cycling

adventures / cycling / Monday / photo / running / swimming / video — Comments Off on A fast race
16
Sep 19

A fast race

It’s difficult to put a full day of racing, and the many weeks of training beforehand, into less than 60 seconds that you shot on a phone. So I won’t try. But this, nevertheless, was Saturday, a half Iron. That’s a 1.2-mile swim, a 56-mile ride and a 13.1-mile run to you and me:

The Yankee won her age group, cause she’s awesome:

Her goggles broke in the water, so she swam with one eye, and was the fifth woman out of the water. Her knee was aggravating her on the run so she wisely took it easy. What we’re saying here is that she can go faster if she needs to.

cycling / history / photo / Thursday — Comments Off on Ancient Greek Wikipedia, not as accurate as today’s
12
Sep 19

Ancient Greek Wikipedia, not as accurate as today’s

I have a late-ish night in the studio, which means there was time for a bike ride this morning. So I set out on a casual 20-miler that featured my first dropped chain in quite some time.

It was no problem. Cruise to a safe stop, hop off, slip a finger inside the chain to move it off the drive train and then line it all back up on the gearing. It meant maybe 30 seconds to stop, a greasy finger or two and a nice little, funny embarrassment. How do you drop a chain going downhill, anyway?

Who cares? No one cares. I don’t either. It was a bike ride. You get quiet little moments like this:

And you get … not exactly the sunrise, but that moment after the inevitability of planetary rotation when the sun says “No, really, I mean it.” The part that’s more about the tree line than a primal miracle.

Some Hellenistic astronomer, Eratosthenes maybe, figured this stuff out 2,260 years ago. He calculated the planet’s circumference based on shadows. He figured out the earth’s axis and had some early Leap Day ideas. He created the first map of the known world. He was a mathematician, a geographer, a poet and music theorist. He was the chief librarian at the Library of Alexandria and pretty much invented geography.

You wonder what he would have done if he had the Internet.

We have this simplistic image in our heads about people who didn’t know about the earth orbiting the sun and the rotation of the planet finding the sun chasing the moon across the sky, and the terror of each night: What if it doesn’t come back? And you can find out all about the Greeks and the scholars who followed them refining and revising the data. Today you just accept what your favorite weather app tells you will be the precise sun up and sun down moments. (Time is a construct.)

But spare a thought for those first regular people, after Erathosthenes and his math friends figured this stuff out. Imagine how they felt, what they must have thought, when they heard the “news.”

And that’s just the Greeks. There’s another 93 gods and goddesses related to the sun on Wikipedia alone.

We have this simplistic image in our heads about people who don’t know that Wikipedia is still incomplete and the terror of actual research: What if I have to go to a non-crowd sourced site? You wonder what Erathothenes would have done with Wikipedia. He died in his 80s. A common version of the story is that he’d gone blind, so he couldn’t read and see the world behind him and so he starved himself to death in his depression. But we don’t really know. Wikipedia is quite certain about it. So maybe its a good thing he didn’t have a dial up modem.

cycling / football / IU / Monday / Twitter / video — Comments Off on Just some videos to fill the day
9
Sep 19

Just some videos to fill the day

It is the rare day indeed, this year, that I get out in front of The Yankee. The closer I got to the end of yesterday’s ride, the more I felt like this:

I just knew she would pip me before the end, and so I pushed and pushed as hard as I could, and somehow I managed to stay away, but only just.

And if you’re here for a different sort of video, this is the funniest one of the weekend:

And this is a cool little bit of something cool the Indiana athletic department cooked up:

But there’s something important in there:

George Taliaferro’s story defies excerpting, but let’s try:

As the first day of school approached, Taliaferro asked the football coaches when he was going to be moved on campus. He was told black students didn’t live in dorms.

“I called my father and told him I didn’t want to be in a place where I couldn’t live on campus, where I couldn’t swim in the pool and where I couldn’t sit in the bottom section of the movie theater,” Taliaferro said. “My father told me there were other reasons I was there, and then he hung up the phone on me. I was never so hurt because I thought the one person who could understand being discriminated against was him.”

That tough love stemmed from two things his parents, neither of whom went past sixth grade, told him every day as he grew up. “They’d say, ‘We love you,'” he recalled. “And, ‘You must be educated.'”

And then:

He played seven seasons of pro football, six in the NFL with New York, Dallas, Baltimore and Philadelphia, three times making the Pro Bowl. He became a volunteer with Big Brothers Big Sisters of Baltimore, advised prisoners adjusting to society upon their release, got his master’s in social work at Howard University, taught at Maryland, was dean of students at Morgan State, returned to Indiana as a professor and special assistant to IU president John Ryan, and helped start Big Brothers Big Sisters of South Central Indiana in Bloomington.

You can’t put that in a gif or a football video, but you certainly oughta try.

cycling / photo / Wednesday — Comments Off on The gain-bi is mightier than the jian
4
Sep 19

The gain-bi is mightier than the jian

There is this little multipurpose path joining two parks, bridging a creek and generally being one of the nicer treats in the area. Today I went down it slowly on my bike, because being responsible is more important than gaining segment points, Strava. There might be people. They may have dogs! And you just can’t see around every fun little corner on this path:

I usually try to come up it quickly, because that is the time to try to improve your segment times, but today was not one of those days. Good thing, too. I got about halfway up the thing and I noticed the light was perfect.

That’s the thing about having a camera on you at all times. There’s always the temptation to stop, backtrack and get that shot. Avail yourself of that opportunity as much as possible; there may be dogs!

But that’s a different challenge when you’re on a bike ride. You have to make the value judgment, and quickly too: Do I stop, turn my rig around and go back for that shot? Am I working on a schedule? For speed? To set a personal best? Is keeping my heart rate elevated important today? Will this photograph take a long time? Will my legs still work when I get started once again? What’s the terrain we’re talking about? Do I want to go up that hill again?

All of that has to be fast, because if you wait too long the decision will be made for you. And of course, there’s the issue of the sun during those golden hours. Will the light hold, or did you see the last, fleeting, moment of the day’s brilliance?

So it worked out for me, above. I went back. It was the right choice. Avail yourself.

I mentioned yesterday how to make sure you you must never let your shadow win a bike ride:

Do you know how you never let the shadow win? Always pedal home from the east. The evening sun will be in front of you and your shadow behind.

Today, I rode back to the house from the west. The sun behind me, the shadow wins:

We had Chinese tonight. I wandered from my usual, because some other random thing on the menu sounded good, and the description I found online seemed one worth trying. We might not have Chinese again for a while. Not because the meal was bad. No. It was fine. It could have been better, but it both served its purpose and didn’t send you spiraling into a dinner of regret. No, that was not why I might be off Chinese for a while.

This fortune cookie, however:

I sound like I’m a knight on a great quest, according to that bit of script. That’s an awful lot to put into a fortune-less fortune cookie. You don’t even know me, cookie. And non one else knew you. Admittedly, that’s an error on my part. If I hadn’t eaten the thing I could have carried both the fortune, and the cookie around — surely the one gives the other some credibility — and people, having heard the good word of the fortune-less fortune, would treat you accordingly.

You hope the fortune cookie process, somewhere in a factory in Michigan, I’m sure, is automated. But what if there is a personal touch? What if there are two or three disenchanted people working second shift reading the little slips of paper.

Yeah, this one will show ’em. Some guy will carry this thing to work tomorrow and try to parlay this into a raise.

Not me, mind you. Like I’m the only person that got the heart/mind/soul cookie special this week.

cycling / Instagram / IU / photo / Tuesday — Comments Off on Bring me …
3
Sep 19

Bring me …

Water, thirsty photographers long ago noted, can make many compositions just a smidge better. It was true on the shrubs in the front 40:

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Morning dew on shrubbery.

A post shared by Kenny Smith (@kennydsmith) on

We do not have 40 acres on the front of the property. That would require more driveway maintenance than anyone wants to maintain. But we do have shrubs and they have exhibited, of late, days of morning dew.

You could put water on more still life subjects for more compelling photographs, but you don’t always have water. You could carry a water bottle, but that sends mixed signals to the dihydrogen monoxide continued therein. Am I but a drop to be drank? Or am I but a drop to be sprayed on a rose?

Water thinks like this, pretty much immediately, when you try to get it some degree of sentience. And then it’s terrifying. What about the water you put into the pet’s bowl? What of the water you put in that pot to boil? You would never make corn or pasta again, if you began to think water had thoughts and feelings. And dreams! Oh the dreams of water! Only some drops get to fulfill those ocean dreams. Some are adventurers, sure, filling up raging white-capped rivers and eager to plunge down a dramatic waterfall. While some are more tranquil drops indeed — ponds for me, thanks — others are just diligently working their way through several cycles of dew and humidity. But even those drops have plans.

Anyway, since a water bottle is the wrong choice, there’s always a spray bottle. But then you’d have to stuff that in your bag, next to your camera and your other expensive and accumulated electronic things. And you’re not carrying a spray bottle that way. What if you got some of those anarchistic drops of water?

We went for a bike ride and I started out strong and was trying to outrace The Yankee back home. Mostly I’m trying to give her something to pace off of, but she’s very strong and fast and this is not my best year. So the best laid plans and all of that.

Well, she caught and dropped me far too early today. Best laid plans and all of that.

It was one of our most basic routes, designed for decent mileage in a timely fashion. We ride it a lot, which means there’s a place where I figured I might be able to make some progress and cut into her advantage. But she also knows the route, of course, and she never let up in the spot I expected. Before long I couldn’t even see her anymore. She’s very strong and fast.

So I just raced my shadow home:

Never let the shadow win.

Do you know how you never let the shadow win? Always pedal home from the east. The evening sun will be in front of you and your shadow behind.

We ran into the local sports beat reporter at the grocery store. We were shopping for a thing the giant megastore didn’t have, and he strolled by, basket in hand. We discussed and worked our way through most of the college and some of the professional sports in the span of about four minutes, before he had to dash off to the next big event. Beat life never stops, after all.

We could have taken a photo — because secondary sports celebrity! — but he’s our friend. Besides, you don’t take photos in the produce section. You forget you’ve even got your phone there. Probably you left it with the water bottle. Or maybe in the shrubbery.

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