cycling

cycling / memories / Monday / Twitter / video — Comments Off on Happy Fifth
5
Jul 21

Happy Fifth

I once had two tires go flat on my bike in a place where there was no shade for a mile in any direction, so I had to walk a good ways before I could figure out how to address the problem of having two flats and one spare tube. I once rode in a race so hard that I couldn’t walk for an almost disconcerting length of time after it, because, that time, my feet had gone flat in aging shoes. Once, of course, I crashed my bike and had surgery collarbone surgery, several months of hazy memories, two additional surgical consults, a neck exam (to make sure, months later, I hadn’t broken* it) and multiple rounds of physical therapy before I managed to get the pain of it all under control. Another time I got caught out in a sudden thunderstorm that produced hail, which fell hard enough to break my skin. Oh! And there was the time when my ride went too long and after an agonizing 45 minutes of realizing this wasn’t going to work out it got so dark I couldn’t see anything and I found myself pointing the front wheel in a general area where I expected the road to be and, you know, hoped**.

Saturday’s ride, a 47-mile effort where nothing went right, wasn’t as bad as any of those. But it’d go on a longer version of such a list.

At least I saw this cool barn!

And the old grain bin next to it was pretty nice, too.

The city canceled their fireworks this year. But the neighborhood provided quality entertainment once more. As an added bonus, we didn’t even have to leave the yard.

I decided to experiment with a Twitter live stream.

And I learned that for some dark and mystical reason of video compression, the audio doesn’t sound quite right, which is amusing.

The fireworks show they put on last year was incredibly impressive, but they scaled it back this year. Even still …

And if you didn’t get enough colorful things in the sky around you last night, here are some videos I shot of the neighbors last year. They really did go all out. This one is deliberately blurry, evocative of how fireworks hang in our memories.

No kidding, they had four false finales last year. Here’s the third one.

This was, I believe, the big finish.

*This was about why things were still hurting well, well beyond when I should have been healed up. That second specialist, saw me because my mother-in-law worked with him. He saw me over the holidays, listened to all my complaints and said, “Six months? Yeah, that’s not right” and “Let’s look at your neck.” So they went off to fetch the right technicians to do scans to rule out neck trauma and I remember sitting alone in his examination room, incomprehensibly mad, muttering to myself I do NOT have a broken neck. (And I was right! I did not have a broken neck.) What I did have — according to the third surgeon I consulted later the next year — was a good procedure from the first surgeon, who gave me inscrutably bad recovery advice and a lousy therapeutic regimen. So that’s how that particular bike ride went.

**I have a good light for just such an occasion now. And I don’t typically ride that late in a day anymore, anyway.

cycling / photo / running / Thursday / video — Comments Off on Here are some phone photos
1
Jul 21

Here are some phone photos

Here’s a little video clip I took the other day. We’d just come back from our trip, a long, long redeye flight, taken a nap and then went for a bike ride. And if you ever have the opportunity to fly, overnight, two-thirds of the way across the nation and then go for a bike ride, don’t.

The nap helped, don’t get me wrong. But it didn’t help that much.

Anyway, this was the plan. Torture ourselves on a plane and then chase each other on a hard ride.

This was one of those rides where I knew the route beforehand, and I knew where I wanted to shoot this little video, because of this curve and this sign.

Do you know how hard it is to chase someone down and how difficult it is to get into, and stay in, the right spot for a precise moment? I found this to be very difficult that day.

Anyway, I’m just cleaning some stuff off of my phone here. Last weekend, my Chick-fil-A cup was making faces at me.

The path nearest our house isn’t quite as nice as running just off the Pacific coast, but at least it had rained just before I went out for this little jog.

It was my first run in new sneakers. The blue Kinvaras have been promoted to walking-around shoes, while the old black walking-around Kinvaras have been demoted to shoes which are … just in the way. (The left heel on the black sneakers had just sort of … collapsed.) Meanwhile, I was approaching the end of the running lifespan of the blue ones, so it was time all the way around.

And these new shoes are fancy looking.

Saucony redesigns their shoes all of the time, which befuddles real runners and mystifies me, too. Not all change is good. Somewhere around Saucony 5 they just turned these things into really shoes, rather than something people wanted to run in. But now, the Kinvara 12s feel like the running shoes of old.

I wish I felt like the runner of old. Mostly I just feel … like I have new shoes.

You thought I was going to say old, didn’t you?

bespoke / cycling / Monday / photo / video — Comments Off on These look fancy
14
Jun 21

These look fancy

This weekend I completed the last of my pocket square project. I have … way too many of these things now. But my breast pocket will always look colorful. It’s not quite homemade, not hardly bespoke and definitely not artisanal, but some of them will look good on me.

You know what I’ve learned recently? There isn’t a logical way to store and present pocket squares. The best option I’ve found so far involves rolling them all up. Think of a giant recipe box or a card catalog or something. Then again, I don’t think most people go into an accumulation stupor as I seem to have done. Just yesterday afternoon I added these eight to my collection. I’ve got the whole process down now, it takes very little time.

Good thing I’ve called the collection complete then, no? Most people think paisley is a gateway design, but I think it’s a moment of clarity. It says “You’ve used everything you like and you should stop.”

Of course, the ones that I’ve made are all cotton. I could try my hand at making some silk squares …

She said it, and I’d been thinking it, but listening to the cicadas has become a soothing thing. Seemed weird at first, and sure, if you find a big cluster it’s so loud it hurts. But if you’re hearing them from a distance, or from inside, the ebbs and flows have a certain enchantment.

Stay all summer, you guys. But stop trying to land on.

That recording doesn’t do them justice. But I might be looping it a lot, anyway.

We took a nice and casual bike ride this evening. This is at a turnaround spot, just under two-thirds of the way through the route.

We go this way a lot. And it is easy, after a time, to know where you’ll drag and where it’ll feel like you are flying. And while it was more former than the latter, I managed to set six Strava segment PRs in that particular portion of the ride.

So what we know is nothing, basically.

Here’s another installment of Barns By Bike, though. This has to be one of the nicest barns in the area.

I always wonder what is inside. I bet the floors are immaculate. I bet there isn’t the first streak on that glass. The glass alone should disqualify it from barn consideration. It’s probably less of a barn and more of a “Somebody finally got my spouse to agree to what I want” structure.

cycling / photo / Twitter / Wednesday — Comments Off on So much is unknown from any given point of view
9
Jun 21

So much is unknown from any given point of view

The perspective of walking and distance is an interesting thing. I park in a parking deck when I am at work. The deck is one block from my building. As I crossed onto the middle block today I noticed a fire truck down near where I was walking. And as I got closer I was having this on-again/off-again conversation about how the fire truck was positioned.

It was parked. The lights were on.

It is blocking the entrance and exit to the parking deck.

No it isn’t.

Yes it is. No it isn’t. Yes it is. And so on until, finally, I was there and could tell that the truck was blocking the entrance and exit.

There’s only one. It’s a small parking deck. There are three lanes, two are now devoted to entering and one to leaving. And the truck was blocking the one exit and middle entrance, like so.

I was parked on the second level. Near my car was a campus police cruiser. Unoccupied, but running. Not in a spot, but at one of those hasty angles police sometimes use. It was near another car and one of the corner stairwells. Downstairs were two fire fighters walking out. And another guy, who looked young, had a backpack and a low key fire department shirt on, just loitering at the entrance. You can see him silhouetted above.

And we’ll never know what took place in the parking deck today. It’s a mild curiosity, but, on the other hand, this experience could have been a really lousy day for someone. So that walking perspective is important here, too.

Someone could collect a list of stories like this, little tales with no known outcome, and write an anthology series. I wish I’d started this years ago.

But I suppose I was always too preoccupied with my other You’ll Never Know mind game: What’s the closest I’ve ever come to unwittingly walking over buried treasure?

Boats would count, too. When was I closest to accidentally discovering a lost Spanish galleon?

It’ll make you wonder, that game. But a short-story anthology might actually be more rewarding.

We went for a bike ride this evening. The Yankee has all but gotten her TT bike dialed in, as I feared. And, as I have prophesied, I can’t keep up with her in such a highly refined aero position. She’s too powerful. Also, let’s also blame the gearing. But not my lack of fitness. This too, requires perspective.

That, I also noted on Twitter, is an old gif, and a different bike There was no way in the world I could get my phone out today. I was working too hard to make new art.

So this is how it works now. I have to wait for hills, or rollers, where I know I am sometimes just the tiniest bit better, and really work hard there and close down her advantage incrementally. (It takes many hills.) The rest is guile. Descend those little hills, corner aggressively, win a sprint when she’s just out for her ride and doesn’t know I’m trying to race back ahead of her. Which is how I found myself attacking in a left-hand turn three-miles from the house at 30+ miles per hour.

In her Strava notes, she wrote that it was categorized as an easy ride. It was not easy for me. This is what it takes just to keep up. Perspective.

cycling / Friday / photo / video — Comments Off on Bzzzzzzz
4
Jun 21

Bzzzzzzz

Just in case you’ve managed to not hear the cicadas yet … we are, perhaps, nearing a peak of Brood X here. Today was very noisy, indeed. If you weren’t deep inside a well-insulated building they could become part of the general soundtrack of any given moment.

You’d need to break out some proper field recording equipment to do it justice, I assure you. And in that area, which is on a section of campus that was developed 100-plus years ago, it sounds like you can hear different dialects of cicadas in the trees.

So far in the last few weeks I’ve only had two or three land on me. Each has been far less traumatic than when it happened to me as a child. I don’t remember my young age or the year, but one just flew in and settled on me, in that most cicada way. It was upsetting, that’s what I remember.

It’s been interesting, riding my bike around, how some places seem to have great concentrations of cicadas and others seem to have none. I’m sure there’s some good entomological answer.

Let’s ask the shadow of someone who took an entomology class 25 years ago:

Experts think it has something to do with urban developments since the brood went into hibernation. Maybe older neighborhoods had less soil disturbance in the intervening years. Tree reduction, cement and asphalt addition, are very impactful on the local population’s health. Maybe, also, it has to do with chemicals we put into the earth. Maybe it’s a combination of things, or other natural features, but it’s still something of a mystery. Where you see them is close to where the best part of them went into the soil in 2004, they don’t seem to go far.

And it was a different time back then, no one thought to ask them back then.

That’s what my shadow said on my bike ride today. I heard a lot of them. Saw a few. But none of them landed on me in two hours in the saddle. For which I am grateful.

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