cycling

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.

cycling / Monday / photo / podcast / video — Comments Off on There’s a podcast and a botched bike ride and some pics
27
Apr 20

There’s a podcast and a botched bike ride and some pics

And how was your weekend? Did you know you just had one of those? We’re all making that joke, now. It’s starting to work its way into television commercials, which is how you know the zeitgeist approves of the usage. But we should also remember that not everyone is in the same at-home condition. And there’s a lot of variance in the stay-at-home concept, of course. And some people don’t have a traditional weekend on Saturdays and Sundays. But you can’t address all of those in one joke, for punchline purposes. You really can’t do it in a small talk shorthand. And you definitely shouldn’t start a long post with it either.

That’s what I learned this weekend.

The cats had a fine time of it. Phoebe at dinner time:

And here’s Poseidon enjoying an afternoon lounging in the sunshine.

And speaking of Poseidon, here’s a cat video:

He never does catch the light. If you sit with that for a few minutes you can make a terrific story. And then you begin to wonder: do cats have revenge stories because of the things we write in our heads, or do we write those tales because cats just fundamentally have revenge on their minds?

Today the cat – light story is about a creature watching a flattened version of a Big Bang. It could be that he has no idea of understanding what he’s seeing. Or maybe he knows precisely what he’s seeing. Maybe that’s where the wonder is.

We could all use a little more wonder these days.

It was a chamber of commerce kind of yesterday, and so we went for a walk in the afternoon.

The flowers I fell for.

No, really, I fell. That was going to be how I started this post, but that sounds scary, and I’m fine. Jammed my shoulder up a little bit. It aches today and it’ll be sore for another day or two and it’ll be fine, I promise.

It was quick trip. The mud slipped out from underfoot and I stuck my arm out, thinking at the last moment I should tuck instead. So I did that, but not completely enough. Mostly it just hurt my pride and got my clothes dirty. So, yeah, I shot a video because if you suffer you should make some art out of it, or something.

That was all the weekend.

Today, I published this conversation with IU’s vice president for research, Fred Cate.

It was fascinating, I asked him to touch on all these different kinds of research, covering a big handful of disciplines from multiple schools on two or three campuses and he got them all. He’s really good at giving overviews. And there’s some great quotes in there. I like the one near the end, about how you’d be hard pressed to find some slice of life in the state (and beyond) not being touched by IU’s coronavirus research. It’s impactful.

I want to talk about all of them.

The view of the sky from just before our bike ride:

It was a weirdly frustrating ride all the way around. But the important thing is that today was hill repeats. Which means finding a hill and going up it over and over again. It makes you a stronger climber and, brother, I need that.

The really important thing is that today hill repeats meant going up the hill just four times before I had another flat. Allow me to visualize this for you:

That’s four flats in the last two weeks, and under Gatorskins, too. Gatorskins being an ultra tough tire meant to protect the fragile little inner tubes. So me and the Gators and the Mavic rims are going to have a long talk tomorrow, because this is getting expensive.

Have a great start to your week, which may or may not be well underway, or even great. But if it ain’t, do try to make it so.

adventures / cycling / Friday / photo / video — Comments Off on Riding into the weekend, and then walking into it
24
Apr 20

Riding into the weekend, and then walking into it

For reasons I’m beginning to understand only a bit, and am not quite yet equipped (or perhaps inspired, or both) to remedy, the videos I shoot on my phone look like compressed garbage when I upload them. What is this, 2012?

Anyway, here’s a little bit of today’s cross-county-line ride. Before the turnaround, and well before today’s flat. So sick of flats.

This, too, was before the flat. Good thing, as this was well away from the house. But you aren’t thinking about any of that when you see turkeys:

Anyway, just before getting back to the house I had another flat. It was on the last big downhill which, in my experience, is the wrong place to have your rear wheel to go down. At the bottom of the hill is a hard turn that leads up into our neighborhood. But I stopped short and figured, ehhh, I’m walking this in.

Because I could try to re-inflate the tube, or swap out to an extra one, right there on the side of the road — like I did just four rides ago! — or I could just walk the last mile in and do all of that in the comfort of my bike room or home-library.

So I walked it in. Problem: bike shoes. So you take those off and walk it in feeling a little ridiculous: spandex, helmet, walking a bike and barefoot. At some point you have to figure the people in your neighborhood, to the extent that they notice you, are just used to it.

Bobet, I hope so.

Anyway, you could be mad at flats, or pleased with the opportunity. If my tire hadn’t gone down I would have whizzed right through here at 20-some miles per hour and not even noticed this redbud tree (Cercis canadensis) demonstrating its cauliflory.

It’s a trait some species exhibit, where blooms can grow directly out of the trunk. Cauliflory, by the way, is ‘stem flower’ in Latin.

And, yes, I looked up the scientific name. There’s only so much stuff I can keep in my head, after all.

Also on the walk back … and this is just after The Yankee got to the house, put her things away and walked back out toward me with my sneakers. Which was great, because half-a-mile barefoot is quite enough, thanks. Anyway, we walked it in together, which was also nice, and we saw this:

And that’s how the weekend begins. I hope yours begins with pretty things and nice gestures, and fewer mechanical issues.

cycling / journalism / Monday / photo / podcast — Comments Off on Some walks, a bike ride, a podcast, some cats
20
Apr 20

Some walks, a bike ride, a podcast, some cats

And your weekend? Was it functionally much different than your week? Unless, of course, you’re going into work still, in which case I apologize for the joke. But that’s all we can do with it, is joke and laugh, and then work from home or wish we could, or, in far too many sad cases, wish we could work from somewhere.

I get to work from home. I’m very fortunate indeed. And not a day goes by that I don’t spend a lot of time thinking of that. I do it a lot more than during the walk from bedroom to kitchen to home office, too.

One of the things I got to do today for work was this little program …

Elizabeth Malatestinic teaches human resource management in the Kelley School of Business at IUPUI. So she’s the one that onboards. I don’t know if she’s the person who came up with that term. It seems unlikely, but I didn’t think to ask. Anyway, she does HR, and we discussed what we should be able to expect from our bosses, what they can get out of us right now, managing the work-at-home dynamic and some other things. It actually is an interesting and useful conversation. But you’re only going to know that if you take my word for it and press the play button.

Press the play button.

Did you press the play button yet?

The cats are grand. Phoebe is studying yoga:

She has since decided to give it a try. She does it with a sense of panache that can inspire us all:

Poseidon has been studying yoga as well. Less interested, but nevertheless:

He’s a nice cat, when he’s being cuddly, and not a jerk to someone.

That cat is going through toddlerhood and adolescence simultaneously, and he’s going to be doing it for the rest of time, which is definitely something to look forward to.

On a walk yesterday we passed some carefully planted roadside trees and it reminded me of how I always make the same disappointed joke every year about maples being nature’s first quitters. It’s true. They are. It is disappointing, and then brilliant, and then just sad like all of the rest. But give the maples their due: They are some of the first ones back on the job, too.

Which is part of the twisted logic of acceptance: Oh, look at the beautiful early leaves! … As we approach the last week of April …

I am showing off the mask a friend made for me. She is crafty and has skills and a desire to help others and even me and I am very fortunate, plus it matches my eyes:

And a shadow selfie from today’s ride, which was notable only for the hill repeats.

You’re supposed to go up a hill for several minutes, descend and then start over again. Only I manage to do it based on the distance, because looking for that quirky tree or, like today, the discarded mattress on the side of the road is easier than staring at my bike computer. So looking at the data now, I went longer the first time, a bit shorter the second time, and then faster the next four times before slowing down for the next several climbs. Hey, it’s all slow and uphill to me. Also, I had negative splits on the back of the ride, which better be the case after 45 minutes or so of going uphill.

At one point this car was coming from the other direction right at the place where I was turning around. The hill continues on, so I have to keep riding, waiting for the car to pass so I can try to do a 180 at a suboptimal speed. Except this guy slows, rolls down his window and says “Steep ain’t it!?”

Hadn’t noticed, neighbor. Hadn’t noticed.

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