cycling

cycling / Monday / photo — Comments Off on This is mostly about a bike ride, but also pets
18
May 20

This is mostly about a bike ride, but also pets

Today I learned that next week is Memorial Day. Sorta sneaks up on you, doesn’t it?

We get a three-day weekend! I wonder what that will be like. Probably we’ll hang out with the cats, same as everyday. They are having a great time of it all. Phoebe has lately been enjoying the steps in the midday:

Poseidon spends a lot of the day warning off the birds, finding new ways to get into the same kinds of trouble and relying on his cuteness to make us forget about it.

We’ve recently shown them some more windows they haven’t had available to them, but they always come back to the windows that point to the southeast. They get it.

Had a lovely little bike ride today. And by lovely I mean we did hill repeats. You go up a hill, then you go down that hill, then you go up that hill, and then you go down that hill, then you go up that hill, and you realize you’ve lost count already.

So I sing a different song to myself each time. It’s somehow easier to count back the songs than recalling how many times I’ve grimaced over that especially steep spot.

Today I was singing aloud, which has the added bonus of amusing The Yankee when she was going up or down the hill opposite my journey.

(That is not the hill. That’s just part of the ride on either side of the hills. The hill was steep, tree-covered, slick from an earlier rain and featured an embankment on one side and a steep drop-off on the other. Also part of a tree fell over behind me at one point. It was an altogether different vibe than the approximately-a-suburb you have in that photo.)

She’s getting stronger on climbs, and if that continues I’m in real trouble.

So it was a lovely 22-mile ride. We rode past a colleague’s house and I yelled to him from the road, which amuses us, and him, but not his neighbors. Probably that route takes us by someone else we know, but I don’t know where everyone lives, which is a shame for so many reasons.

On my last repeat I went all the way down to the lake, where the boat launch is, and climbed the whole way out. And suddenly I realized why we were only doing the top half of the climb for the repeats. After 13 reps up an 8.6 degree ascent the bottom half of the full climb is a leg breaker, it was a 200-foot ascent over a half-mile with a maximum gradient of 12 percent, which, by then, was enough. And that’s not the point. The hills were the point. which is certainly one wake to look forward to the end of your weekend. And since there was a ride we can return to the irregular-when-I-think-of-it Barns By Bike feature. Look at this beaut!

Remember how, on Friday, we examined the malfunctioning speed on one of the cycling apps? Today it said I was doing 130.7 miles per hour on the first descent. I was not.

I save that kind of speed for the climb back out, where I set PRs on three Strava segments after riding all those hills.

cycling / Friday / photo — Comments Off on How fast am I?
15
May 20

How fast am I?

We went for a bike ride to bring in the weekend. We decided to go out 50 minutes and then turn around and come back. I went 55 minutes, because sometimes you need an extra 10 minutes. I’m looking, now, at the mile splits on the tracking app. Each number represents the maximum touched within that mile. Let’s check them out.

27.2
66.8
27.3
28.7
25.7
30.9
103.3
24.4
21.9
25.6
28.9
25.5
26.2
26.9
32.0
31.6
49.9
19.9
27.0
25.6
36.9
26.4
30.7
78.1
26.9
104.4
27.2
35.3
22.3

There are no typos there, but which do you think are wrong? Some of them are wrong. I was pounding on the pedals and stretching the chain and really working through the hills and trying to remember to breathe and, otherwise, having a good ride. Still, nothing like some of those speeds. So I assume there’s a GPS-out-in-the-country issue, or a dropped-signal issue or a this-app-isn’t-very-good issue.

Anyway, on mile 17, when I wasn’t doing 49.9 miles per hour, I cruised past this place. Couldn’t tell you the last time I saw a kokopelli.

Surely there’s something about putting two of them together that is a bad idea. It was a god of fertility, a god of agriculture. Oh, and also a trickster. If there’s a place where you don’t want a trickster god, it would be in your crops, or your abode.

Elsewhere, work stuff. There was a meeting and I wrote 1,900 words about demo reels and so on.

Most important news of the day …

And, to the weekend!

More on Twitter and check me out on Instagram.

Covid-19 / cycling / photo / podcast / Tuesday / video — Comments Off on The usual much ado
12
May 20

The usual much ado

All of that sun on Sunday was so nice and lovely, but the passing shadows told the tale. When I stopped taking pictures of the birds it was because the sun had scooted beyond the houses and was focusing on something else. A chill took over from the sun. Because that’s going to be the natural conclusion of things around here in May. I went inside because I was shivering.

And yesterday, Monday, I went on a bike ride and shivered some more. It remains the second week of May and jackets are required.

It was a quick and short ride. Today, a short and slow run. First time out in a while, dashing off a casual little 5K:

Because if you asked me to actually work through a 5K right now I could only laugh at you.

We talked the performing arts! Dance! Theatre! Musicals! I mentioned a classic Italian and sounded learned:

Of course, it is a conversation with the chair of a high quality program, so we know who the real learned person was. These conversations are fun, but here soon, as the reopening begins, or continues, or begins to continue, we’ll have to start thinking about some of these are framed. Which is just as well. We’ve had about 15 of these sorts of episodes now and a little change of pace is called for.

Which is why it’s cold, and I’m shuffling on slow neighborhood runs. See? The pace, she changes.

I’m getting to the point where I could do for some change. Thursday will mark nine weeks at home. That’s a lot, and I’m a homebody. One mustn’t complain overmuch. We have our health, and the health of our loved ones. We are still working. And sure, we have missed out on some activities, but those are relative inconveniences. It is easy to get caught up on the personal inconveniences. It should be easier, still, to maintain one’s perspective. I read that story about cruise ship crews and I think of the few I’ve been on, and the gracious and kind people who spend their lives working hard and working long hours for small amounts of money to make sure people have a wonderful experience, and this is happening in their office. It’s a terrible thing. My office is all-but-closed and we’re working from home offices. And, if that gets too stuffy, I move to the living room, or the kitchen island, or the deck as I did one day, or the front porch as I did another day. So I’ll stay quiet about what I need. My chief complaint, then, is the weather, which is out there while I’m in here. What I can complain about is inconsequential at the moment.

I sat on the deck all afternoon Sunday, I had a bike ride yesterday, a run today, and tomorrow it will be cold again. I’ll have a Zoom meeting or two. We’ll read about something sad that has happened somewhere, and something sweet and endearing that took place elsewhere. I’ll probably watch something I have had in a queue for a while. It’ll be Wednesday. (Or so I’m told.) And it’s all downhill from there. Patience and grace.

cycling / hobby / Monday / photo — Comments Off on So many photos to enjoy
11
May 20

So many photos to enjoy

Happy late Mother’s Day. I think all of our flowers arrived today. But the cards got there early. One of those years. Mothers, being moms, completely understand.

The cats are doing just fine. Phoebe is in a tunnel phase:

It’d be wrong to ascribe human emotions to cats, of course, but that is one content-looking cat:

I have decided to keep the cats out of my home office for the many breakable things. Any closed door, to a cat, is an opportunity. (A mentality I totally appreciate.) But figure out the pattern, dude. I open the door, you sneak in, I scoop you up and put you back out in the hall. He has not figured out the pattern. So I made a sign.

The Yankee says it was nice of me to put it at eye level. That, I thought, was the best part of the joke.

He disagrees. And he likes to let me know about it.

A view of one of the local lakes from Friday’s lovely bike ride:

One of the apps that I use — there are three — to track rides gives you the maximum speed you hit on each mile segment. There were 35 miles in that particular ride and there are a lot of times that make sense: 27.2, 25.2, 28.8, 24.5, 28.1. If you looked at the terrain or stop signs or things, it tracks very well.

Except for that one spot where, I know I was sprinting, but I’m fairly certain I didn’t hit 2,513.9 miles per hour.

I will accept the data it gives me for a split three miles down the road where it says I was doing 51 mph. Probably I wasn’t — in my experience when you hit about 46 it all starts to feel noticeably different — but I’ll accept it.

The Yankee on her weekend run:

I was on my weekend sit-on-the-deck phase …

I was sitting on the deck to have a Mother’s Day call and watch the birds. Check out this little guy:

You can sit up close to a bird feeder and, if they are hungry enough, most birds will come to accept your not being in the way of their dinner:

Anyway, it was a fine time, a nice long chat about this and that, some pleasant weather for a change and watching the wildlife go by:

Like I’m a nature photographer over here:

A red-winged black bird on the ground, very common in this area:

One of our neighborly cardinals, which aren’t exactly in abundance, but not scarce. I guess that means they are plentiful. There are at least four:

And a nice brief little look at an Indigo bunting:

We call the red-winged blackbird a Superman Bird. You can really see it when he flies. And I guess you’ll have to take my word for it since I only have pictures of it standing around:

And a nice red head finch wrapped up the photo safari on our back deck.

So that was the weekend. And how was yours? And back to the new week. How’s yours shaping up?

cycling / Friday / photo / podcast / video — Comments Off on It’s gonna be …
1
May 20

It’s gonna be …

Time for a bike ride, and since we went in the late afternoon and we headed generally north and east that means it’s time for a shadooooooow sellllllfie …

It was also the day for me to go the wrong way because I got the roads confused and The Yankee had to chase me down which was no easy feat today because I had good legs and yet she managed to eventually do it anyway because I looked over my shoulder and saw the look on her face and then sat up and, yes, run-on sentences do happen a lot in cycling. It has something to do with the breathing, I think.

So we turned around and went the right direction, determined to not speak of this again. It only added on one extra mile, so she didn’t have to chase me far, because she is a strong rider, but my legs held up throughout the day. This is what’s important, look at that water:

There were people fishing on the causeway as we went through. Everyone is ready to enjoy some nice weather, which we’ve only had it intermittently here. That’s a crime against humanity, I’m pretty sure.

Anyway, that’s just after the big downhill, which one app tracked me at 134.4 miles per hour. I was not going 134.4 miles per hour. That’d be very fast, indeed, and I think the app is wrong in a lot of ways, begging the question: Why?

So you go down the descent then you take a hard left and you find yourself on a road that you can somehow hit 25-27 miles per hour without even pedaling. Then there’s the water and that’s when she caught me:

And then the climb out. This is where our barn by bike feature of the day comes in, and, yes, that is an uphill and not a camera tilt trick:

Is there a video? There is a video. On this particular route the video is from the last smooth, easy part before the hard part, and before the water.

It would be tempting to rush through here and attack the long series of rollers that turn into an uphill before the long downhill and the next eventual climb. It’d be fun to turn this into a bunch of big sweeping sines, as Bill Strickland called them:

I was riding in long, gradual curves that stretched nearly from the right shoulder of the road out to and sometimes past the yellow line on the left, then back and out and again the same.

[…]

The sine curve to me is more of an undulation, an expression of the natural beauty of movement, and the beauty of natural movement: a lover’s body in moments of passion beyond thought, for instance.

Or a bicycle rider in one of those rare interludes when the pure sheer pleasure of being a bicycle rider can be expressed only through an extended series of line-to-line swoops. The road sine is one of the most spontaneous and unsophisticated acts of cycling, and it begins and occurs and continues in some kind of complete state of unexamined and unself-conscious motion.

Bill Strickland is a brilliant writer and I love that description. I do it all the time on the bike. I always think of that passage when I do.

But never right here; never at the fence.

Somehow, I always find myself doing that other ultimate sign of freedom. I get to just the right spot on that road, just ahead of us here, and let it go and coast. I’ll float almost as far as momentum and enthusiasm will take me. And then start working my way uphill.

Talked with Tom Duszynski again, because the world needs to hear from epidemiologists and I’m part of the world and I want to give learned and thoughtful people a place to speak to people who want to hear real things and not bombast.

Wash your hands. And if you’re out on a bike or out on a trail or just in the backyard, have a great weekend.

← Older Entries
Newer Entries →