Fifty-four miles on Saturday. Fifty-eight miles on Sunday night.
A metric century yesterday.
Fifty-three miles today.
That’s a lot for me. A lot of time staring at the basement, too.
cycling
30
Dec 24
Libraries and books and classes and things
So let us reset the scene. We have moved through Christmas. Everyone has returned home. No one knows what day it is. My grading is done. Final grades have been submitted. I have turned my mind fully to spring classes.
Fully is probably overstating it. But I’m working on stuff. One class is all but done. Twenty percent of the new class is done. Soon enough that one will become a sole focus.
Also, I want to go to the local small town library. I’d like to explain the library situation to you. We live in an unincorporated community. The small town next to us has a library that you might categorize as, “cute.” It’s staffed entirely by volunteers. It is open 26 hours a week — 20 in the summer.
In the county seat, over in the other direction, there’s a “Free Library.” That’s in the name. And it’s free if you live in the city. If you live in the county, as I do, that costs $15 a year. The free library is slightly better appointed than the cute library.
In the next county, where campus is, there is of course the campus library — currently under renovation. And there’s a library system, six branches of varying size, I’m sure. If I want to join that library, because I don’t live in the county, I could pay $100 a year for a membership.
But!
That larger library system is a member of consortium of 22 libraries and systems. If you’re a member of one of those, you have privileges at the larger system.
My cute library is not a part of that consortium.
You know, being out in the country has it’s benefits and its drawbacks. As I have documented, for the first year we were here we didn’t have garbage pickup. We don’t have road clearing. Somehow, the library thing is the one that annoys me.
None of this makes any sense, none of it matters, because there’s always the ILL, the Interlibrary Loan system.
Interlibrary Loan is a miraculous system. You simply find a title somewhere that you want, that’s not in your home library. You tell your library. They fetch the book for you, and then you get what you requested. The only thing is that ILL operates a little differently everywhere you are. Local rules and resources and all of that. My last campus library, for example, you had to go over to the library to pick it up. The place before that, they brought it to you. It was awesome.
Whatever it is, I have this feeling that the process here will be the weirdest one yet. I’ll find out in the next few days, maybe next week.
The bike riding continues. Last week I wrote of the speculation of trying to hit randomly collected goals that were just a little out of the realm of comfortable possibility, but definitely possible because I could see it, right there, on a spreadsheet. A document that serves only to taunt me.
Well, I decided to reach for all of those goals, most miles in a December, a round number, the circumference of the the planet (at this latitude). They were close to one another, but far away from me. And so I set out for it. After 40 miles on Christmas night, a bit more after that, 110-ish miles this weekend, there was a bad ride this afternoon, and then another one tonight.
The problem is that the ride earlier today was bad because I’m tired. Legs are almost dead. I am probably under-fueled. And the basement is a bit demoralizing at the moment.
Also, I have another long ride tomorrow.
Those big goals might have been a little ambitious. But you can’t get close and just stop, even on your arbitrary goals that mean, in the end, nothing at all. That’d just be rude.
And a bad way to end a year.
Stupid spreadsheet.
23
Dec 24
The assemblage of the 23rd
The in-laws are here for the holidays. My mother spent Thanksgiving here, and they are here for Christmas. It still feels strange to not travel everywhere for the holidays, but it is also nice to make some of these moments in our home.
And don’t underestimate the practical value of not being constantly on the move. That’s not what it is about, but sometimes that’s what it becomes, which is not what it is about.
If that makes sense.
Anyway, they arrived safely, brought some cold down with them, and we will have a fine old time this week.
I walked by the Dickensian village at just the right time today. I enjoy the village. I’d vote to keep them out for longer, just for the classic scenes and all of the little activities and details you can find. The designs are charming, the lights in them, in the evening, are a delight.
And, today, the sun streaming in was creating these lovely little shadows.
I wish we had the space to display them all. (We have a lot.) Alas, we have a Catzilla.
When I hauled the garbage can to the end of the drive last night, I looked up to see …
… not drones. (That’s Orion. And if this confuses you, get an app, or crack a book.)
Let’s talk about the bike. I did nothing for the first two weeks of December. It was, I thought, an uncharacteristically long lull, and it felt like it. I rode 21 whole miles the weekend before this, just to see if my legs and feet could remember how to make tiny circles. I got in 70 miles on two days last week, just to see if I still could. This weekend I pedaled my way through 72 more miles.
Now we get to the problem of the spreadsheet. Since I log all of these things — in about three different ways — I know precisely where I am. I know what the trend lines look like, what’s possible, what is beyond reach and, dangerously, what might be feasible, if I stretch.
And that’s always the dilemma. Is it authentic if I see those benchmarks coming and push just a little more to get there. Even if only barely?
This is what I can get to, if I ride a lot in this last week: a new-to-me round number. It’s a small amount, so I don’t even want to say it aloud. I could finish the year with the number of miles equaling the circumference of the earth, at this latitude, anyway. (Next year I’ll finish my first equatorial circle of the earth.) Doing all of that also means I could also set a new record for the month of December.
In all, it seems unlikely. I had that lull to start the month, and time is short.
But if I push, I thought as I pedaled through 30 more miles today, if I could somehow get 300 more miles this week …
That’s not a lot. Except, to me, it most definitely is.
That spreadsheet just sits here, taunting me.
2
Dec 24
And so we start December, and the mad dash
Took mom to the airport for the sad and tearful goodbyes today. Drove home in the late afternoon’s dying sunlight. I was back inside before she was on the plane, but she has safely returned home and I have turned back to work, and the grading of things.
Before I began that, however, I did the monthly computer rituals. Cleaning old files from the desktop, adding the site’s page visits into a useless spreadsheet, updated a few other running files, and so on. I also updated the November cycling chart, which always amuses me and bores you.
The blue line is this year, and you can see that, compared to 2023’s red line, I’ve had a successful increase in my mileage, be it ever so humble. For some reason, in 2021 or so, I added a 10 mile per day projection line to the spreadsheet, and it seems to have outlived its usefulness.
It appears I’ll handily accomplish those two goals, of besting last year and the 10 miles per average, so I’ll turn myself to other, slightly more impressive goals. Goals which I most likely won’t achieve, because of the holidays. But they are out there, nevertheless, and we shall approach them with vigor, and alternating days of tired and enthusiastic legs, I’m sure.
This is funny to me because these are small numbers, really, but they seem YUGE.
Also today, I have updated the banners here on the blog. (You know those rotate, right? The one on the top and the one on the bottom change each time you load or refresh the page. You knew that, right? You also knew there was a banner on the bottom too, right? Because you read the entire page every time you come by. There’s only five posts per page, and that’s not too much to ask of you. I mean, come on.)
So now there are 116 banners randomly loaded across the top of the page, and 118 randomly loaded banners populating the bottom of the page. I should probably cull those two lists. That sounds like a great winter project. So click reload a lot between now and sometime in February to see them all. And don’t forget to scroll down to the see the ones at the bottom, either.
Poseidon always checks out the bottoms of the page. He’s very diligent and curious about the goings on around here.
(When it’s typed well, he caught the errors. When there are typos, he was off the clock.)
Phoebe, on the other hand, is much smarter, and she doesn’t care about any of this. Just so long as her picture makes the site, so that the week’s most popular feature is here every week.
We’re going to finish the year with something like three-quarters of a million visitors, according to the site statistics I looked up today. Why, I have no idea. The cats have it figured out, and they thank you.
As for me, I am now in the home stretch of two classes, so things will be light in the next few weeks. And after those two classes wrap up I’ll be finishing with two other classes. So there are liable to be some thin days in here this December. But there will be something more often than not, and we’ll of course always have the weekly check in on the cats. It is the most popular weekly feature on the site. (They know it, and they make me type it, too. Marketing geniuses, these kittehs.)
19
Nov 24
On the occasion of a record breaking ride
Most rides are for the ride themselves. Or for riding with others. A lot of them are for exercise or to enjoy the great outdoors or both. Take a break, unwind, race a friend you can’t beat, go somewhere. Indulgent as they can be, they always seem to carry at least some sort of purpose. But this ride, today, was just for me. I realized, just before I left, that this would be the ride where I broke a personal best for miles pedaled in a year.
It happened right in here.
After that spot, every turn of the crank arm, every loop the chain made, every time I shifted through the cassette would all be new, a record, a best, an achievement.
You don’t think about that over the course of a ride, but it’s there. When the legs protest, you remember it. They’ve stomped and danced and glided through more miles this year than you’ve ever asked of them before. When your lungs don’t ache, maybe it’s for the same reason. When the lactic acid takes a little longer to burn, maybe that’s why. Or all of it could be that you’ve learned a new kind of patience this late into the year.
All of this is racing the sun, trying to stay on the right side of daylight. I set off through town and out the other side, doubling back into the town again, where 10 miles had gone by in the blink of an eye, thinking about the possibilities of what this ride could hold, given the hour and the time of year.
Yesterday I wanted to do this same route, but started too late and wisely changed my plans. This afternoon, which became the early evening as I swooshed and whirred along, felt like a ride that could go on forever.
I thought about that when I stopped, to put on my windbreaker. I was close to home, but determined to take the longer way back, so I mounted the headlight and left the full finger gloves in my pocket, and riding down that three-mile straight stretch of chipseal. It goes on forever because I want it too, particularly today. And through this stretch I feel a melancholy, a paradox that comes up with the truly great rides. It’s going to end soon. And the season will end soon, which is unacceptable. I don’t want this ride to end, either.
Sometimes you want a ride to be over. You have things to do or somehow the fit seems off or you’re just not feeling it, but there are days when you want it to go on forever, and this was one of those days, evenings, now, because the sun has left me and I’m listening to the rubber on my Gatorskins shuzzzz away in the gloaming.
That’s a great road. No traffic, beautiful farm scenery, two little rollers that can make you feel powerful or humble, or a bit of both. I only want that road to end because of what’s waiting at the turn.
At the bottom of that road is the best part of the ride, a brand-new ribbon that you could soft-pedal at 20 miles per hour, but it only lasts four-tenths of a mile, far too short for something so luxurious.
I have to work my way through two parking lots there, and I become aware that my neck has tightened up because my fit is never quite right and, also, I’m a little bummed about how this ride is coming to an end — I have been out for about two hours and heard two voices in that whole time, a crossing guard in town, who told me to “Go ahead honey,” while she held up her stop sign and a woman two towns later who stepped into the crosswalk as I came through the intersection, she laughed and I apologized and she said “Oh, that’s OK,” and we wished each other a great afternoon and you could hear the smile on her face as I pedaled away through a sleepy small town block. It was those two people and me and road noise and the click click click of my bike and this rattle in my headset, a loose screw that I need to tighten — why should any of this end?
I realized I’d put my foot on the ground just three times during this whole ride. Sometimes the timing is right and that was today, and this turn weaving behind the small car dealership and the gas station beside it, I had the timing right, rejoining the highway and a bike lane with no one coming from either direction. The bike lane there sometimes feels huge and sometimes small. Today, it felt small. I felt big. I felt like I could do anything on my bike, even though I can’t. I felt like my machine was asking me to do more, but it certainly, by now, understands my limitations.
This is why you don’t want these rides to end, why you don’t want colder weather to run you indoors, because you eventually tap into something elemental about this. Something basic and cosmic and purposeful and purposeless. I don’t want to lose that. Not for a minute or four months. It takes too long to find again and would require years of continual study to understand or explain it. Besides, we’ve lost too much this year — family and friends and elections and car keys and cyclists and opportunities and remote controls — and how much must we lose? How much is the right amount? But we lose it all, don’t we? And that’s when I heard the Canada geese somewhere to my left, to the west. They’d blended into the dark blue-gray of the sky, making those incessant honks and barks, those beautifully chaotic, continual sounds. They stay over there to the left, in a wildlife sanctuary, between some pastures, harassing the cattle, adding a bit more to the soundtrack as I stand up and suzsh suzsh suzsh my way up the fourth-to-last roller on my ride. You know the one, it tells you how you’re feeling in defiance of everything else you’ve done, and without any consideration for what else is still ahead, three more little hills, in this case.
At the 4-way stop, the one with the haunted house on the corner, a truck hauling a trailer is waiting for me to pass, even though he has the right of way, and I think, not for the first time, it would be great if everyone understood the rules the same way. But he waited, and I did a track stand for a respectful amount of time and finally I went, even though it was his turn, and even here, it felt like I could have held my bike up for forever. But I could not. But it felt like it just then, and now I wonder, maybe my bike doesn’t want this ride to end, either. Is that what it is? We’re both feeling this moment the same way? The air in the tubes and the softness of the grips and the loose-but-tight grip of my cleats in their clipless mates have all made this tiny little magical moment, which is persisting, but also fleeting.
Down and back up again, just two hills to go. I’ve been thinking, for four miles now, about how I didn’t want this ride to end, about that girl I knew in elementary school, some friends from the 10th grade, a professor I once had, the work I must get to. How the mind wanders. How it can wonder in its wanderings! I thought about the incredible feeling I had on my first ride outside this year, the sweet joy and optimism that came with it, and the feeling of this one, right now. I’m starting to think I should write this down and one word falls out of my mouth as I pull the bidon away one last time: Elation.
Sometime, in December, probably, I’ll have to take my bike to the basement and put it on the trainer. I’ll ride away on Zwift for several months. I’ll pedal a bunch, I’ll sweat a lot. I’ll be breathless. I’ll go nowhere. It’s just not the same.
I saw someone on social media yesterday beaming with pride that their oldest kid had learned to ride the day before and she pedaled away yelling, “I feel freeeeeee!” And, kiddo, it never gets better than that. She’s an old pro by now, because you know she was riding yesterday, and again today. So she knows, but it bears repeating. Be home when the lights come on, or for supper, or whenever your parents tell you, but it never gets better than that. It doesn’t have to. How could it? It just stays that perfect. And you can’t get that feeling on a trainer, no matter how many endorphins you tap into.
My average speed fell away, because why would I want this to end? And I circled one of the neighborhoods, the road shaped like a horseshoe. My neighbor built that development. It’s his, and he thinks of it that way. He still plows that road himself if it snows. He probably contributed, then, to those potholes on the backside of it, the ones I dodged in the semi-dark, chin down to the stem, hands over the hoods like a Belgian champion, using the fullness of the subdivision’s road as I turned into the final length of that horseshoe. The flow of a bicycle in the diagonal is a triumph. You feel freeeeeee. And maybe I could do anything my bike wants to do, even if it is a bit slower.
What is speed, anyway? Today, it just seems like a way to end a ride sooner. That’s a fool’s racket. A hustle with no payoff. At the end of that subdivision, I did another reasonable approximation of a track stand to let the traffic clear, so I could turn left, and then quickly right again. Now a car is behind me, and it’s finally fully dark. I charge up the little hill, throwing my bike this way and that up this penultimate roller, looking like a French prima donna, feeling like a million bucks, thinking of those headlights on me, and wondering where they disappeared to. I glanced over as I switched my headlight on, and the car was gone. So now it’s the downhill and it flattens out to the 90-degree turn into the back of our subdivision, the last hill, then a right-hander and around the big circle to the house. Two cyclists we know live back there, but I don’t even think to look in their yards today. I was, I realize now, too taken with imagining the next ride.
I wonder where it will take me, and how my legs will feel about it. I remind myself, once again, to start earlier in the day next time. This ride was 40 great miles, without even that much fuel, or water, considering the temperatures. I could just as easily have done another hour or two, amused by the muses and the thoughts they bring, bemused by how much better this little tale was, because I was fully in composition mode, while my legs brought me home. Some days it feels like they could go on forever. You must take advantage of those, I said to myself for the 6,000th time in the last 15 years of doing this.
There are days when it never gets old, days like this one. Not the fastest or a technically superior ride, not the first new road discovered, but just a ride for me, filled, in that last little bit, with hopes and fears and love and dreams. My dreams never grow weary.
