that Thursday evening for television … and we were all so much younger back then.

So two weeks at home, and working from home. Lots of Zoom meetings and a lot of email. The latter is basically my natural condition anyway. What’s nice, I suppose, is that I get to sleep an extra 40 minutes. And I can have breakfast at home, instead of at my desk.

And today I’ve started moving around the house, so that I don’t sit in the same spot every day. Also, I’m working on straightening up my home-office, which was overdue to be reworked anyway.

Last week, our first full week from home was Spring Break, so The Yankee was able to scale back her workload. Mine was naturally reduced by timing and circumstance, so I got busy playing catch up on a few things and enterprising some other projects out of the very air. This week has been a second week of Spring Break, ostensibly to let the faculty readjust their curricula to an online setting, and probably just to let everyone catch up with the changing floor beneath us and other important things like, their breath. So next week is Back To It: No, Really, But From Home.

We’re still doing great. We had a nice day of mild weather for a change and went on a bike ride. Saw this guy on the private road that almost no one rides down. It features a nice up-and-down roller through the woods and a loop on the back and then the harder version of the down-and-up roller to leave the little pastoral neighborhood.

When I went down the road he was on the left hand side, sitting on his horse, and talking to another gentleman who was standing across the road. Maybe that’s just how they’d going when they ran into each other, but as I tried to carefully split the road perfectly between them I liked to imagine that they were the local vanguards of the social distancing movement. And what an awful name that is, no?

When I finally caught back up to The Yankee, who is faster than me at this stage of the year:

In the originally sized image you can see me pretty well in her sunglasses. So really this is a selfie.

cycling / errands / Friday / photo — Comments Off
13
Mar 20

To the fruits ahead

My first full work-from-home day in several years, it turns out. I used to do this quite frequently at a previous stop. Once you are in the right groove, it can be quite productive.

I remember I found that the advice to keep a schedule was something that worked well for me. So I set the alarm, get home, have a breakfast snack, do the morning read of news, cringe at what I’m reading in the news, and then remember I have saved 20 minutes of commute here, plus the time ironing slacks and that sort of thing.

It is important, for some reason, to address the mop on top of my head. And it is important, for some reason, to wear some sort of shoes.

So give that a try, if this sort of thing is new for you. And remember, grace and patience. Even with yourself. Perhaps especially with yourself.

We went to the grocery store this evening, which is basically just a morbid fascination I have now. Even though we’re now ready to cut way back. Today I discovered a new thing in the produce section. This is a jack fruit. You can pick it up for $1.99, but lift with your legs and not your knees. These ran about 20 pounds each. Why, yes, I did weigh them.

Jackfruit, I’ve just learned, is a unique tropical fruit native to South India.

It has a distinctive sweet flavor and can be used to make a wide variety of dishes. It’s also very nutritious and may have several health benefits.

Just once, I want a site like this to say, “The flavor is meh. And you can only use it in one or two things anyway. If you don’t already have a natural taste for it, or if it doesn’t remind you of home, don’t worry about it.”

The description I just read, however, sounds interesting, and I’d like to try it sometime soon.

Got in the third bike ride of the year this evening. Hopefully the weather will soon warm up to the point where we stop picking our spots for rides, and I stop counting the progression.

No photos, because those don’t come until after the first few rides, when I remember how to do this properly. A little more fitness would help, too. Also, I need it to warm up for photos, since my full-length gloves discourage photos.

But it was a nice, easy, 20-miler. And as soon as I stop counting the progression of bike rides I can start counting the addition of extra miles. That’s a goal for this year. More miles, more miles.